Imagine finding the perfect website that fills a specific need of yours. You click on the site but find it impossible to navigate and find what you want.
If you want to keep your customers from feeling that way, you need a user-friendly website. Whether you’re a designer or not, you can do a few things to improve your site’s usability.
Read on for some ideas.
1. Make It Easy to Navigate
One of the most important elements of a user-friendly website is a navigation bar. You can add the bar to the top of your site so that people can easily find what they need.
You might include links to pages on your site, such as:
- About
- Contact
- Services or shop
- Blog
Make sure the pages you add to your navigation bar make sense for your visitors. For example, you might not want to have a services page if you focus on selling products.
2. Add a Search Feature
Another excellent part of user-friendly website design is a search bar. While you should have a good navigation system, some visitors may want to find something specific.
Maybe they’re looking for a blog post on a particular topic and don’t want to scroll through your blog posts. If you have a search bar, that visitor can input the term and search for it.
That can make it much easier for people to get around your site. And if finding pages on your site is easy, you can keep people on your site for longer to get more traffic and potential customers.
3. Create a Mobile Version
As more people use their mobile devices to browse the internet, a user-friendly website will become even more important. If you can’t navigate around your site on your phone, you can lose a lot of traffic.
Usually, a mobile website has just the basic features. It can have a search bar, but the navigation bar might become a button that users press to access the navigation options.
Fortunately, most website platforms let you design a mobile version. That way, you can still have a desktop version that looks good on a bigger screen, but the small screen version will also work well.
Responsive website design is crucial for attracting and maintaining mobile web traffic. Be sure to check the mobile version any time you update your website to make sure it still works.
4. Set Up an SSL
A secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate is another essential part of a user-friendly website. SSL certificates help encrypt data from you and your website visitors, which is great if you take payments on your site.
While not having an SSL may not make your site hard to use, it can cause problems. For example, people may not trust your site with their data, so you could use sales.
Luckily, you can get a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. If you have a SiteGround hosting account, you can set everything up in just a few steps so that your site is safe and easy to use.
5. Focus on Page Speed
Imagine having to wait seconds or even minutes for a website to load. When designing a user-friendly website, you need to make sure your site runs as fast as it can.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to use fewer images. If you need to use multiple images, use an image compressor to keep the file sizes from being too large.
The slimmer your site is, the easier it will be for it to run fast. If you aren’t sure what’s keeping your site slow, you can use a page speed test to determine the problem and increase your speed.
6. Include a CTA
Another one of the best characteristics of a user-friendly website is the existence of a call to action (CTA). A CTA can be a button or a link or something that tells the visitor what to do.
Sometimes, people won’t know where to go on your site, so you have to tell them. You can do this on your home page by including a big button that links to your sales page.
Or you might ask a few questions and include buttons for each question. That can be great if you sell products and services, so each visitor can go to where they need to go.
7. Link to Other Pages
Aside from your CTA, you can also make your website more user-friendly by adding internal links to other pages and posts. For example, maybe someone finds a blog post of yours on social media.
Throughout the blog post, you can link to relevant posts you’ve already published. You can even link to the right service or product, depending on the context of the post.
Then, visitors will know where to go next to find what interests them. And you can track which links get the most clicks to know where to include links in the future.
Not only will adding these links help users navigate the site, but it can help your SEO. Those links tell Google what each page is about and what your site is about, so you may get more traffic.
8. Don’t Forget Accessibility
You can do a lot of things to create a user-friendly website. However, nothing you do will matter if the site isn’t accessible to certain people, especially if those people make up a huge part of your audience.
An easy way to make your site accessible to people using screen readers is to use alt text. This is where you can enter text when editing an image, so the screen reader will know how to describe the image.
You can also make your site more accessible by using contrasting colors and easy-to-read fonts. Adding headings can also make your content easy for people to skim and find what they need.
A User-Friendly Website Done Right
Without a user-friendly website, you can lose a lot of potential customers. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a design expert to make your site easy to use.
Instead, add things like navigation bars and some links. Then, people will be able to find what they need, and you can grow your online presence.
Did you enjoy this article? Check out our business section for similar content.
