How to Make Your Website User-friendly in 7 Steps
Your website is your business’ first impression for potential customers. Therefore, it’s crucial that you make sure new visitors have a positive experience when they land on your page.
Websites are now an integral part of the social media revolution and people expect them to be user-friendly as well as search engine optimized. Having a user-friendly website can go a long way in helping people navigate and find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Every website can benefit from some minor tweaks that make the interface feel more intuitive and easier to use. Fortunately, creating a user-friendly website is easier than you think! Here are 7 simple but effective steps you can take to make your site easier for your visitors to use and engage with:
Maintain a responsive design
As people’s device preferences change, so does their need for a website. It’s even been predicted that by 2025, 75% of the world will be accessing the internet using their smartphones.
Make sure you design your site with a responsive design, regardless of where it is being viewed from. This will ensure that your site will be viewable on any device without losing any of its functionality.
Responsive design is the most basic, cost-effective way to ensure your site is accessible and legible on all screens. To optimize your site for mobile usage, use a mobile-friendly URL. This will make your site load more quickly, and help users avoid any frustrating redirects.
Keep the navigation simple, clear, and consistent
Use a menu that is easy to understand and follow. It should be no more than three levels deep and have links that are simple and easily recognizable. It’s also a good idea to create submenus that make sense and link to the pages they belong to.
You can also create a site map to help your visitors navigate your website. A site map will help them navigate through each page on your website. It’s important to remember that site maps don’t just help visitors navigate your site, but they can also help search engines understand it better.
Upload well-formatted, easy-to-scan content
Users often want to quickly skim your content and decide if it’s worth their time. Easy-to-read content is not only going to do wonders for your digital marketing efforts, but it will also increase the time visitors will want to spend on your site.
Use clear, concise writing so that visitors can easily understand what you’re trying to say. Make sure it is properly formatted too, for easier reading, and try to keep paragraphs short. This will help people quickly scan your site for key information without having to scroll through long blocks of text.
In addition, use quality images but see to it that they are duly compressed to avoid affecting your site and your pages’ load times. Make sure the file format is optimized for the internet. For example, you can compress your images to 75% of their original size and still have them retain the same quality.
Maintain fast load times
A slow website makes visitors irritated and may even turn them off. Websites that take a long time to load can also hurt your success rate when optimizing your marketing efforts for SEO.
Visitors will be less likely to return if they have to wait too long for the site to load. You can also lose opportunities for new visitors because of bad user experience.
One way to keep your site fast is by using an authoritative site address. Another way to keep your site fast is by optimizing your pages for speed. This means keeping them lean and clean with no unnecessary elements cluttering the page – images, HTML code and more should be minimized so users can see what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Choose the right colors
Deciding on the right color scheme for your website is a matter of taste and personal preference. However, certain considerations can help you to choose the right colors.
Color plays an important role in how we perceive things, so it’s important to choose colors that are both easy to see and appealing to the eye. On top of that, you want to make sure that your website design fits with the rest of your branding.
If you want people to associate your website with a certain style, then it’s important to choose colors that match those styles. You should also use complementary colors and colors that are easy to read. This means avoiding light colors like white and blue because they can be difficult for people to see on a computer screen or mobile device.
Ensure browser consistency
Ensuring browser consistency of your website is essential to ensure visitors are seeing the same content, layout, and experience as you intended. A consistent appearance across all browsers can help your website look better and feel more polished.
Ensure that all of your content is displayed in the same manner and format across all devices so that visitors have a consistent experience when visiting your site. This includes not only keywords and text, but also images, videos, audio files, and any other type of media. Make sure too that all of your web pages are coded consistently with each other so that everything functions properly across browsers.
Add call to actions that make sense
CTAs, or call-to-action buttons, are the most important element of a website. They’re what direct visitors to take action and get involved with your organization.
While CTAs are important for driving traffic, they can also be ineffective if they’re not tailored to the needs of your audience and don’t provide a clear call to action.
There are many different types of CTAs that you can use on your website, including call-to-action buttons, social media icons, and banner ads. Each type of CTA has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the right one for your business.
Keep your users in mind when creating your website
Today’s global digital landscape is a constant stream of information, and there is a huge demand for user-friendly websites. People are coming online in increasing numbers, and they have diverse needs, reasons, and purposes when they visit a website. User-friendly websites ensure that users can easily find what they need and get the most out of your site.
While achieving this can sometimes feel a little challenging, there’s no shortage of proven ways and strategies on how this can be done. You’ll be surprised how much these seemingly minor adjustments can turn things around for your business and make all the difference as far as online engagement, visibility, and the amount of traffic and leads you are getting.