5 tips to make your website user-friendly

5 tips to make your website user-friendly 

Your website is your gateway to success. It’s the first impression that potential clients have of your company, so you can’t afford to let them get lost in the digital abyss. Luckily, we’re here to equip you with five powerhouse tips & tricks to transform your website into a user-friendly marvel. Prepare to captivate, engage, and convert your visitors like never before. 

Let’s make your website shine brighter than the competition! 

1. Think about your visitor, not yourself

While creating your website, you have to get inside the mind of your visitor. Not doing so, is often one of the biggest mistake companies make. 

 Language 

In the realm of content creation, simplicity is key. Leave your industry-specific jargon at the door and step into the shoes of your visitors. Speak their language, use words they understand, and steer clear of confusing abbreviations. While you may be well-versed in the acronyms of your trade, remember that your readers may not share your expertise. Don’t let your website become a bewildering maze of unfamiliar terms. Break down barriers and ensure your message resonates with clarity. After all, you want visitors to stay and engage, not flee in confusion. 

Webpages 

When it comes to your website, it’s time to shift gears and put your customer first. Leave behind the random news updates that may not interest your visitors. Instead, dive into their minds and anticipate the questions they have and the information they seek. Once you’ve identified these topics, give each one its own dedicated web page.  

Why? It’s all about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, my friend. Search engines analyze your pages to understand their content. They crawl, scrutinize, and evaluate based on the tags you use.  

So, here’s the bold truth: Make sure your page title and H1 tag feature the most important search term. That way, when someone searches for your topic, Google will recognize the relevance of your page and proudly display it at the top of the search results. Don’t just tell your story; let Google help you shout it from the digital rooftops! 

2. What works for one, does not necesseraly work for you 

Regarding your website design, there are certain tactics that simply work better than others. Ever noticed how the “place in basket” button often shines in a vibrant green hue? There’s a reason behind it, and it’s rather straightforward: Green signifies something good, something positive! And that has a powerful psychological impact on the reader. The same principle applies to those delightful green check marks that highlight the benefits of a product or service.  

Here’s a pro-tip: Make sure to position your logo at the top left. It’s become such a standard convention that visitors might even feel a pang of annoyance if it’s placed elsewhere.  

Lastly, don’t fall into the trap of placing important information on the right side of your website. People tend to overlook it. So, let’s be bold and guide our visitors towards greatness by implementing these design strategies that truly catch their attention. 

Test, analyze and optimize 

What works for one website may not work for yours. That’s why blindly following best practices won’t cut it. Instead, embrace the power of testing, analyzing, and optimizing for a user-friendly website.  

Here’s a quick tip: Conduct A/B tests to compare different elements and never make two changes simultaneously. That way, you can pinpoint what truly works and what falls flat. 

But here’s the deal: to identify what’s going wrong, you need to dig deep and analyze your website thoroughly. Track down those treacherous areas where visitors get lost. And if you’re struggling to uncover the problem, create a short user survey and let your visitors point out the pain points. 

3. Why is someone visiting your website? 

The question you have to ask yourself when drafting your website is why are people visiting your page? What are they looking for? For one, it will be to gather information or to find an answer to a question. For the other, it will be the purchase of a product or a service or finding the contact information of the company.  

Take your time to analyze what the most visited components of your website are and make sure those can be easily reached via the homepage. Your homepage is comparable to a train station where the visitor should be able to find his or her desired traffic destination as quickly as possible. The shorter the customer journey, the fewer steps a visitor has to take to get where he or she needs to be, and the more satisfied the customer. 

4. Keep it simple 

The easier a visitor finds what he or she is looking for, the better. That’s why you need to leave all the frills aside, it’s more user-friendly. There’s nothing wrong with cool branding and a nice design, but make sure that it doesn’t take precedence over functionality.  

By using clear CTAs, or Call To Actions, you can lead your visitor on a journey through your website. So, take some time to think about the position of these CTAs on your site. You don’t want to overtake visitors immediately on the homepage with a “buy now”-button!  

The visitor needs to be warmed up first by gathering information, before he or she is ready to decide whether to purchase a product or service. Consider those different steps in the purchasing process while designing your website.  

In addition, capturing data via forms needs to be as simple as possible. Only ask for the necessary data needed to allow the visitor to continue to flow through the customer journey. When you do ask for additional information, make sure you clearly address why that is requested. In doing so, the visitor does not become suspicious and won’t leave your website, but instead will be happy to give you his or her information. 

5. Website loading time & responsiveness 

There is nothing more annoying than ending up on a page and having to wait before anything appears. If your website takes too long to load, the visitor will leave. Fortunately, there are some basic principles to improve the loading speed of your user-friendly website: 

Browsercaching 

Ensure that, at the first visit, files such as images, HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements are stored locally in the visitor’s browser. When the visitor on your website a second or next time, the loading time will be much shorter. 

Compress your files 

Compressing your files ensures that heavy files become much lighter for your website. In doing so, your page will need less time to load and display everything. Before compressing images, it’s better to already have them in a smaller size. 

Responsiveness 

In addition to the loading time of your website, the responsiveness is also important. We don’t just visit websites on our desktop anymore, but also on our smartphone, laptop or tablet in all different shapes and sizes. No less than 50% of all websites are being viewed via our smartphone! Hence, ensure your website also looks good and functions perfectly on all those devices. 

In this digital age of information overload and endless options, rise above the noise and put your customers back on the throne where they belong. A user-friendly website is your golden ticket to cut through the clutter, provide crystal-clear guidance, and lead your visitors on a seamless journey towards that ultimate goal: making a purchase.  

It’s time to create a virtual kingdom where clarity reigns, and your customers become the heroes of their own stories. Embrace the power of user-centric design, and watch as your website becomes their loyal guide, paving the way to success.