Improving Your Website’s User Experience

We live in a business climate that’s becoming increasingly dominated by online sales and marketing, so no matter what your business or industry, it should come as no surprise that giving your website viewers a better experience leads to better results. One of the biggest pushes in online marketing in recent years has been to improve user experience in order to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to find what they need quickly and easily.

However, did you know that even Google Search itself will reward those websites that take steps to improve their user experience? One recent development introduced by the team at Google Chrome is the implementation of Core Web Vitals, a series of metrics that track a web page’s performance in terms of speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. These Core Web Vitals are intended to help website owners measure their current user experience so that they can improve upon it in a number of ways. How quickly your page loads, if your website is mobile-friendly, and the amount of delay users experience when first loading your page will now have a measurable impact on your website’s ranking in search results. With that in mind, here are some simple yet effective tips you can use to improve user experience on your website:

White Space

While the world of web design is full of complex terms and technical jargon, the term “white space” is exactly what it sounds like: the spacing between pieces of content or images on the page that gives the page proper spacing and allows it to breathe. Including the proper amount of white space helps make content more legible while simultaneously helping you put specific focus on the most important elements of the page, similar to how photographers use spacing to emphasize certain subjects.

Effective use of white space helps give your website a more modern look and feel, and is now a metric tracked by search engine crawlers - so using it effectively will get more eyes on your page. 

However, how to get the most out of white space can vary from one website to another based on the content you want to present and the look and feel of your existing website. For the best results, we recommend you break up content into digestible 4-5 line chunks while giving images on the page space to breathe by separating it from content by a few inches.

Attractive Hyperlinks

The ultimate purpose of any hyperlink on your page is to get a user to click on it. Using effective hyperlinking strategy on your website can create a natural flow of content as users navigate from one page to the next, which serves two important purposes: keeping users on your website longer, and telling Google that your website is an interconnected web of useful content.

Hyperlinks on any page should be immediately identifiable as such. Any links on the page should use visual cues to identify them; normally, this means having the text on these links bolded, underlined, or differently-colored in order to draw attention to them.

However, simply drawing attention is not enough. Your hyperlinks should be “attractive.” This means that they should act like the title of a book, giving you just enough information to pique your interest without overloading the user with information. After all, you want the user to click on the link for more information, so there’s no point in throwing everything at them up-front. Don’t use one- or two-word hyperlinks (“Click Here”) but give the user just enough information to tell them what they’re clicking on and no more (“Read more about our page speed tracking tools”).

Page Speed

Finally, the biggest way you can improve your website’s user experience is by ensuring your page loads all of its content immediately upon visiting the page. In the modern online era, people are not accustomed to waiting: if a user is forced to wait for a web page to load, chances are they won’t wait very long and will instead simply back out and find another page that can give them what they’re looking for. 

Keep in mind that your page should be able to load instantaneously regardless of whether your visitors are viewing from desktop or mobile. You can get started on improving your website’s page speed through a number of tools such as Google’s PageSpeed toolset. Big images on the page are one of the most common sources of page load slowdown, so compressing any images on the page before loading them to the website can be a big help in making the page itself load faster. There are a number of image compression tools on the net that can help in this regard.

Want to get more out of your website? The team at Lobster Marketing are experts in evaluating and improving our clients’ web presence by creating faster, more effective websites built from the ground up to give them the edge when it comes to user experience. Get in contact with us today for more information.