If you have recently noticed spikes in your website’s bounce rate, it may be time to revisit your users’ experience. Users are growing increasingly impatient. They expect everything to be clear and simple, and if it is not, they won’t stick around. Fortunately, there are easy fixes to improving the UX of your website and we’ll give you five!
What is UX?
UX is shorthand for User Experience and refers to the usability and ease of use that a website design provides to the end user. Having good UX design is absolutely vital to improving your web traffic and converting leads into sales.
5 Tips for Enhancing UX
1. Create a Logical Sitemap
Your website’s sitemap is a listing of all pages on your website in a hierarchical fashion. It refers to your main navigation, secondary navigation, and all other pages that make up your site architecture. Developing a logical sitemap is very important for UX. This means placing child pages under the appropriate parent pages and using well-known terms in the main navigation. Bonus points if you use your targeted keywords in the main navigation!
2. Informative Homepage
Your homepage will more than likely be the most popular page on your website. This is the first page that Google indexes and the page that the majority of your users enter your site through. Because this is the first impression, it is important to use this page to inform and engage the user. Include powerful images and short snippets of content to get your point across. Most importantly, incorporate strong calls to action that direct visitors deeper into your website.
3. Strong Calls to Action
As we just mentioned, strong calls to action are one of the most important pieces of your website. Your calls to action (CTAs) should be present on both your homepage and interior pages of your website. Incorporate a mix of persuasive content and bright, clickable buttons to keep users engaged. Determine what your most important conversions are and let those guide your CTA strategy.
4. Limit the Steps
When creating your CTA strategy, you will want to determine the steps it takes for a user to go from the CTA to the final conversion. Your goal is to limit the number of steps as much as possible. Remember that users are very impatient. Once your website has been live for a while, take a look at your Google Analytics to see your conversion rate. Google Analytics will also tell you where the largest number of users dropped off so you can improve your process.
5. Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation is very important for keeping the user from getting lost on your website. It refers to the mini navigation that appears as a user moves deeper into your website. This type of navigation helps a user to retrace his or her steps if they end up on a second-level, third-level or even fourth-level page! Just like Hansel and Gretel, these “breadcrumbs” are there to help the user return home.
If you need assistance with improving your website’s UX design, please contact Informatics Inc.
