10 Tips to Make your Website User-Friendly

As it turns out, first impressions do matter. 

Studies have shown that it takes less than one half of one second for someone to form a first impression about your website!  

After that person has made the initial choice to stay on your website, it is crucial to make sure that they want to stay there. That initial eye-catching website may hook them but if customers can’t easily find the items that they’re looking for, they will look somewhere else. 

The easiest way to keep customers on your page is to create an intuitive user-friendly website.

In the fast-paced culture that we live in, convenience and ease of use are essential to keep our attention. 

Here are 10 simple tips to make your website user-friendly 

1. Design your website with your grandparents in mind

You probably know your website and products like the back of your hand, but what seems intuitive and clear to you may seem like a maze to everyone else. 

When designing your site, ask yourself “Could my grandparents use, easily navigate, and understand this site?” (Don’t bother asking your kids, as we all know they can probably use it better than you can!). 

Ensure that it’s easy for customers find, compare, and purchase your products.

2. Make it easy on the eyes

Create a consistent clean look across your entire website. The best way to do this is to stick with a simple monotone color scheme. 

Keeping the background of your site clean, uniform, and free of distractions will highlight your wonderful products.

When choosing font colors, keep in mind that some colors may be more difficult for people to see than others, especially when the background color is too similar. Yeah, that sky blue colored font is pretty but on a white background it will be way too hard to read! Instead, use high contrast colors.

As for the font type, don’t get too fancy! You made your website to feature your products not that cool font that you found on Pinterest.

Use a combination of high quality images of your product (make sure to have close ups of any details) and lifestyle pictures of your product in use. Customers want to see how that beautiful necklace they just bought from you is going to look around someone’s neck.

3. Empty white space is not a bad thing

You might think that having flashy exciting designs filling up your website will entice people and keep their attention. 

Well, it might for a second but that will quickly turn in to overstimulation and a major distraction for most users!

Studies have shown that having empty whitespace is actually more effective in keeping users focused on your products.

Having clean white space will prevent customers from feeling overwhelmed and help them to stay focused and engaged. 

  4.  Less is more

Have you ever been on a website and clicked on a menu, which leads you to another menu, then another and another?  Eventually, you’re so deep in the rabbit hole that you’re not sure where you are or how to get back to where you started!

Minimize the amount of sub-menus and paths to navigate around your site. Too many options is overwhelming and can cause anxiety for shoppers, so in this case, you’ll benefit from simplicity. 

5. Scan, skim, glance, gloss over… 

How often do you really read all of the text on a page? Are you really even reading this word for word right now? 

More often than not, people tend to quickly skim websites quickly rather than fully reading them.

Overcomplicating your text with too many details or being too wordy will deter customers. 

Keep it simple and easy to digest. Try using bullet points, subheadings, or bold text to highlight keywords.

6. Don’t make customers search for the search bar

When someone knows specifically what they’re looking for, they don’t want to waste time digging around your website to find it.

Make your search bar easy to find and consider adding filter options to help customers narrow down their search.

7. “Help me, please” 

Can’t find what you are looking for? Need to return something? Have a question or concern? 

Customer service is key, especially for an ecommerce company where there is no face-to-face interaction. To keep your customer service on point, customers must be able to easily find contact information. Have an obvious “contact” button in your menu where they can reach out with questions and comments. 

8. Make buying your product hassle free

It may seem like a no-brainer, but, the easiest thing to find on your website should be the “buy now”, “add to cart”, or “enroll me now” buttons. 

Making these “call to action” buttons very obvious encourages people to buy your product without hesitation. 

If it’s confusing or too much of a hassle to actually purchase your products, people will find what they want somewhere else. 

9. Time is the new high value currency

There is nothing worse than watching the load bar on your browser spin endlessly. 

We live in a fast paced world where 53% of users abandon a website if they have to wait longer than just three seconds for a page to load, according to a study done by Google. 

There are a variety of ways to decrease your load time including image optimization, browser caching, choice of web host, and minimizing pop ups.  

10. Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, Apple, Android, Safari, Chrome… Browser and device compatibility are key

With so many ways out there to access the Internet, it is crucial that your website functions flawlessly on a variety of platforms and devices. 

View your site on different browsers such as Safari, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer to ensure that it displays correctly and that all links work properly. 

Not only should you view your website on various browser platforms, but also be sure demo it on different screens and devices.  Screen resolution, color capability, and size all affect how your website will display and function. 

With 58% of website visits coming from mobile devices, it is imperative that your website be mobile friendly.  Make sure that it’s just as easy to view and purchase items from your phone as it is from your desktop computer.

These 10 tips will not only keep customers on your website, but it will keep them coming back!  

Just remember, when in doubt make your website simple, intuitive, concise and clear.