You launch a new website and visitors begin finding your website, this is the starting phase. Once visitors are on your website does your website give your prospective visitors the best first impressions?

According to research from Nielsen Norman Group, the standard time that you need to grab the attention of the website visitor before they close the website and look elsewhere is 10-20 seconds.

Never has it been more important to carefully plan and structure your site to ensure that when they arrive they know exactly who you are and what you do.

What can we do to improve the website’s overall user experience?

1. Ensure your website loads in good time approximately 2 seconds.
2. Position clearly and concisely who you are and what you do?
3. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.
4. Effectively use whitespace to break up a page.
5. Use appropriate formatting and headings.

Page Speed

The biggest frustration for any time conscious visitor is the website’s overall page speed. This is the time it takes for the website to load and be interactive.

“The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.” (Portent, 2019)

With mobile traffic continually on the rise it is important to not overcrowd your website with lots of different sections as this will have a significant impact on whether people will continue to wait.

It is worth noting that if you are using shared hosting this can have an impact on your load times. Therefore, pick your hosting wisely ensuring they have a good support service too.

You can also improve your page speed by compressing your images before uploading them. There are a number of free tools such as TinyPNG that you can upload your images to and it will compress them into a smaller file size, saving additional load time.

Position clearly and concisely who you are and what you do?

With your website copy you need to immediately make it clear who you are and what you do or you will lose visitors. Be clear and concise and avoid ‘waffling’. Use your home page banner to clearly position who you are and what you offer so when people land on your site they are confident you are right for them.

You can use call to actions links or buttons to grab further attention and also direct them to relevant pages in your website funnel. An example being “Sign up for a Free Trial”.

Keep it simple and if you do overlay text on an image, make sure it is legible. Make the process of finding out more about you stress free.

Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly

According to StatCounter Global Statistics, “55.5% of all web traffic comes from mobile phones”.

It is important your website is fully optimised for mobile. The experience on desktop to mobile should not be wildly different. Avoid hiding too much on mobile devices. Consider adopting a mobile-first design approach.

You should regularly test your website to check how it responds on different devices and if you make any content, design or development changes, ensure you re-test again.

Effectively use whitespace to break up a page

There is the temptation to overcrowd your website pages but this should be avoided if you want to continue to grab their attention. By giving more whitespace around the section on the page you help to make it more legible and make it easier for them to focus on one specific area at a time.

However, it is worth noting that too much white space in a design between sections can disrupt the grouping. Then elements on the page don’t appear to be part of the relevant section.

Use appropriate formatting and headings

If you are confronted with a page with a ‘wall’ of content/copy then the chances are you may struggle to engage with the content. It is important to correctly format your content and use well considered headings to break up your content and grab the reader’s attention.

You should consider using keywords in your headings that target your message and attract your audience to read on. Headings allow the reader to be able to scan the page more effectively so they can find the content that is appropriate to them.

Bullet points are another useful method of giving information to the reader quickly and gives them another choice if they wish to read further.

Conclusion

There are many things you as a small business owner or charity CEO can do to improve your website experience for visitors to your site and the key to this is good planning and investing in good hosting and expertise. Getting your design, your content and your development executed well will put you in good stead and hopefully will convert into an enquiry or sale.