6 Ways to Make Your Website More User-Friendly
Your company’s website is an essential part of doing business and streamlining your customers’ experience. Unless you’re trying to be cryptic about the products and services you provide, it’s incredibly important to provide a positive user experience with your website as this is likely to be the source of your most effective sales funnel.
There are several things that you can do to ensure that your customers have a great experience online before placing an order or visiting your business in person. Read below for six ways that you can make your website more user-friendly to improve your online business image and encourage shoppers to buy.
Place Your Logo in the Top Left Corner
It’s crucial that you have your logo visible on your website. This is important for brand recognition as well as providing a constant reminder for users where they’re getting their information. The top left corner of your website is recommended as the best location as this is the first place users look as they typically read from left to right. Additionally, it’s not uncommon for users to look toward the navigation bar when trying to see which website they’re on currently.
When you’re placing your logo on the navigation bar, you have a couple of options. You can keep the logo full size while the user is scrolling or you can set the logo to shrink in size. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but it’s best to make sure the logo sticks to the top of the page while scrolling so it’s always visible.
Make Contact Information Easily Accessible
Put your contact information in the footer of your website. This sets up your website so users can easily find a phone number, address, and email address on every page. If your customers have a pressing question or request for you, they’re not going to want to search across your website trying to find a way to get ahold of you. The easier it is to access your phone number or navigate to a contact form the more likely they will be to reach out to you for information.
Add a Search Function
Along the vein of making information easy to find, add a search function to your website so your customers can quickly and easily find exactly what they’re looking for. A site search tool allows users and potential customers the ability to search for information about your products, services, and more. No matter how well you set up your navigation, an internal search engine for your website promotes a user-friendly interface that encourages users to take their experience into their own hands if they feel that they need to.
Include Social Media Icons
Depending on your industry, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and even TikTok have proven to be effective methods to driving sales leads for many businesses. If you use social media as an extension of your marketing techniques, you need to encourage traffic there in addition to your website. By getting more eyes on your social media posts and growing your following, your online reputation and reach will grow. Make it easy for prospective customers to find you on social media platforms by putting corresponding icons on your website. Even if they don’t follow your accounts, visitors can still share your posts with their friends, which is a no-cost sales lead.
Speed Up Load Times
Many users have a short attention span when they’re surfing the internet. This is the result of increased internet speeds by providers that allow websites to load at lightning speeds. We have developed very little patience for websites that aren’t fully loaded within two or three seconds and it’s not unusual for someone to click away looking for a new source if a site takes longer than that.
You can use online tools like PageSpeed Insights by Google to find out exactly how fast your website loads as well as get recommendations for ways to make it faster. Two of the first steps that you can take to improve your website’s load time are compressing images and graphics to be 300 KB or less. Large images can be up to 1 MB if you have full-screen images that cover the background of your website.
Make Navigation Intuitive
It’s important that your website is easy to navigate. Your navigation bar is not only meant to guide users to where you want them to be, it should be designed to help users easily find their way through your website. You can load up your navigation bar with top-level links and headers with a variety of second-level links, but what’s most important is that it makes sense.
Sort your pages as you would present information to customers. This includes more information about your company, your products and services, and a way to get in touch. You can add more links to your navigation as you see fit, but these are the basics that can streamline the user experience.
