It takes a split second for users to form an opinion about your website. It’s this opinion that will determine whether they’ll stay and look around or browse away immediately.
As a business owner, you know the power of first impressions. In a marketplace where consumers are bombarded with options, you don’t get many chances to impress.
The same goes for your website. Fortunately, with websites, it isn’t all about looks – because beauty can be subjective. In fact, it’s a lot more about how friendly it is.
But what are user-friendly websites?
In this article, we’re telling you the characteristics of a user-friendly business website. Let’s get started!
The Looks (Design)
OK, we said websites aren’t all about looks, but that doesn’t mean looks aren’t important.
Sure, a user isn’t going to abandon a website just because they don’t like its designer’s choice of colors and themes, but they aren’t going to love it either. And what you want is for users to fall in love with your website. This is what keeps users coming back.
A user-friendly website design should follow a minimalistic theme with good use of whitespace and contrasting colors where necessary. The font also adds to the look of the website.
Imagine opening a news website with a dark them and an italic font. While this theme may work for an underworld criminal gang website, it’s not going to do well for a lifestyle news magazine.
It’s not possible to create a website design that caters to the individual needs of every user, which is why the best thing to do is to play it safe with a minimalist design.
And, don’t try to DIY a business website, lest you end with a terrible design. Hiring professional web designers, like those at Hiltonwebdesign.com, is an assured way to end up with a website that ticks all the boxes in the looks department.
Page Load Speed
Many users will abandon a website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.
3 seconds might sound like a split second, but when it comes to page load speeds, it’s a lifetime. We have website pages that load in less than a second, so unless a user has a painfully slow internet connection, they aren’t going to excuse your website for taking forever to load.
There are several digital tools you can use to analyze the current speed performance of your web pages. If you find that it’s slow or can do with some speeding up, there are a number of measures you can take.
One way is to use a great website host. A reputable, industry-leading website host will charge you a premium for their hosting services, but it’ll soon be clear that the money is well-invested. Choosing an unreliable host that throttles down speeds or suffers frequent outages is a sure way to hurt your website users’ experience.
Using a content delivery network is another crucial move. CDNs shorten the distance information has to travel between your servers and the end user’s computer.
Other ways include optimizing images for speed, cleaning your database, streamlining your HTML, and minifying CSS and JavaScript.
Mobile-Friendly Design
In 2022, mobile accounts for over 50 percent of all web traffic. It won’t be long before this percentage climbs to over 70 percent.
What does this tell you? More people who’re visiting your website are using their mobile devices. Does your website have great mobile compatibility?
If it doesn’t, you’re losing more users (and potentially customers) to your competitors with business websites that are mobile-friendly.
There’s an easy solution to making any website mobile-friendly. It’s to use a responsive design. This requires some front-end coding, so it’s not a task you should take on if you don’t have any coding expertise. Hire a web developer and they’ll deliver a website with responsive design.
Remember, the goal isn’t to make your website just desktop and mobile-friendly. There are users who are browsing the internet on televisions and other big-screen devices. A responsive design ensures your web pages render properly and seamlessly regardless of the user’s screen size.
Accessibility to All
Making a website accessible to all is akin to making a building accessible to all, including people with various physical disabilities.
The typical website is designed only for people without any physical disabilities. But then you want everyone in your target market to purchase your products, right?
Well, if your website isn’t friendly to people with hearing disorders or the visually impaired, you can’t say it’s user-friendly.
Making a website that’s accessible to all comes down to web development techniques. Adding on-screen readers, for example, enables people who’re visually challenged to listen to the text on your website. Without this feature, a person with vision problems will otherwise feel compelled to leave.
Fluid Navigation
Your website has multiple pages. You want the user to navigate from page to page without any problem. They shouldn’t struggle with locating the home page from another page, for instance.
Enabling fluid navigation is all about the architecture of the website. This is one of the foundations of website development. Ensure your website developer knows navigation fluidity is one of your key goals.
It’s Easy to Build User-Friendly Websites
Building user-friendly websites might sound like something that’s overly technical. It is, to some extent, but for the most part, it’s easy. You just need to know what makes a website user-friendly and what doesn’t. And, you can simply solve everything in one move – hiring a professional website developer and designer.
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