The ultimate goal of your website is to attract and convert your website visitors into clients or customers. Today, I'm sharing 4 ways that you can improve website user experience and keep them on your website longer.
1. Have a Clear Path to Contact
You'd be surprised how many websites have contact info that is hard to find! Nothing is more frustrating than trying to reach out to someone that you are interested in working with and not finding their contact info. Am I right?
It's important to have a link or button in your menu for this purpose, and I recommend naming it ‘Contact' vs ‘Chat with Me', ‘Get Started', etc. Make it super clear and easy for them to reach out to you.
Additionally, you can integrate a 3rd party form like Dubsado or Honeybook. You can also give them further control by adding a calendar service that allows them to choose a time/date to connect with you. I recommend checking out Calendly or Acuity for this.
Along with having a working form to fill out (yes, double check that your contact form is working properly!), I also highly recommend having your direct email address listed on the contact page as well. List your office hours and optionally, an address and phone number.
2. Give Free Value
It's nice to have an opt-in to grow your email list, but you also want to offer free value to your audience. A blog or podcast is perfect for doing this, and it helps build trust with your audience. By educating and offering advice to your audience, it shows that you aren't just there to ask, ask, ask. Blow them away with your knowledge and think of creative ways to help them without asking them to hand over personal information or money.
By offering up valuable information for free, it encourages visitors to stay longer and get to know you and your business. Even if now is not the best time for them to work with you, they will remember the value they received by visiting your website and will be encouraged to come back again and again.
3. Limit Popups
You already know what I'm going to say about this one, because you've thought it yourself at least 100 times. Popups can be intrusive, annoying, and can actually deter people from browsing your website. There is nothing more annoying than coming to a website for information that you are excited about and getting bombarded with popup after popup. It is true that popups can increase signups, but it can also increase your bounce rate if it gets to be too much.
However, there are great things about having one, too. With a popup box you can capture email addresses, announce new products, share sales or coupon codes, and more!
If you want to add a popup on your website, I would limit it to just one and make sure that it can easily be dismissed with an icon or button. I also recommend no popups on mobile (and so does google)!
4. Optimize for Site Speed
Large images and videos are the most common culprit for slowing down your website. By optimizing these, your website will load faster and keep your visitors around longer.
The goal is for your website to load in less than 2-3 seconds. As page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 32%.
Another thing that slows a lot of website down is having too many plugins. While these plugins can add functionality to your website, you don't want them to increase your website load time. I recommend keeping plugins at a minimum when at all possible.
Ready to test your website speed? Here you go!
I hope this list was helpful, and that it gives you some ideas for improving your website. As always, I'd love to support you in creating the perfect online home for your business.
