Running a blog is fun, especially when you get good traffic and engagement, it’s time for bloggers like you and me to improve the user experience. Today, search engines love websites or blogs that provide a great user experience.
Often, we get so busy writing great content for our blogs, marketing our blogs, that we forget about the important factors that keep our readers on our blogs. Today, I will share a few tips for every blogger that will help provide a great user experience for your readers.
Some of these tips may change depending on your blogging style, for example if you run a blog as an individual or under a brand name. You may not be able to incorporate everything mentioned below, but try to incorporate as many as possible.
Why do you need to provide a good user experience?
This is the first thing you should ask yourself:
- What motivates you to keep blogging?
- What elements of a blog make you remember it?
- What kind of mistakes would make you frustrated and leave the web page you were browsing?
- Do you enjoy rereading what you’ve written on your blog?
Once you’ve asked yourself these questions, you’ll have a clear goal in mind for improving the overall reader experience on your blog. Now, let me help you with some things that will not only keep readers coming back to your blog again, but you’ll also get tons of free marketing for your blog.
Here are some statistics that highlight the importance of user experience:
- 70% of unsuccessful web businesses fail due to poor availability.
- 75% of consumers admit to making credibility judgments based on a company’s website design.
- 88% of visitors are less likely to return to a website after experiencing a negative user experience
Simply put, happy users are the key to a successful website. By ensuring our website is easy to use and provides a positive experience for our visitors, we improve our chances of attracting repeat traffic and generating sales.
So how do we start working on improving the user experience?
Here are some tips;
1. Simplify the design of your website
Good web design is all about creating an easy-to-use, visually appealing website that visitors want to come back for more. From choosing the right colors and fonts to organizing content in an easy-to-understand way, there are countless small decisions that need to be made.
However, there are some general tips that can help simplify the design process and make it easier for users to navigate our websites.
Use simple color schemes and typography
Clean, uncluttered layouts can help visitors focus on our content, and a limited color palette for content can create a sense of unity and coherence. In terms of typography, using a few carefully chosen fonts can also help our designs look clean and streamlined.
Use concise menus and submenus
Too many menu items may make it difficult for visitors to find what they want, resulting in a poor user experience. Therefore, we need to use menus carefully and only include necessary links. You can also use drop-down menus or sub-menu micro-interactions to further organize your content.
Group related content
One way to ensure a good user experience is to group related content.
For example, if your blog contains multiple categories, consider creating separate pages for each category instead of keeping all posts on one page. This will make it easier for visitors to find the specific information they want.
Conduct usability testing
Usability testing is an important aspect of web design because it helps ensure that the website is easy for the target audience to use and navigate. This can be done through a variety of methods, such as conducting user interviews, observing user behavior through tracking software, and gathering feedback through surveys and focus groups. With this usability testing guide and careful consideration of the needs and preferences of the target audience, web designers can create a website that is both visually appealing and easy to use, resulting in a better overall user experience.
2. Check the validity of each link
Broken links can frustrate visitors and make our site appear unprofessional. Not to mention, they can also lead to lower search engine rankings.
To avoid this, take some time to regularly check all the links on your website to make sure they are working properly.
We can manually check each link to make sure it’s valid. This can be time consuming, but it’s the best way to make sure everything is working properly. Alternatively, we can use Google Webmaster Tools or Ahrefs to help identify any broken links.
3. Include a search bar and sitemap on every page
Most website visitors are looking for something specific. Whether they’re looking for information about a product or service, the direction of our business, or general information, they want to find it quickly and easily. That’s why it’s important to include a search bar on every website.
This way, visitors can go directly to the relevant page just by typing in what they are looking for. This improves the user experience and reduces the number of people who leave our site without finding what they were looking for.
Bruno Marota from puzzle site I Am A Puzzle explains, “When we added search functionality to help find puzzles instantly, our bounce rate went down because our users were able to find what they were looking for right away. Plus, we got data on puzzles people wanted, which we then added to our database.”
We can supplement our search bar with a sitemap to further enhance our website navigation. A sitemap is a directory of all our web pages, usually organized in a hierarchical manner.
Visitors can see at a glance what pages are on our website. This is especially effective if you have a large website with a lot of content.
Second, a sitemap can help search engines index our website more efficiently, thereby improving search engine rankings and visibility.
4. Use engaging visuals to enhance user experience
Visuals are a great way to attract visitors and increase interest in our website. However, it is important to use them with caution and only include images and animations that are relevant to our content.
Our goal is to have an image to text ratio of no more than 1:5. This means that we should only include one image for every five blocks of text.
When using animation and video, we should aim for a length of no more than 10 seconds. A short looping animation can work well, but it’s important to make sure it doesn’t distract the reader from your content. It’s best to cut out irrelevant parts of the video online and highlight only the key points.
