The Fundamentals for Optimal Website UX

Fundamentals for Optimal Website UX

Having a website is the basic need of every business; once you have an online presence, you can start building a community. A loyal online community provides a great return on investment as they are the first ones to buy your new products or services.

Each brand looks forward to engaging with its online community whether it is through social media, website, or newsletter.

While other things in this framework can be unstable as social media accounts can get banned but a website is something that no one can take away from you.

If you are selling products or services just through social media, this is a good enough reason to create a website that provides a great user experience.

Your website is about your business, but it needs to be designed keeping the customers in mind. That’s where user experience comes in. You have to introduce your website to the customer in a manner that will make the customer care.

Once the customer starts to care about the content on your site, they will be engaged and will browse further.
However, the ultimate goal is to make them perform certain actions like making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter.

Website user experience (UX) is how users interact with a website to perform tasks. Your main goal should be that the user experience is unique and simple. Someone who visits your site should be able to complete the ideal actions with a few steps and without any hiccups.

The UX and the UI of a website are terms that are used interchangeably, but the difference is critical in understanding the components of a well-made website. UX focuses on the experience that a user has while using your website. Whereas, the UI is about the visual layout of the website.

The UX is all about how a user may feel while using your website and there are many aspects related to it and why they may feel that way. A few factors are necessary for having an optimal UX for your site.

1. Understanding the user journey

You need to understand the user journey so that you can gain insight into how to get them to make the final steps. A user journey map tracks everything your user does on your website and how they interact with it.

You can also know where a visitor got to know your website from and for how long they browsed it. With the help of a user journey map, you can understand the intent of each user who visits your site.

If the intent of the user differs from the expected intent, then you should make changes to the website accordingly. If your website has a good UX, your site’s visitors will click on the CTAs and scroll through the website’s content.

2. Create a sitemap

A sitemap lists all the pages that exist on a site and creates hierarchical relationships among them. Creating a sitemap is essential for SEO as it lets search engines understand your site in a better manner. All the pages on your site should be easy to find which will help SEO.

3. Optimize your site’s speed and performance

Your site should load quickly so that visitors can start consuming the content instantly.

If a customer finds your website, but it takes too long to load the information that they wanted to view. They will find it somewhere else. Site speed and performance are key factors in user experience and search engine optimization too.

Google updates its core web vitals algorithm in 2021 and that is why the site’s speed is important to rank well. The quality of the experience that a user has on your site directly affects your search engine rankings.

Since 2021, Google has started to place more emphasis on the user experience. The Core Web Vitals focuses on a few factors.

• Loading: The time it takes for your site to fully load
• Interactivity: The amount of time it takes for an action to be completed after it was initiated.
• Visual stability: The stability of the page as the site’s elements load.

If you focus on all three aspects of your website, you will be able to see where your site is falling behind. Improve the factors that are not performing well and your site ranking will improve. It will also be easier for the users to browse your site after that.

Make your design and content simplistic

Users want a website that is not only easy to use but they also want a website that has content that is easy to digest. Your site’s visitors come to the site with an intent.

They know what they want from the search and it is your goal to ensure that they find that on your site. Create elements in the site that will smoothly move the visitors from point A to point B.

Content is an important part of creating a good user experience. If the content on your site is engaging, visitors will have a better experience. All the content you publish on your website should be clear, engaging, and plagiarism-free.

The content and the design of the website should have the same rhythm, if those two are not in sync, something about the website will feel odd.

A website’s front-end design brings the entire site to life! It can be used to communicate with the visitor what the site is all about! Visual elements need to be eye-catching but they should not overload you.

That’s why many people prefer to go for a design that is minimalistic. Your site’s elements should be visually appealing but they should also be able to complete their functions.

This creates a great harmony between design and functionality. Because of this, your users will be hooked to your site and the site will not have any problem in gaining new regular visitors.

Work within website accessibility standards

Website accessibility standards ensure that all different types of individuals can access and use your website. This includes people who speak a different language or someone with a disability. Some of your users may access your website with the help of screen reading software.

The software reads the portion of the website to them if they have any visual disability. To ensure that this works your HTML documents should have language attributes and each image should have alt text.

Alt texts are used to describe an image, this way people with visual impairment will get to know what the image is about. Your user can be anybody it is not necessarily an english-speaking person who lives without any disabilities. To improve the UX you should find ways to improve the accessibility of your website.

Responsive design

A responsive website is a site that is compatible with different devices and browsers. To ensure that your website provides optimal UX, you should implement a responsive design during the development phase.

This ensures that the website can function in all the different screen resolutions. Otherwise, if a site is designed for a laptop, will look completely different on a phone or on another device.

You have to ensure that your site can function optimally on any browser or device. Your users will be annoyed if they can only access your site through a laptop but not mobile or vice versa. If people are hooked to your site, they will be using it on different devices and browsers.

Without responsive design, a user may have to scroll much more to find out what they are looking for which ultimately ruins the user experience.

Most people online use mobile to look out for websites, that’s why it is essential to know that your website’s elements and screen resolution are mobile-friendly..

By using a responsive design model, you are increasing your customer base and also ensuring that whoever loads your website has a great time.