These Tips Can Help You Improve the Experience Consumers Have on Your Website
Your website is the hub of your marketing strategy, and great user experience has a lot of influence over whether your website is effective. Visitors to your website will spend only 2.6 seconds scanning your website before landing on a particular section and focusing there. Consumers are making fast decisions about whether a website makes the cut.
Here are seven tips for improving the user experience on your website:
- Slash words ruthlessly. Only about 28% of the text on any web page is read, so make sure only to include what’s critical and adds value. 62% of online shoppers will give up and go somewhere else when there’s too much information.
- Be strategic with information location. Website visitors spend the most time looking above the fold, so put your most important text where they won’t have to scroll to see it. They’re also more likely to look at the left side of the screen, so design your web pages to accommodate this tendency.
- Think about how visitors “read” pages:
- They scan in an “F” pattern, looking at two horizontal stripes and one vertical stripe
- Your CTA should be posted in a shorter vertical stripe
- Your headline should read in a horizontal stripe
- Invest in your load time. Even loading just 250 milliseconds slower than a competitor could lead a visitor to prefer the other site. Four out of five visitors will leave your site if a video stalls while loading. It also only takes three seconds for an online shopper to abandon a purchase if the page won’t load quickly.
- Extend your search box size. The average search box is 18 characters, but given the conversational way consumers search for things, expand yours by 10. A search box of at least 27 characters accommodates 90% of all searches.
- Use strategic typography. Don’t go crazy using a bunch of different fonts; instead, think of your font as being a part of your brand identity and choose one or two that fit your brand personality.
- Make your links stand out. Your links should change colors after they have been clicked, and the link should be descriptive enough that the visitor knows what to expect when clicking.
To learn more about strategic web design that lends itself to great user experience, contact us at SJC Marketing. With an in-house web design team, we can help you with a few guidelines or build a site for you from scratch.