User Experience (UX) is one of the most important factors to consider when managing first impressions with your customers. It’s the overall experience your customers have when they interact with your website, so getting it right is essential to your site’s performance.
Whatever your product or service, those first impressions form quickly and can determine whether or not a person moves on to one of your competitors.
The more frustration a user encounters, the more likely you are to lose that lead. Good UX should be intuitive to navigate, efficient, and enjoyable to use. Here’s what you need to know.
If your site has a high bounce-rate ― where users leave your site without interacting with or viewing more than one page ― you can expect to rank lower on search engines. The relevance of your content, visual appeal to your target audience, and efficiency all come into play here.
According to research analysis published by Tool Tester, “Google has started rewarding websites that provide a good user experience, taking into account criteria such as page load speed and mobile friendliness, as a factor for ranking search results.”
While user behavior varies depending on what sort of service or product you offer, loading speed is one of the key culprits when it comes to poor user experience. According to Tool Tester’s analysis of 100 top websites worldwide, “The average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.”
If conversion is your goal, according to Portent, try aiming for a 1-4 second load time. It may not be surprising that most users are markedly less patient when interacting with websites on mobile devices than they are on desktop.
According to Google’s Consumer Insights, “53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.”
There are many great tools out there for testing your page speed, but it’s worth noting that your ratings are based on worst case scenarios. Depending on where your users are located and the kind of network connections they have, you’ll see very different results.
You can simulate these different network scenarios with Network Throttling on Chrome pretty easily, and Browserstack’s instructions will walk you through it. If you want to see an average user’s load time, select 3G in your settings.
Once you’ve identified pages that are loading too slowly, a few small adjustments can make a big difference.
Check for oversized images ― anything larger than 20 megabytes is going to be a problem. For most things, try keeping images smaller than 2 megabytes. Shopify has a great cheat sheet for optimizing your web images.
Use .jpg for photos and .png format for more complex graphic images. Do any necessary enhancement or compression before uploading them.
Adding alt text to your images makes your content accessible for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers. Search engines consider this too, so well-crafted alt text can also help improve your rankings.
Make sure your widgets are updated and functioning properly.
Consider the user’s experience from end to end. Your website should be accessible and easy to use.
Think about the number of steps your customer has to take, and reduce them where it makes sense. The more hoops someone has to jump through to make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter, etc., the more likely they are to leave.
While it might be appealing to collect more information about your customer base, asking for unnecessary information undermines your credibility. Unfortunately, this is a very common mistake.
Instead, keep things short and to the point. Review your checkout processes and contact forms. Do you really need to include more than a name, message, and contact information fields? Does the user need to enter their name in more than one text box?
Streamline where it makes sense, reduce the number of fields they have to fill in as much as you can, and aim for a single page checkout process. Good form builders, like Craft CMS, will automatically separate first and last names for you even if they’re entered in the same field.
However, just because you can simplify something doesn’t mean you should. You don’t want to inadvertently compromise security by eliminating a verification step, for example. Make sure you understand the potential risks, and do your best to balance efficiency with solid cybersecurity practices to earn and keep your customers’ trust.