Websites have come a long way from when they used to be just hubs of information on the internet.
We use them to learn, buy what we need, and interact with people worldwide. For businesses, websites are one of their most important online assets, with users expecting them to be well-designed, entertaining, and both intuitive and user-friendly.
Users only stay on websites that catch their attention, provide a good user experience, and make it easy to find what they are looking for, all of which factor into user-friendliness. So, how do you make your website more user-friendly?
Use a Search Bar and Intuitive Navigation
Most people will reach your website through a referral from another website or a search engine. Once they are there, make it easy to find additional information on what they need and navigate the website easily. You achieve the first using a user-friendly search bar and the second using intuitive navigation.
If the website user can’t immediately find what they are looking for, they will probably click away and visit a site that is a lot easier to navigate.
Make The Content Easy To Scan
A lot of readers skim through a website’s content instead of reading it all. Keeping paragraphs short and formatting your text correctly are some of the ways to make your content easier to read for your visitors.
Next, consider using headings, subheadings, and bullet points where appropriate to break up your content because no one wants to read a wall of text. Additionally, it is harder to scan and fatiguing if you try. You can also use images to break up the text and infographics to make the information more digestible.
Don’t use crazy fonts or anything else too distracting. If the text is hard to read, nobody will read it. Simple.
Ensure there is enough of a contrast between the text and the background, so text stands out. For example, black text on a white background is easy to read but black text on a dark gray background is not and will cause eye strain.
Make The Website’s Purpose Obvious
Every website serves a purpose, whether it is a blog, an online store, or a gaming website. The purpose should be clear as soon as a visitor lands on the page. Businesses and website owners can make their websites’ purpose obvious through their design and use of content.
For a shopping website, for example, a user should see all the products they may be interested in on the first page, with clear links to different categories and similar products.
A news website could include a list of the latest or most important news articles on their homepages, with links to similar news stories or categories of news.
The website should also make it obvious what they want the user to do on their website. Unscramble.me, a free-to-use tool for unscrambling words, places the input box on the homepage and provides instructions for what the website’s purpose is there, too. It is a simple yet effective design.
The more complicated a website is, the harder it will be for a visitor to fathom what the site is about, in which case they will likely click away.
Make Your Website Fast
With how fast internet speeds are, most people expect the websites they visit to load quickly, usually within two to three seconds. Some studies even show people are more likely to leave your website if it loads in over three seconds.
There are numerous ways to speed up a website, but they all start with checking how fast your website already is. Many of the tools you use to check this also provide suggestions for speeding up your website, so take advantage of those.
Some of the main factors that impact a website’s loading speed include:
File size – if a page needs a lot of resources to load, it will take longer. Pages with heavy video content, for example, tend to be slower at loading. Popups and high-definition images are also resource heavy. The more functionality you add to a website, the greater the page weight will be. Bear this in mind when modifying your website to improve it.
Hosting location can also affect a website’s loading speed. When content needs to travel from one country to another, page loading speed slows down. For example, if your primary audience is in the US, it makes sense to use a US-based hosting company rather than one based in Europe.
If the website is still slow after optimizing it consider switching to a faster web host, particularly one using SSD storage, as that makes it easy to use a CDN with your website. Not all web hosting providers are created equal and some offer faster loading speeds than others. Shop around and read customer reviews before committing to a hosting deal.
Ensure Your Website is Fully Responsive
Your website should adapt to the device a user is using, known as ensuring your website is responsive. Granted, most web developers do make sure all the websites they create are responsive, but it still pays to check, especially when over 60% of internet users look at websites on their smartphones every day.
Remember that the website does not have to look the same on desktop, tablet, and mobile, but it should provide users of all three with a comparable experience.
Include a Contact Page
Many websites don’t provide any contact information to readers. You might not think this is needed if you aren’t running a bricks and mortar business, but it helps to have a contact page with some way for people to get in touch. The more ways you have for people to do this, the more credible your website looks.
User-friendliness is crucial for all websites at a time when competition is fierce, and visitors expect it. There are various ways to improve this metric, many of them not requiring overhauls but simple tweaks to your website, design, and functionality.
