As a business owner, your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing efforts. And user experience is how people feel when they visit and interact with your site on their phones, tablets, and desktops. Naturally, you want every visitor to feel as happy and eager to take action as possible. The best website builders know how to accomplish this to ensure that your website is enticing customers to stay and not driving them away.
How the Best Website Builders Create Quality User Experience (UX)
Optimize for Mobile Phones
As owners and designers, we tend to manage our websites using the large screens of our laptops or desktops. After all, that’s the best way to see things clearly so we can endlessly test, tweak, and improve the various website elements. But it’s sometimes easy to forget how many visitors experience our websites through the much smaller screens of their mobile phones.
These days, 55% of online browsing is done on mobile devices in the US, and the global figure is a staggering 92%. Mobile browsing is becoming the norm, and even Google has started to penalize mobile-unfriendly websites. So it’s essential to make sure that your site provides an equally silky smooth experience for all your small-screen viewers.
How Responsive Is Your Site?
Website responsiveness is how well your website adapts to various screen sizes, browsers, and devices. The key is to constantly check how your site looks, feels, and navigates on all common screen sizes.
This includes the header, logo, menu, page titles, copy legibility, links, call-to-action buttons, and every other element. The best modern website builders automatically have various systems for optimizing responsiveness at every stage of the website’s construction.
Speed Up Your Webpages
Think of the last time you were frustrated by the slow load speed of a website you visited. Did you have the patience to wait around, or did you bounce to look for answers elsewhere?
Internet connections are so fast and smooth these days that any loading delay can feel jarring to the user. Page load speed has become such an important part of user experience that Google also penalizes slower sites and boosts the rankings of quicker ones.
Batten Down Your Bounce Rate
Page load speed has a dramatic impact on the bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who only view a single page before leaving a website. So whichever traffic analytics tools you’re using, keep a close eye on load speed and bounce rate while taking action to speed things up.
Any website builder worth their salt will create your website already optimized for speed. This includes factors like performance-optimized hosting, minimal unnecessary functionality, compressed images, fewer redirects, minifying Javascript, CSS, and HTML, using a content delivery network, and more.
Keep Consistent Design Across All Pages
A well-known crux of effective branding is consistency. Not only should your distinct brand image, colors, theme, and messaging remain consistent across all marketing touch-points with your customer, but it should also be consistent throughout the pages of your site.
When the design theme of your site is perfectly coherent across every page, the user has a more psychologically seamless and pleasurable experience. This means matching your header size, header design, coloring, spacing, style of imagery, font size, hyperlink style, and everything else.
Utilize the Peaceful Power of White Space
Visually overcrowded websites are rather off-putting for visitors. You can offer your visitors a little visual breathing space by strategically using white space. White space adds a certain clean, modern, open, peaceful feeling to any site, inviting the visitor to stay for longer.
A study by Crazy Egg found that using white space around page titles and text increases visitor attention by 20%. The best of website builders know this well and integrate tactical white space into all their designs.
Make Your Navigation Links Stand Out
Oftentimes, a collection of seemingly little changes can have a large impact on user experience. Something as small as the color and design of your navigation and call-to-action links can keep people staying for longer.
On every page of your site, you want your visitor to click and take further action of some kind. This might be heading to your bookings page, signing up to your email list, adding a product to the cart, or simply browsing another article. The easier you make this action with clearly visible and attractive links, the higher the percentage of your visitors who will take the desired action.
Link Design That Attracts Clicks
Since the dawn of the internet, blue underlined text has been associated with a clickable link. Depending on the color theme of your site, increasing click rates might be as simple as meeting this common design expectation in your navigation links.
If blue won’t work for you, ensure that the size and color contrast of your links makes them stand out clearly. Another tip is to increase the number of words in a hyperlinked chunk of text. The more colorful clickable words there are, the more it draws the eye.
Use Fewer Stock Photos and More Real Imagery
Stock photos can serve a wonderful purpose in rapidly populating a new website with lively, high-quality imagery. But interestingly enough, studies have recently found that visitors can recognize stock photos as compared to real photos taken by the company owner of their own staff, products, and premises.
And when a page contains unique, personal photos, the whole website becomes more real and human to the visitor. As a result, they want to stay for longer. So when you next have time, break out your camera and start snapping away. Your visitors will be grateful for it.
Visually Prioritize Your Page Titles
This article is focused more on design than written content, but, of course, one of the most important factors of all in user experience is delivering the exact information the visitor desires to find. Not only should your title topic and wording provide the right answers, but you should also visually prioritize the titles in the design of every page.
As legendary copywriter David Ogilvy once famously said that five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. This maxim holds true for every website and every industry. And all the best website builders know how important it is to have titles showing large, loud, and proud on every single page, drawing the eye before anything else.
Get Rid of Broken 404 Pages
Maximizing user experience means minimizing frustration. And one of the most frustrating things a visitor can experience is coming across a dead 404 error page stating, “Page Not Found.” This creates an unprofessional image and often spurs the visitor to leave a site.
As websites grow, these 404 pages sometimes appear when content is shifted around or deleted, URLs are added to links incorrectly, or server errors mess with connections. A good website builder will be well aware of this potential problem and frequently check for crawl errors to find and fix these broken links.
With these eight key tips in mind, you and your website builder can optimize the user experience and ensure your visitors stay happy and engaged in your site for longer. If you’d like to have a beautiful, extremely user-friendly website constructed and launched in just 30 days, contact Next Level Media Crew today for a free strategy call today.
