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Your Guide to a User-Friendly Website

Your business is your online headquarters, and it serves one main purpose–to help you find a new pool of clients in the digital space.

With that goal in mind, your website needs to be user-friendly. As soon as it loads, users should intuitively know how and where to find the information they need. Not only that, the said information should be presented in an easy to digest manner.

If you fail to do that, users could easily click out of your website and go to your competition instead.

In this blog post, we are going to discuss three ways to make your business website more user-friendly.

Let’s get started.

Get to know your audience.

As long as you host your website and own your domain, you are in full control of all its elements. You decide what plugins, colours, and fonts to use.

However, you did not create the website for your own enjoyment. You created it to network with new clients in the digital space.

Examine your website’s current state with those potential clients in mind. Get to know them, especially their likes and dislikes. Begin by asking yourself the following questions:

• How old is your ideal client?
• Where is he or she located?
• What are their strengths?
• What are their improvement areas?
• What are their pain points?
• How does your business help resolve those pain points?

For example, StoryBrand’s website shows how well they know their audience. They are targeting business owners who need help with marketing, and it shows in the language, colours, fonts and images they use.

• They offer classes about StoryBrand’s marketing principles, and they use photos from those classes on their website.
• Their navigation and business tagline are white against a dark background, ensuring users digest information right away.
• The calls-to-action are in teal against a dark background which draws a user’s eye.
• The entire website has a professional but approachable feel.

If you are unsure if your website is user-friendly enough for your target audience, conduct a survey. You can create one with SurveyMonkey, and post the link on your social media accounts. You can also add a link to the survey the next time you send out your business newsletter.

Simplify website navigation.

Your navigation is a major factor in whether users continue exploring your website or not.

If you clutter it with too many choices, they will have a difficult time finding the information they need. They will not find the information you want to present first. This could greatly impact your conversion rate.

A simple and organised website navigation is key.

As much as possible, minimise the links in your header navigation. Too many links may confuse users and cause them to leave your website.

If you need to include several important pages, organise them into categories and sub-categories. In the Cornerstone Digital website, for example, we have one main page for Web Development. We included sub-pages for E-commerce, CMS, WordPress and Shopify underneath it.

Do not forget to make sure your hyperlinks–links to other webpages–are visible. If they do not stand out, users will be unable to differentiate from the text on a webpage.

When it comes to digital marketing, we highly encourage you to separate yourself from the competition. Your website navigation, however, is not the place to do this. Use standard names for your pages like About and Contact. Do not use terms users may be unfamiliar with.

Improve your website speed.

A slow website could have a huge impact on your conversion rate. Almost 70% of consumers admitted that page speed affects whether they will buy from an online retailer or not.

Your website speed could also affect your search engine rankings. Google rolled out its Speed Update in mid-2018. The update made page speed a major ranking factor in mobile search engine results.

Creating quality content is still important, but having a fast website could improve your search engine rankings.

Begin by determining your website speed. You can use PageSpeed Insights. It is a free tool created by Google that measures website speed using data from Google Chrome users.

Once you open PageSpeed Insights, you will have to enter your website URL and hit enter. The tool will then grade your website speed and give you a list of improvement suggestions. The suggestions may include optimising your image sizes or updating your website’s CSS codes.

Conclusion

A user-friendly website is key for improving your search engine rankings and conversion rate. The more user-friendly it is, the more users will learn more about your business.

Begin by identifying who your target audience is. Create a website that appeals to them in terms of content, aesthetics and ease of use.

Simply your website navigation. Organise all your pages into categories and sub-categories. Only include necessary links, and eliminate the non-essentials.

Users expect websites that load quickly. If your website takes too long to load images and data, they might decide to work with the competition instead.

Cornerstone Digital is a web development company in Sydney. We’d be glad to help you reach a new pool of potential clients with a user-friendly website. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.