Despite so much awareness and technological advancement, business owners are not paying much heed to usability. Necessary for the overall success of websites, good usability improves search engine ranks, increases sales and revenues. That's why, business owners must not ignore usability.
The user-friendliness of your website also sets it apart from your competitors.It also helps your visitors for easily going through the website. Owing to all of these reasons, you must ensure that your website is user-friendly.
Curious about how to check the user-friendliness of your website? Take a look at these essential parameters and enhance your website for getting more customers, traction and revenues:
Accessibility to Diverse Users
Your users can be elderly, disable and even blind. Take them into account and make sure that you have screen-readers in place for them. You just need to follow the simple 508 website accessibility guidelines to let your website reach its larger and diverse set of users.
Compatibility with Mobile
The world has gone mobile. Your website needs to be more mobile-friendly to rise up the usability ranks. Use Google's mobile tester to check how your website appears on mobile. These days, you can also create your mobile website for free by using website builders.
Scannability of Content
Your visitors do not wait to read every word of the content that you have on your website. Instead, they wish to easily scan through it. Make it easy for them by highlighting and rightly placing the copy on it. Make the right use of paragraphs, descriptions, bullet points and more to format your content in a way which helps visitors easily scan through them.
Streamlined Information Architecture
Presenting all the information in a systematic manner is important to improve the usability of your website. As website these days have a whole range of information which needs to reach the right audience, you need to improve its information architecture. Think as a user and plan your categories, website sections in a proper manner.
Consistent Browser Experience
Avoiding browsing consistency can badly impact the performance of your website. Even global companies are ignoring such an important aspect of usability of their website. This not only affects their branding but also harms its user-friendliness. Different browser will interpret your website in different ways. Therefore, it is necessary to make your website's UX consistent across them. Invest in making sure that your website behaves and looks similar across Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. This will help make your website feel more professional and up to the mark.
Optimum Time for Loading
Imagine visiting a website that takes hours to load. Feels like a nightmare, right? Spare your visitors from that trouble by ensuring that your website loads within the first 4-6 seconds. Use tools like Pingdom to ensure increase the speed of your website and also improve it. Avoid using third-party plugins and widgets as they could impact the loading times.
Smooth Navigation
First of all, make sure that the navigation of your website is clutter-free. Keep it minimal and simple to go through. Good navigation is one of the most critical factors which make your website user-friendly. Create a good search feature, provide detailed header and footer, invest time in building good internal linking to streamline navigation and usability.
Enhance Handling of Errors
Some of the most user-friendly websites ensure that their errors are managed with proper descriptions. To make your website more user-friendly ensure that it shows right messages for the right errors at the right time. By doing so, your website will not only become robust but will remain bug-free as well.
Error-Free Code and Valid Mark-Up
If your website follows all the benchmarks and best-practices then it becomes more secure and user-friendly. It will also ensure that your website loads in less time across various websites. At the back end, this also helps you in tracking the actual problems, errors if you have ensured to make it optimum early on.
Complementing Colour Palette
Always ensure that your website has a contrasting colour scheme. The background and the text should strike the right balance. For example, if the background is white in colour then have black text to make your content look more clear. Using wrong colours can visually overwhelm users and impact its usability.
Your website's usability is critical for its success. Better usability improves its search ranks, brings in more visitors. Keep these factors in mind to make your website user-friendly and accelerate your business like never before.