5. Use pop-ups with caution
Pop-ups can be an effective way to collect information from visitors or promote special offers.
However, they can also be invasive and annoying, so it's important to use them with caution.
We should only use popups when it is relevant to the user and we trust they will not find them intrusive.
For example, if you have an article that’s behind a paywall, you might consider using a pop-up to provide a preview of the article or give visitors the option to pay for access. Or, if you’re running a contest or promotion, a pop-up coupon code can be an effective way to entice people in.
We should also make sure that our popups can be easily closed so that users can close them when they are not interested. You can invest in smart popup software to help you create high-converting popups that won’t annoy your users.
You can also use WordPress survey plugins and create interesting surveys for your website to attract more visitors and keep them on the page longer.
6. Optimize your website for different browsers and devices
According to Statista, mobile users account for 90% of the global internet population. That’s why it’s important to make sure our website is responsive and looks good on a variety of screen sizes.
Generally speaking, we should design our websites to be easy to use on both desktop and mobile devices. This means keeping our designs simple and using large fonts and buttons. We should also resize images and crop animations to look good on smaller screens.
We should also test our website on different browsers to make sure it displays correctly.
Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, but it's also important to test our website on other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
We can test how our website looks on different browsers and devices using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool . Simply enter your URL and Google will show you how your website looks on different devices.
7. Use social proof to improve user experience
If you’ve ever read and seen an ad or post on social media that had a lot of likes, shares, or comments, then you’ve seen social proof in action.
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people see others taking a particular action and decide to follow suit.
For example, let's say you're considering buying a new product from an online store. If you see that the product has a lot of positive reviews from other customers, you're more likely to go ahead and buy it.
Or, if you’re reading an article on a website and see that it’s been shared hundreds of times, you’re more likely to think it’s worth your time and attention.
In both cases social proof influences our behavior by providing information about what other people are doing. While this may seem like it only happens on social media, businesses can actually use social proof to improve the user experience on their website in a variety of ways.
8. Combining AI and chatbots
Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots, and live chat plugins may be used to improve the user experience on our website.
Artificial intelligence can personalize the user experience by providing relevant content and recommendations. This can be done by collecting information about user preferences and behavior.
Chatbots, on the other hand, can be used to provide customer support and answer any questions a user might have. They can also be used to create chat widgets to conveniently connect customers with various messaging apps.
If you have minimal coding knowledge, there are no-code application platforms that can help you create AI and chatbot solutions easily.
9. Enhance website security
Security is an important part of any website. Not only does it protect our website from attacks, it also helps ensure a positive user experience.
Visitors to our website need to be confident that their personal information is safe and that they can browse without being bombarded with intrusive content.
To improve the security of our website, we should ensure that our website uses HTTPS. This will encrypt the communication between our website and the visitor's browser, making it difficult for attackers to intercept the data. You may have an SSL certificate installed on your server to do this.
We should also keep our software and website plugins up to date.
If our website is up to date, our website visitors are less likely to encounter errors or other problems while browsing.
This way, they can experience smooth, uninterrupted navigation without having to worry about their safety.
10. Improve your website speed
The average user expects a website to load within 3 seconds. If your website takes longer than this to load, you risk losing visitors.
In fact, according to Google, 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So how can we improve our website speed ?
Here are some tips;
Optimize files
Optimizing our files means reducing their size without compromising quality. This is achieved by compressing videos and images, minifying JavaScript and CSS scripts, and choosing the appropriate file format.
For example, JPEG is great for photographs, while PNG is good for graphics with transparent backgrounds.
Enable browser caching
Browser caching allows our website to store some of its files locally on a visitor's computer. That way, when they return to our website, their browser can load the cached files instead of having to get them from our server again.
As a result, our website will load faster.
Leverage Content Delivery Networks
A CDN is a network of servers located around the world. When we use a CDN, our website's files are stored on these servers and delivered to visitors based on their location.
This can help increase our website speed because it reduces the distance files have to travel.
overall
In order to improve the user experience of our website, we need to adapt, merge and enhance certain features for our visitors.
We should simplify the design of our website, check for certain errors, and use pop-ups and visual effects with caution. We also recommend integrating search bars, sitemaps, social proof, and artificial intelligence to help visitors navigate our website.
In addition, we must improve the usability, security, and speed of our websites to provide uninterrupted browsing time for everyone. By following the above ten tips, we can achieve the best website user experience.
A good practice is to go through your blog pages and think from the reader's perspective. Think about which parts keep you reading your blog and which points make you lose interest. Note down all the points and then work on improving them. You can also ask your random friend to check your blog and give his opinion. Unbiased feedback will help you understand the common problems of your readers and you can work on improving it.
If you have more ideas and suggestions, please share them with me in the comments. If you found this article interesting, please consider sharing it on Facebook and Twitter.
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