Considering the massive growth in the number of consumers turning to the internet to research products and services, one area that we encourage you to give some attention to this year is your website. More specifically, the user-friendliness of your website design.
1. Make your website mobile friendly.
When looking for tips about creating a user-friendly website in 2016, making your website design mobile friendly will hands-down be the most common tip.
Did you know that nearly two-thirds of Americans now own smartphones? And the vast majority of these smartphone users rely on these mobile devices for internet access.
If your website is not mobile friendly, you can bet that your audience will click over to competitor’s website that is.
Even more, Google has now updated its search engine algorithm to give preference in rankings to websites that have been enhanced for mobile friendly website design.
In a nutshell, if your website is not already mobile friendly, you’re behind the eight ball.
2. Make your content easily accessible to your audience.
You put a lot of time and energy into creating high quality content for your website, so you’ll want to make sure that your visitors can easily find the content they are looking for on your website.
You can do this by organizing the content into clear categories on your website that are visually defined.
You should also use very clear navigation titles so that your website visitors will have a good idea of what the content is about before they even click on the link.
And, if you’re going to take advantage of an in-site search feature on your website, make sure that it produces relevant results!
3. Pay attention to loading speed.
Today’s consumers have an attention span shorter than a goldfish. If your website takes too long to load–3 seconds or less, as much as 40 percent of consumers will choose to abandon your website!
With so much content to compete with on the internet, speeding up the load speed of your website needs to be a priority.
Do you know how quickly your website takes to load? An easy way to find out how long your customers have to wait for your website to load is to visit your website yourself. Another option is to use a free website speed test tool like Pingdom.
4. Regularly check your website for broken links.
One of the fastest ways to lose credibility and appear unprofessional to your audience is to include broken links on your website.
Make a point to periodically check the links that you include in the content on your website to confirm that they actually work. When you uncover broken links, remove them immediately or correct them.
If your goal in 2016 is to make your website user-friendly, you’ll be happy to know that it doesn’t take much time to make these enhancements. Ask your customers about improvements that they would like to see to your website in addition to taking advantage of these 4 user-friendly website design tips.
