How to optimize your website for a better user experience?


tips to optimize website

Suppose you go to a supermarket and everything is cluttered. You want to get vegetables, but you get fruits instead. You want groceries, but there is no direction given to get to the grocery store. Your time was wasted and you had a bad experience. Until or unless that is the only supermarket in your town, you will not visit there again, right!

Just like the supermarket, if your website is not providing a good user experience, users will not visit again and in the supermarket case they can even go, as it is near to their home, but they have your competitor in a single click. 

 And this is why a good page experience matters. Providing a good page experience starts with the building of a website. From design to functionalities, everything should be in the correct format and in the right place.  

 

As per UNBOUNCE, If an eCommerce site loads slower than expected, over 45% of people admit they are less likely to make a purchase.

So, to make a better user experience, you need to optimize your website and there are various ways you can do it and also there are various issues that can be solved to make a first good impression. Here are the tips to optimize website.

Table of Contents

Tips to Optimize website

Increase Page Loading Time:

One of the most important factors why people leave your website is “slow loading”. Users today want to have results as quick as possible and this is why slow speed websites irritate them and they leave the website. Here Speed up your website is the most important factor to increase user experience. 
A two-second delay in page speed can increase bounce rates by 103%.”

So, how do you solve such a critical problem:

The answer is given by Google itself. The first thing before making your website fast is to know why your website is slow. For that, Google’s Free tool PageSpeed Insights is like magic for you.

Go to PageSpeed Insights, enter the URL of your website and within a few seconds, it will give you a full report for both mobile and desktop.

Along with the details of page speed it also provides suggestions where you can make improvements. 

speed up website

One of the major factors of slow page loading is heavy size images and videos. So, the first thing you can do is to compress your image size and upload images in webp format. For videos, instead of uploading videos you can embed them. 

Easy Navigation:

Let’s say your website is about “Boat” and users who are visiting your website are looking to buy a “Boat” and they have to go through many pages to reach to the “Boat product” they will visit some other websites to buy a Boat where they can easily see the section to buy a boat. So, whatever your main services are, make them easy for people to see and visit.

 

Core Web Vital:

First mobile and now desktop, google has made page experience a ranking factor and core web vital is the main feature of page experience. What is Core Web Vital? Core web Vital is a mix of 3 elements. 

  1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  2. First Input Delay (FID)
  3. CLS (Cumulative Shift) 

All these 3 are part of Core Web Vital

How to solve this issue:

There are various measurements for core web vitals, like CSS, Javascript size, render blocking, slow loading of above the content fold. To solve all these issues, again, you have to go to PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These 2 tools give the understanding of the position of core web vitality and area of improvements. 

Responsive and Mobile Friendly:

With the increased rate of mobile and reach to data connectivity, users are more likely to search on mobile devices, as they can search from anyplace and anytime. And this is why having a website which gives a good performance on mobile and any other device like tablet is essential. For this, you need to build a responsive website. A good Web Development Agency knows all the trends and technologies and builds you a responsive website, but if you find any issue, you can ask your developer to correct it. 

 

Proper use of H tags:

H1 to H6 do not only help search engines understand the content and help rank, but also users can understand the main topics of the web pages. As H1 is considered as the main topic of the page and the rest are sub-topics of the main one. It helps users to visit the section directly they want information for.

 

404 Error:

So, you enter a URl on the search engine and instead of taking you to the desired location it takes you to the 404 error page. What is this and why does this happen?

404 is an HTTP status code and when we enter a URL that does not exist or make any typo mistake while typing the URL, it shows us the 404 page error and says the requests page is not available. It is generally an issue from the user’s end. So, for that, what you can do is create a custom 404 page that informs the user about the unavailability of the URL they are looking for and you can give them options to visit any other page of your website like home page or blog page.

An example of Custom 404 page

404 error page
Image Source https://www.searchenginejournal.com/404-page-examples/211154/

One reason for a 404 error is that you have changed the URL of a particular page and the user has the old URL and when he uses the old URL to see your web page he will land on the 404 page. To resolve this issue you can make use of redirection. If you have made the temporary changes to the URL you can use 302 redirection for permanent you can use 301 redirection. With this even if a user enters the old URL, he will be redirected to the new URL.

Highlight the Hyperlink:

Let’s say you want users to go to page B when they are on Page A and to make them go to page B, you give a hyperlink with a proper anchor text. Make sure that anchor text or hyperlink is clearly visible to the user. For this, you can bold that particular text, and give it a different color. 


Last Words:

I hope with these tips you will be able to give a whole new experience to the visitors of your website. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. 


Surbhi Khatri

A digital marketer, seeking every opportunity to help brands and people reach their goals. Having expertise in SEO, SMO, and Google ads, I also possess creativity and design content in both writing and infographics. My zeal to learn always makes me get new information and implement those learnings. Learning human psychology helps me understand the behavior of people in each aspect of life. Thus this helps in solving problems of brands and consumers.

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