Your website is often the first point of contact for potential customers with your business, product or service offering. Knowing how important first impressions are, having a website and landing pages with a fantastic UX is a must. Simply put, you not only need to focus on designing an experience that makes users want to stay, but also that converts them into customers.
Why is optimized landing so important?
Your website is the public face of your company, especially nowadays when the Internet accounts for a significant portion of sales for many companies. A company that does not have a website that is nicely designed, easy to navigate, and intuitive, doesn’t get taken as seriously and can be perceived as unreliable.
Most consumers’ purchasing decisions are now made from the comfort of their own homes, while sitting on the couch or in bed. It’s not unlikely that your potential customers are going through a large number of websites, including those of your competitors, trying to find the ideal product or service to meet their needs. You can’t rely on luck to attract users any longer. Your website must stand out, and it is your responsibility it provides an outstanding customer experience.
10 things to consider when optimizing your website and landing pages
When it comes to website performance and user experience, minor tweaks can result in significant improvements and boost conversions. We’ve compiled a list of ten guidelines to consider when analyzing your website’s UX.
1. Don’t make your clients look for information.
All of the information presented on your website should be accessible with minimal effort. Your landing page needs to be as simple as possible, intuitive, and above all, easy to navigate.
Remember that 50% of all leads are lost because users can’t find the information they need. To guarantee you don’t miss out on those leads, work on refining your information architecture and paying attention to how your material is categorized and structured. You are now probably thinking: how can I do that?
To ensure that your users are not confused by your website’s information architecture, you should learn about their expectations and have a clear understanding of how they think. “Information architecture – IA” refers to the way you organize and structure all of the content on your website, app, or other digital platform. The basic representation of it is usually your website’s navigation menu.
Luckily, there are two great methods that can help you easily improve your IA and make sure users don’t get lost browsing through your pages.
Card Sorting
Card sorting is a research technique that allows you to learn how people think about and categorize material on your website. Simply put, it allows you to figure out how to organize and identify your information so that it makes sense to your users and enhances your website’s UX. With an online Card Sorting tool, you can design a card sorting study in minutes.
Tree Testing
Tree testing is a technique for determining how easy it is for visitors to find information on your website. It tells you exactly where users are if they get lost. It’s a popular way for evaluating information architecture’s effectiveness and usability. It’s basically reversed card sorting, and it’s used to double-check the findings through the card sorting exercise. We recommend using an online Tree Testing tool to get the most out of your study.
2. Avoid the horizontal scroll
Horizontal scrolling, nine times out of ten, will do more harm than good to your landing page. People aren’t used to it, and it takes a lot more effort than the vertical version. Users can’t predict what information they’ll obtain if they click on the arrow, so they frequently ignore it. Horizontal scrolling is one of the top 10 online design faults of 2002, according to Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s leading user experience advocates, and it may still be observed today. Save your time and trust us on this one, horizontal scrolling will not benefit you in any way.
3. You don’t need all that text
Users will be unable to find what they are searching for if your landing page is packed with text. They’ll simply leave and try their luck somewhere else (probably at your competitors’ websites). Remember to keep everything you want to say short and sweet.
A great example from Mailchimp. Short text, straight to the point with a clear CTA.
4. Make sure your website and landing pages are quick to load
What is the average loading time of your website and landing pages? We’ve all experienced the frustration one gets after dealing with a slow website. Your landing page should ideally load in 0-2 seconds, but in the worst-case it should be no more than four seconds. if it doesn’t load within that time frame, this is something you should work to improve.
According to Portent’s 2019 research on the Impact of Site Speed on Your Conversion Rate:
“When pages load in less than 1 second, the average conversion rate is almost 32%. At a 1-second load time, the conversion rate already drops to 20%. At 2 seconds, the conversion rate begins to level off at 12-13% and reaches its lowest at a 5-second load time.”
Here is what the research found:
- The optimal loading time for the best conversion rates is 0-4 seconds
- The first 5 seconds of page load time have the biggest impact on the website’s conversions
- With every additional second of loading time your conversions drop by an average of 4.42%
The dependence of loading time on site desertion rate that you can see above, demonstrates that a website’s loading time is critical.
Compressing your photos before uploading them to the page is a great way to speed up your website. You can also use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to get suggestions on how to optimize the load time of your website – all you have to do is enter your URL.
5. Create responsive layouts
If your website isn’t responsive, you should prioritize fixing this. Modern online customers expect their content to be presented in an easy-to-use format that allows them to locate what they’re looking for quickly. Responsiveness is no longer a nice-to-have, but an important must have.
On mobile devices, you don’t want your website to look like the one above in the second example. Ensure that all of the layout components are responsive.
Double check that your website and landing pages work perfectly in all browsers and maintain their integrity.
6. Never underestimate the power of a good CTA
A call-to-action button is an important part of any landing page. It will inform your user of the next steps. Without a CTA, the user may become confused, unsure of what to do next, and abandon the page before completing your objective.
7. Keep up with the trends
Some things, such as white space and minimalism, will never go out of style. However, it is occasionally beneficial to add something new. The following are some of the things that will be popular in 2022:
- Neomorphism
- Personalization
- 3D graphics and animations
- Crazy typography
8. Analyze the user
The basic minimum today is to monitor your users using a website analytics software like Google Analytics. You should also keep an eye on the availability and performance of your website. It will enable you to ensure that your website is constantly up and running. Monitor the amount of visitors that come to your website, the bounce rate, the amount of time spent on landing pages, and so on. Keep an eye out for any sudden changes or odd behavior that could indicate a bug or other issue with your website that needs to be addressed.
Session recording is something we recommend for every website owner. It will allow you to repeat your customer’s entire website experience as a video, as well as detect faults and difficulties that your visitors encounter. UXtweak’s Session Recording Tool additionally collects and indexes every user interaction, making it searchable with advanced filters. You’ll save a lot of time when it comes to analyzing the data you’ve collected.
9. Heatmap analysis is a must
Are your clients clicking on non-clickable elements? What do they concentrate their attention on? What draws people to your website in the first place? Are they responding to your call to actions? Is it even possible for them to find it if they scroll down far enough?
Heatmaps can help you find the answers to these questions and many more. Heatmaps are a quick and easy way to examine where your users click, how far down the page they scroll, and where their cursor is placed. Click, Scroll, Move, and Tap Heatmaps can be generated at any time using an online session recording tool.
10. Test, test and test again
This cannot be emphasized enough. Never overlook the importance of usability testing. Testing will assist you in determining what works and what doesn’t.
Using an unmoderated website usability testing tool is an excellent approach to rapidly and effectively assess the usability of your website. Unmoderated online testing solutions offer a cost-effective way to test your website with real people and receive relevant insights and quality feedback. You can offer participants a real task to do on your site with unmoderated testing, and then evaluate if they were successful while completing it or what prevented them from doing so.
Example of usability testing of e-shop with UXtweak Website Usability Testing tool.
Get an edge over your competitors
Good user experience is now more important than ever. Fifty percent of people tend to form their opinion about a business based on their first impression of their website. Optimize your landing pages for the digital world using these tricks and watch your conversions boost like never before.
The opinions expressed here by Guest Contributors are their own, not those of Rise Marketing.