Have your website engagement stats been looking a little dismal lately? Are you getting plenty of traffic to your site but encountering high bounce rates?
It’s time to identify what could be going wrong. Here are a few steps you can take to ensure users stay on your site and take the actions you want them to.
1. Optimise your website for mobile
Having a responsive website design is essential. As mobile phone usage is on the rise, you don’t want to give smartphone users a frustrating experience when they’re viewing your site. You can throw endless amounts of time and money into content marketing or social media advertising, but if people are arriving to your site on their smartphones to find it’s slow to load, has off-centre images and text they can’t read, your efforts will be in vain.
Firstly, keep things simple – don’t try to reinvent the wheel. When you’re dealing with mobile, you want your website design to be clean and minimal. Secondly, don’t make people work hard the minute they land on your homepage. Users shouldn’t have to zoom in simply to read your navigation menu, or swipe from right to left just to see a whole image that should be centred in the middle of the screen. According to Sweor, eight in ten customers will stop engaging with content if it doesn’t display well on their device.
“Eight in ten customers will stop engaging with content if it doesn’t display well on their device.”
2. Make your website easy to navigate
When designing a website, put yourself in your users’ shoes and consider how easy it is for them to access the information they’re looking for. If someone has to click more than several times to find the information they need, your website is too difficult to navigate. A user may become frustrated and give up, even if the information is only one more click away. Consider your website from a user experience perspective and ask yourself: What information do my website visitors want/need to know, and how will they find it? Consider reducing the number of tabs or simplifying the wording on your navigation menu, so that it’s easy for users to understand where to go. Try to avoid cluttering your homepage with too much text or images that distract users from navigating to where they want to go.
“If someone has to click more than several times to find the information they need, your website is too difficult to navigate.”
3. Speed up the load time of your site
Sites that load slowly will also put users off, regardless of what device they’re using. People are multi-tasking as they browse your site, and any frustration they experience could cause them to turn to a competitor at the click of a button. Test your site speed using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and enlist the help of an agency specialising in website development and UX design to help you shorten your load times and improve the on-page experience for people.
4. Ensure your calls-to-action are prominent
If users aren’t taking the action you want them to – signing up for your e-newsletter, downloading an eBook, or requesting a free consultation – it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not interested. Maybe they simply don’t know where to go. Good website design ensures that the key actions you want your users to take stand out. For example, are people not downloading the new eBook you published? Instead of hiding it away on a page someone needs to click three different links to get to, position it front and centre on your homepage. Is no one signing up for your monthly newsletter? Move the sign-up form on your homepage from the very bottom to the top, and see if this makes a difference.
“Good website design ensures that the key actions you want your users to take stand out.”
Great web design is an art, and at NZ Digital our team of website developers and web designers work together to deliver user experiences that engage and delight your users.
