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While the internet totally transformed people’s ability to start global businesses from their back bedroom with next to no money at all, it also assured in a wave of competition across every market that simply never existed before.
Making things even more challenging, of course, is that all of your direct competitors – every single one of them – can be found by your potential customers just a click or two away from your website.
If your site isn’t perfectly dialed in, if it isn’t lightning fast, and if it has a poor user experience you’re going to be losing sales left and right to competitors with even just marginally better-designed websites.
Below we run through (almost) everything you need to know about how to improve your website user experience without having to totally rebuild your site from top to bottom.
How to Improve Your Website User Experience
There are a number of different website improvements you can unleash on your site to dramatically overhaul your user experience, but a handful of them are going to have an outsized impact compared to all the rest.
Focus on the website improvement tips and tricks we break down in the rest of this detailed guide and your user experience (sometimes called UX by professional developers) on a website like Designer Daily you can read more about this guide and your UX will skyrocket immediately.
Clean Up Any Clutter
Straight out of the gate you need to get rid of as much “clutter” as you can from your web design.
Truth be told, you want a website that almost feels empty from the amount of white space all of your core design elements feature.
The last thing you want is for your site to be busy, confusing, and overwhelming for your users. You want them to land on your site, understand exactly what kind of content you offer – and how to get more – and most importantly how to navigate your site, too.
More on that in just a minute.
Strip away unnecessary design elements and your user experience will be much better for it.
Lighten the Code Load
Secondly, you want to do absolutely everything you can to lighten the code load of your website.
Yes, this means you’ll have to do a little bit of poking around “under the hood” of your website – tinkering with the code or even using a lighter-weight Content Management System (CMS) that can eliminate code bloat completely.
Too much unnecessary code means your website is going to load very slowly. And according to the folks at Google if your site doesn’t load within a second or two more than 30% of your visitors are going to leave your website. Many of them never to return again.
Lighten that code load ASAP.
Simplify Your Navigation Scheme
People need to know how to effortlessly navigate your website, and that means you need a navigational structure and scheme that is foolishly simple, very obvious, and as standardized as possible.
Resist the temptation to name common pages like HOME, BLOG, or CONTACT US with funny or quirky names.
It might feel like a fun way to sort of personalize your website, especially if it’s congruent with your brand and your brand personality.
At the end of the day, though, you risk alienating and frustrating web users that have learned how to navigate millions and millions of other websites with a more standardized navigation scheme.
Keep things simple and web visitor focused and you’ll be a lot happier with your results.
Use Plenty of Calls to Action
Far too many website owners assume that their web visitors are just going to sort of find their way around a website, almost stumbling across the content, products, or services that website owners offer.
That’s no way to run a site or a business.
Instead, you want to be almost completely obvious and overt with your directions to your web visitors and kind of march them all over your website – from one page to the next – using tons of calls to action (CTAs).
You don’t have to be rude or condescending with these calls to action. In fact, that would probably be a terrible “website improvement”.
But find a way to elegantly direct user traffic to the pages that you want them to hit, thinking strategically about the path you lead them on and how that’s going to influence whether or not they purchase products or services from you.
Engineer Your Site for Responsive Design Principles
Lastly (but certainly not least important) you need to be sure that your website is built on a bedrock of responsive design principles.
More than forty percent of all web traffic today is handled through mobile devices. That number is only going to climb higher and higher every year from here on out.
That means all different sized screens are going to be showcasing your content to people all over the planet and your site needs to be optimized with a user experience that can fluidly adjust to that available digital real estate.
Leverage responsive design principles if you aren’t already.
It’s a huge piece of the usability and user experience puzzle today and it’s a major website improvement you don’t want to miss out on.
Closing Thoughts
So there you have it, the most important website improvements you’ll want to make to dramatically overhaul and boost your user experience.
Take advantage of this inside information to tweak and modify your site as soon as you get a chance.
Implement as many of the tactics we highlighted above as you can – and then develop strategies to implement the others – and watch as your user engagement shoots through the roof (alongside your sales).
Few things can have as big an outsized impact on your business as overhauling and improving your user experience. Since this is often the only contact your business will have with your customer base it needs to be pitch perfect right from the first moment they land on your homepage.
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