You hear a lot about “UX,” or “user experience,” along with terms like “conversion” and “search engine optimization.” If online marketing isn’t your specialization and you entrust this all to others – whether in-house or third-party – all of these terms can be difficult to wrap your head around, and you have so much else to think about when running your business. However, your users’ online experience can’t be ignored. Experience Dynamics reports 79 percent of users will leave a site for another similar one to complete their intended task if the website is not optimized. Regularly checking to see if your website’s UX is optimized is a must for any successful business.
Ask for Feedback
The best way to gauge how your website fares with both new and repeat visitors is to ask them. Unfortunately, you only have a few seconds to catch a new visitor’s attention, and if they’re not happy, they’re unlikely to visit again or bother to let you know. However, if you incentivize the feedback, you’re more likely to get answers. Ask people via social media to complete a survey about their experience with your website and offer coupons, a free item or a chance to win a bigger prize for completing the survey. You might also consider a pop-up window that appears when a user attempts to click away from the site, but that has the potential of annoying visitors already annoyed with your site, who might leave even worse feedback and skew the results.
Check Mobilization
SkyHook reports that 73 percent of consumers visiting a site do so with mobile devices, and yet only 20 percent of company websites are completely optimized for mobile use. It’s easy to check how well your website performs on a mobile device; simply access it yourself. Click on every possible link you can and see if the website doesn’t fit the screen or if the menus are difficult to navigate on this smaller screen. Ask a professional website development company to improve your company’s mobile website experience or even to develop an app that will make shopping online far more convenient for your mobile consumer.
Analyze Traffic
Examine the number of visitors who come to your website’s landing page and see how many are converted to actual sales by comparing that with your sales figures. Also pay attention to things such as how the visitors came to your website in the first place (search terms, social media, website referrals) and how many pages they look at while they’re there. It’s common for there to be more visitors to the initial page than there are people who browse other pages and people who buy from you, but if your UX is truly optimized, these statistics shouldn’t be drastically different. Hire a traffic analysis expert to help you figure out where the sharp drop in statistics is occurring if need be.
Even if you only offer services or products offline, your website still needs to provide users with an easy way to contact you and an enjoyable experience. Even if your mind is full of endless tasks on your to-do list, it’s a mistake to push your website’s optimization to the wayside. If you found out that almost eight in ten of the people who walked through your front door left without buying anything because they were unhappy with their experience, you’d pay attention. If that many people don’t like your website, it’s basically the same thing.
More to read
- 3 Things to Consider When Optimizing Your Website
- Overhauling an Outdated Company Website
- Using Search Engine Optimization to Your Advantage
- Website Features that Will Keep First-Time Visitors Engaged
- Making Your Site Stand Out in the Digital Age
- The Best Ways to Gauge Your Website’s User Experience
- Cheap Web Design