Have you ever visited your website, as if you were a brand new potential customer, and tried to do business with yourself? Is it simple and easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, or are there road blocks in the way?
Earlier in this series, we discussed the Design and Content of your website, and both of these have an impact on user experience. But even a beautifully designed, well-written and freshly updated website isn’t enough. Your website will still fail to generate results for your business if it doesn’t provide a good user experience.
Here are few red flags to look for that may be indicators of your customer experience.
User Experience
1. It’s not mobile-friendly
Imagine visiting a website on your phone and not being able to read anything, because the text is all designed for a screen that’s 10x bigger. Then you can’t use the navigation bar, because it’s hidden in a drop-down menu that you can’t see. You’d leave that site pretty quick.
Mobile devices account for 51% of organic search traffic in the U.S., according to Statista, and that number is growing. With over half of search traffic coming from mobile devices, a mobile-friendly website is no longer an option; it’s a requirement. Some companies choose to build an entirely separate mobile version of their website, optimized specifically for mobile devices. More often, websites simply use responsive design, where content adapts to the size of the screen being used.
Not only do users expect an optimized mobile experience, Google now penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly.
Is your site mobile-friendly? If you’re not sure, check with Google’s handy free tool.
2. Slow load times
Seconds count. We’ve all been frustrated by slow webpages, and many users won’t wait longer than a few seconds for a webpage to load. How fast should your pages load? Simple answer: as fast as possible. According to Kissmetrics, even a one second delay can mean a 7% reduction in conversions. Take a look at their infographic below, and you’ll see that up to 25% of users were abandoning a page with only a four second load time, and it gets worse from there.
Think your pages are loading fast enough? Test your page speed here.
3. Visitors aren’t staying
Once visitors are on your site, you want them to stay. The last thing you want is to drive them away due to a bad experience. One way to measure this is to look at your bounce rate, which is the percentage of users who visit a page on your website and leave within a certain period of time without looking at any other pages (in other words, single-page visits).
The lower the bounce rate, the better, but typical bounce rates vary widely depending on the industry and type of page. For example, a blog site may have a 70-90% bounce rate, because visitors rarely read more than one article at at time. Meanwhile, a service site typically has a much lower 10-30% bounce rate, because visitors need to visit multiple pages to understand the service in depth.
Google Analytics is the easiest way to check your bounce rate, so make sure it is properly configured on your website. Google gives an site-wide average bounce rate, but check bounce rates for individual pages too. Start with your homepage first, then drill down into your most popular pages.
4. Broken pages & links
“404 Error: Page Not Found.” You’ve seen this type of page when you’re browsing a website and you click on a page or a link that doesn’t work. Broken links are typically caused by moving or renaming a page on your site, or linking to other pages, images, or videos that have moved (or no longer even exist). In addition to frustrating users, broken links stop search engines from crawling and indexing your site, which can hurt your rankings. So it’s important to constantly police your site for broken links. Try a tool like dead link checker.
5. Difficult navigation
Imagine driving in a crowded city with no lane markings, hidden street signs and stop lights that don’t work. Chaos. That’s what your website is like without clear navigation. What makes a website a virtual traffic jam?
First, a hidden navigation bar. When you’re driving, you know where to look to find a stop sign or traffic light. Similarly, visitors expect your navigation bar to be on either the top of your site, or the left sidebar. Don’t make them search for it.
Navigation with vague labels or too many choices also complicates the user experience. For example, a navigation link called “Discover,” could mean a lot of things: it could be information about the company, new product offerings or an inspirational blog. Meanwhile, e-commerce sites are especially are prone to listing tons of sub-categories for products, giving users so many choices it’s confusing.
Lastly, navigation suffers when pages are missing that visitors expect to see, like About, Products/Services, and a Contact page. It may seem dull, but when it comes to navigation, stick to standards and best practices; navigation isn’t the place for clever experimentation.
On to Part 4: Technical Elements. Or, go back and catch Part 1: Design and Part 2: Content.
