If you imagine you can improve your website’s user experience by giving everyone that visits a one-year membership in the Jelly of the Month Club, you’re either visionary or severely misguided.
Since we don’t pass judgment here, we won’t make that call, but it is worth mentioning that none of the advice you’ll find in this article involves jams, jellies, or any other sort of preserves. It is the gift that keeps on giving the whole year, but there are much better ways to optimize your website.
Here are five inexpensive methods to improve your visitors’ experiences. If after reading you still feel like a year’s worth of jelly is better advice, please let us know your favorite flavor 😉.
Make Sure Your Contact Info Is Easy to Find
You want to make it as simple as possible for website visitors to get in touch with you. When someone is ready to convert you don’t want your contact info hidden in some obscure corner of your website.
On top of having a “contact us” page, you should place your contact information in the header and footer of every page. That way no matter where your visitor is on your site when they decide to contact you, they’re just a tap or scroll away at most, from connecting with you.
Place a Free Offer Above the Fold
Adding a free offer at the top of your home page in order to capture your users’ email addresses sounds more like a way to improve your experience instead of your users, and that’s because it is. Adding a free offer can significantly boost your website’s conversion rate.
However, your users are visiting your website because they’re interested in what you’re offering. If you make it easy for them to get useful information in exchange for their email address, many people will appreciate the effort.
If you like Mexican food and you visited tacoscompleteme.com, would you enjoy your visit more if they offered you a free taco in exchange for your contact information? Of course, you would. You may even be tempted to create extra email addresses and enjoy Taco Tuesday for a month! We don’t recommend that.
Be Certain Your Site Navigation is Clear and Easy
Just like no one would visit your hotel if all the floors were misnumbered and the hallways were something out thriller movie, a confusing website that’s hard to navigate will drive visitors away.
Make sure that your page names are descriptive of the content you’ll find on the page, and only feature relevant content on each page. Clear navigation allows a visitor to know exactly where they should go no matter what information they’re looking for.
Consider that 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds on a website before deciding whether to stay. If poor navigation prevents them from getting their pressing questions answered, you’ll be on the receiving end of a high bounce rate. Your bounce rate is calculated by how many times someone visits only one page of your website then leaves in a short period of time.
Remove Jargon from Your Content
Website content should be concise and easy to understand. Assuming that all of your visitors are savvy enough to process dense industry jargon is a great way to stop getting website visitors.
In order to offer a better user experience, you should assume instead that everyone visiting your website is a novice interested in learning more about your subject matter. Ditch the jargon and replace it with clear content that’s approachable for newbies.
Mobile Responsiveness
By the end of 2019, mobile web traffic represented roughly 52% of total traffic worldwide. If your website isn’t responsive for mobile devices, you’re ruining your site’s user experience for more than half of the people that want the information, product, or services that you provide.
That might be fine for businesses that sell mobile devices to people that have never owned one, but otherwise, a lack of mobile responsiveness is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Imagine if you punched every other customer in the face as they entered your store. They would likely be a bit put off by their user experience. Omitting mobile responsiveness is roughly the same thing, though easier on your fingers.
Fun fact: Google now ranks websites based on “mobile-first”. That means how your website looks on mobile as well as how visitors interact on mobile devices.
Bonus Items!
When are seven things better than five? When you’re helping a princess in the woods when you’re interested in infracting some deadly sins, and right now! Here are two bonus strategies for improving your site’s user experience.
Reduce Your Load Times
Remember that fifteen seconds you have to prevent a visitor from bouncing? That includes the amount of time it takes for your website to load.
It’s actually worse than that. 47% of people expect a website to load in two seconds or less. If it takes longer than three seconds, 40% of people will leave immediately, and they are likely to never return. These are lost prospects that will never get to experience your website.
This demonstrates how important fractions of a second can be. There are myriad ways to improve your load times. Check Google PageSpeed Insights to see how your site loads. Shorter load times always improve user experiences.
Remove Broken Links and Broken Images
Broken images ruin the aesthetics of your website, and broken links annoy visitors. Both should be avoided. Thankfully it’s easy to find and fix these problems. You can use a free service like brokenlinkcheck.com to scan your website for links that point to content that’s no longer available. Or a plugin for WordPress sites. To find broken images, simply scan through every page on your site with your eyes wide open.
If you’d like some help optimizing your site’s user experience, contact us today. We can help get your customers singing your praises, and you singing ours!*
*You won’t be required to sing the first time we speak, but we’ll love you if you do.
