Enhance Your Website to Improve Functionality and Conversions
When learning how to enhance a website, it’s crucial you focus on a minimum of two essential factors: website usability and website performance. These are two factors that will determine just how successful your website is in search engines as well as consumers’ eyes.
Why Website Usability and Performance Matter
After your website is up and running, there are several things you’ll want to be monitoring to determine just how successful your website is. Important key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be monitoring include:
- Bounce rate
- Heatmaps (to determine how users navigate your site)
- Page load speeds
- Pages per session
- Pageviews
- Time on page
- Top exit pages
- Unique visitors
Why is it so vital you monitor these KPIs? It’s these factors that will tell you not only who’s visiting your website and how they are navigating it, but also how much time they spend on a single page, how many pages they visit per session, and how well your website is performing. These are all vital to your website’s success because it gives you a glimpse into your website’s overall usability and performance from your customer’s point of view.
When individuals visit your website, they expect ease of access and a pleasant experience. These visitors are looking for answers to an inquiry or a solution to a problem and they are looking for it now, meaning a website needs to be responsive, designed nicely, and quick-loading. Otherwise, they have no problem moving elsewhere.
For instance, 75% of consumers have stated that they judge a website’s credibility purely on its design aesthetics, while 53% of consumers visiting a website on their mobile site claim that they move on to a new website if the original doesn’t load within three seconds.
By monitoring your website’s KPIs regularly, you’ll be able to notice any changes in your website’s page speeds and be able to identify pages that are performing better than others. Once you’ve identified those that need improvement, it’s time to ask yourself how to enhance your website to improve its performance and usability.
How to Enhance Your Website in 4 Steps
If you’re scratching your head wondering how to improve your website’s usability or performance, then you’ll want to check out this four-step guide to help you enhance your website:
1. Increase Page Speed
If you’re looking to enhance your website, you want to optimize everything to help you increase your page’s loading speeds. When viewing on a desktop, the average page load speed is approximately 10.3 seconds to fully load, with a mobile web page taking 27.3 seconds to load fully. The slower a website runs, the more it impacts your business, including:
- Reducing page views
- Decreasing overall conversions
- Decreasing customer satisfaction rates
To remedy this situation, you’ll want to consider:
- Altering your web hosting/server type: Our friends at Crazy Egg did the heavy lifting for you by testing the best hosting options on the market today! To learn more about their top picks and how they scored them, check out their article here.
- Check your website’s plugins to see if any of them are bogging down your site
- Optimize images
- Optimize the site by removing data that you no longer need, including trashed posts/drafts and deleting unapproved/spam comments
2. Optimize for Mobile Users
Research shows that approximately 56% of organic search engine visits in the U.S. are made via mobile devices, which isn’t surprising when you consider that, in 2020, there were approximately 275.66 million smartphone users in the U.S.
That means to enhance your website usability for your visitors, you need to ensure that you are using a mobile-friendly site layout. That will guarantee that your visitors can maneuver through your site with ease, and they won’t lose out on any vital information.
3. Simplify Your Navigation
While you are enhancing your website’s usability, you’ll want to make sure you revisit your website’s primary navigation to ensure that it not only makes sense but that it is easy to use across all devices. Remember, the point of your navigation is to make it easy for users to get from point A to point B. If it requires them to go through all sorts of subheadings to do so, users will have no problem moving to another, less confusing site.
4. Share Informative, Yet Scannable Content
How you design your content will also play an essential role in your user’s experience. Sure, while long-form content is becoming increasingly popular, you still want to design the content in an easily scannable way, so your visitors can quickly scroll through and find what they need.
If they are forced to sit and read through walls of text that aren’t designed with any sort of content hierarchy, then they will lose interest and move on to a different site.
Enhance Your Website with The Help of CadenceSEO
While these four steps are some of the simplest ways to help you enhance your website and improve its overall usability and performance, they are tasks that can easily overwhelm your website design team, especially if they aren’t quite sure how to go about them.
Instead of leaving it up to chance, let CadenceSEO help you find out what’s working and what isn’t with your site.
Get your free website audit today.
