How to Make Your Website User-Friendly? 5 Tips
More and more businesses are making their products and services available online as customers are spending a large portion of their time on the Internet. Nowadays, it is easy to get a website up and running. It has also become easier to make it look aesthetically pleasing to prospects and customers. In the quest to make the website visually appealing, businesses forget to make their website user-friendly. Without combining the element of user-friendliness in the overall website design, it becomes harder to get returning customers. The rule of thumb for website design is to make it as effortless as possible to make them stay. If you make it difficult to obtain information or navigate through the website, they will leave, which can have a negative effect on your sales.
Here are a few handy tips you can use to make your website user-friendly:
1. Load time
According to Adobe, 39% of the visitors won’t continue using a website if the images take too long or if they don’t load at all. As the average attention span of users is decreasing, it will become more difficult to retain visitors if your website takes too long to load. Load time is one of the most critical elements of a user-friendly website. By having a website that loads faster than your competition, more prospects and customers will begin to use your company’s website.
While it is good to have elements in your website design that will gain the attention of your page’s visitors, it won’t be of any use if the visitors can’t see them. Think twice when you are planning on adding more eye-catchy elements to your website.
2. Mobile-friendly
As Internet consumption on mobile devices is growing at a significant rate, it is important to make your website design mobile-friendly. If your website design isn’t optimized for mobile phones, the navigation menu, the icons, the content, and advertisements will look out of place when it gets viewed through them.
Imagine using a website where you can’t locate the ‘x’ icon to close a pop-up. You will end up getting frustrated as you can’t close it and you will move on to another website. In today’s highly competitive market, you can’t afford to lose out on even a single customer
3. Navigation
One of the most important elements in user-friendly website design is navigation. The visitors on your website need to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. The visitors shouldn’t have a hard time figuring out how to navigate through your website. The menu should be visible and its location should be obvious.
If you are using abbreviations on your website, give it a thought before adding it. What may be obvious to you may not be the case for the visitors. Avoid adding multiple layers to your menu as your visitors will have to spend more time trying to find what they want. Also, you should always add search functionality to your website. If the visitors can’t find what they are looking for, they can always search for it.
4. Readability
Another element in user-friendly website design is readability, as it makes it easier for the visitors to grasp information with minimum effort. Nielson Norman Group conducted a study and found out that visitors only read 28% of the information on a website. In other words, they scan the content on your website rather than going through it word by word. To increase the readability of your website design, you need to choose the contrasting colors for the background and the text of your website. When there is a contrast between the two, the visitors will find it easier to go through the content of your website. While selecting a font, pick one that is simple so that it can be read easily by visitors of all ages.
Fonts that are fancy may look harder to read, making it harder to scan the content of your website. Also, don’t use a lot of fonts on the same page as your website won’t look user-friendly. Avoid having long paragraphs or long text because it reduces the chances of it being read. Instead, break down your paragraph, use bulleted lists, and headlines to make your content more scannable.
5. Include contact information
According to Ko Marketing, 51% of the online users think that contact information, an extremely important element is missing from the majority of the company websites. 64% of them want to see the contact information of the company when they are on the homepage. Also, 44% of the visitors will leave immediately if there is no contact information on the website.
As you can see, it is extremely important to include contact information in your website design to make it user-friendly. You can add it at the bottom of your website so that it is visible to all the visitors.
By following these simple tips, you can make your website design user-friendly. If you are finding it difficult in making it user-friendly, why don’t you take the help of Mouth Media? They are experts in making website designs user-friendly!