6 User Experience Best Practices for Any Website
Follow these six tips for a clear and effective user experience on your website.
If you are trying to gain an online audience for your business, you will need not only first-rate content but an excellent website design. It doesn’t matter that your content is great if you have a website that no one can navigate. The user experience (or UX) of every visitor to your website is essential for getting new eyes on your content and potentially earning new customers or clients. If you want to guarantee a good user experience, follow the six best practices outlined below.
Design for Key Interactions
Before you begin designing your website, figure out what your site’s end goal is. What action do you want visitors to take? This can be buying a product, watching a video, or subscribing to your newsletter. Once you have a goal, design your site to make taking that action as straightforward as possible. Don’t hide the video or the subscribe button from your visitors, but guide them to it with simple navigation, engaging copy, and a bold design.
Minimize Load Time
The quickest way to frustrate users is to make them wait minutes for your webpage to load. This immediately ruins the user experience, because according to Hubspot, about 47% of users today expect a website to load in under two seconds. To improve the speed of your website’s loading time, you can optimize images, enable browser caching, compress pages, and keep any JavaScript files lower down on your page.
Improve Site Navigation
Users will also become quite frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for on your website. For instance, if you have advertised your website as containing an insightful, must-read blog, don’t hide that blog under layers of navigation. To ensure a smooth user experience, signpost each section of the website and make your menus easy to use.
Make Text Readable
It is essential to consider the readability of your website’s text. The recommended font size is 12-point for text, with 1.2 spacing for body text. Avoid using illegible fonts and color contrasts that make it hard to decipher words. Your website should be accessible for every potential user, and not everyone has perfect vision or a large format screen on which to visit your site.
Prioritize Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile use accounts for nearly half of all web traffic worldwide, so you should take the mobile user experience seriously. Most website visitors also expect web pages to look at least as good as, if not better, on mobile than they do on desktop devices.
Use Analytics
Check your website’s analytics to get a look at the behavior of your users. If people are bouncing from a page quickly, that might indicate an issue. Or, if they are failing to move from your homepage to the most important content, that might point to a navigation or design flaw.
No matter which tactics you use to optimize your website for your goals and your readers, remembering the user experience is critical. Remembering these six UX tips can help you put your best foot forward and give your readers an excellent first impression.
Contact Adventure Web Interactive Today
For more tips on how to optimize your web content and drive more traffic to your Facebook page, follow our blog. Adventure Web Interactive offers expert marketing solutions, including blog and copywriting and social media management. Take the stress of planning, posting, and plotting off of your team and contact us online or by giving us a call at (410) 788-7007. To see more information about our team and services, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
