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Providing a great user experience with your website is very important for running a successful eCommerce business. This is because it can make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for, increasing their chances of buying from you! In this article, we’re going to outline how you can improve your website’s user experience.

Let’s get started.

Make your website as accessible as possible

Making your website accessible is very important. Web accessibility refers to the different techniques and tools that can be used to ensure your website can be used by anyone. This includes those with certain impairments that may need additional accommodations. Here are a few different steps you can take to make your website more accessible:

• Add alt text to your images so they can be described by a screen reader
• Transcribe your videos
• Make sure people can access your content, no matter what device they are using

Making your website accessible is also important for legal reasons. If you’re in the United States, your website may be subject to the regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you’re not sure where to begin, check out the ADA Compliance Website Checker from Siteimprove. They can help you identify accessibility issues and quickly fix them.

Focus on making your menus intuitive

It should always be easy for website visitors to find exactly what they need on your website. If they can’t, they’ll be much more likely to leave your website without making a purchase. This means that you need to create a menu that is intuitive to the user, so it’s easy for them to understand and navigate.

There are a lot of different ways that you can help people navigate your website. Here are a few different suggestions:

• Break up your navigation menu by product category
• Have website visitors select the type of customer they are (for instance, student or teacher)
• Offer selections based on the problem the person is having

Let’s take a look at a few different websites with intuitive navigation menus for inspiration.

Abercrombie & Fitch, a men’s and women’s clothing retailer, has a very intuitive menu. Take a look at the menu in the image above. As you can see, their categories are divided up rather simply — first by larger categories, like men’s and women’s. Then, when a browser holds their mouse over one of these categories, they’ll see different selections like new arrivals, tops, pants, and so on. This strategy is common for clothing retailers, making it very intuitive to the user. This makes it very easy for people to find what they’re looking for, improving the customer experience.

If you sell a lot of products in different categories, consider setting up your menu in a similar way. This is a very natural and intuitive approach that can help your customers easily find what they’re looking for, improving their experience overall.

Robert Half, a staffing agency, has an intuitive website menu, as well. Their menu bar is divided up by the types of people that come to their website — namely, job seekers and business owners. By having such simple navigation, Robert Half can ensure that their website visitors quickly find what they’re looking for, improving their experience.

If you only serve a few different types of customers — for instance, teachers and students, employees and employers, and the like — consider breaking down your menu navigation so each group has a place to go. This will help people find what they’re looking for and improve their experience.

Provide value with high-quality and helpful content

Publishing great content on your website is very important for providing an excellent user experience. Content can help you build trust with website visitors, position your business as a brand authority, and ultimately lead to more sales!

To determine what kinds of content will help your customers, consider checking in with your customer service team. If there are questions or concerns they frequently get, you could create content that addresses them. This will help ensure that you’re creating things that provide value for your ideal customers.

You can also conduct some keyword research. Start by coming up with a list of words and phrases related to your business. Head to Google Keyword Planner and plug them into the tool. Google will then provide you with a list of keywords based on their competitiveness, or how hard they are to rank for, and their average monthly search volumes. Many of these keywords will work as content topics on their own! Be sure to choose keywords that aren’t too competitive, or you’ll risk not ranking for them at all.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that consistently publish great content for inspiration.

Musician Authority, a website specializing in helping people to learn how to play instruments, has a lot of top-notch content. They cover a variety of different topics, including easy songs for beginners, how to start a band, and more. Throughout each piece, Musician Authority links to other helpful, related topics in order to help musicians take the next step in their journey. By structuring their content like this, they can help improve a website visitor’s overall experience.

Consider setting up your blog content in a similar manner. If you have a series of articles on related topics, be sure to include links to them for further reading. This will help website visitors get the most out of your content and improve their experience.

At Loganix, we strive to have great content. This is important for an SEO fulfillment agency! Our local SEO checklist can help website visitors in a number of ways. It outlines how one can get their local business to rank on Google with technical SEO, Google My Business, link building, and more. It’s a very thorough guide that beginners and experts alike can learn from!

Because our target audience is full of digital marketers and small business owners, this guide is something they can refer back to time and time again. The article also links to a lot of other helpful articles on the Loganix website for further reading — providing these links helps us better educate our readers, improving their experience with our business overall.

When you create content, be sure that you include internal links to other helpful articles on your website. This will give people a reason to come back to you to learn more about topics in your niche, improving their experience with your company.

Do everything you can to ensure your website loads quickly

Having a fast-loading website is very important! So, it’s a good idea to keep your page load time under two seconds. In fact, 57% of people leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load which means, if your website is too slow, you’ll risk people landing on it and then leaving quickly.

Here are a few different ways you can ensure your website loads faster:

• Compress your images to reduce your image file size
• Seek out and remove any dead links using your content management system
• Limit the number of plugins your website uses

You can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to determine how fast your website loads and how you can improve it.

Make sure it’s incredibly easy to hire or buy from you

Making it easy for prospective customers to take the next step with your business is very important for improving their user experience. You want website visitors to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, as it will make their overall experience smoother, increasing their likelihood of making a purchase.

Here are a couple of different ways you can make it easy for people to move forward in the buying process on your website:

• Have clear and direct calls to action, or CTAs, that tell the user where they should click to take the next step with your business.
• Offer a sophisticated search tool that takes people directly to the products or services they need.
• Have your contact information clearly visible. This will make it easy for website visitors to get in touch with questions or concerns.

For inspiration, let’s take a look at a few examples of businesses that make it easy to take the next step with them. This provides a great user experience for their customers.

RMIT Online, an online university based in Australia, makes it very easy for prospective students to take the next step on the page for their business analytics graduate program. As you can see in the image above, users can simply plug in their name and the program they’re interested in to download a brochure. Because the process is straightforward and simple, RMIT Online helps to guide their website visitors through the process smoothly. A smooth process like this is an important part of providing a positive user experience

Make sure that it’s easy for customers to take the next step with your business. If you are offering a resource, like an eBook or brochure, be sure to only require users to give you a small amount of information to access it. This will make it more likely that people will give you their contact information and move through the buying process. When taking the next step is easy for website visitors, they’re likely to have a better overall experience.

Venngage, an online infographic maker, also makes it easy for people to take the next step on their templates page. As you can see above, users can quickly find the perfect template for their needs based on what layout or category they are interested in. There are options for infographics, reports, business cards, and more. To start working on their chosen template, a user just has to click. This makes it easy for people to get started with Venngage, leading to customers that are happy with their selection.

Make sure it’s easy for your customers to find their preferred products on your website, as Venngage has. This will help guide your customers through your website smoothly and help encourage them to make a decision.

Summary

Providing a great user experience can help you build trust with your customers and lead to more sales! In this article, we outlined how you can improve your website’s user experience with great content, a fast load speed, and more.

Need more help? Check out the Engine Templates blog. They have articles on WordPress, social media plugins, and more!

ET Digital Team

We’re a Digital Team from EngineTemplate with 5 content experts. Our team has 5 years exp in open source Joomla and WordPress, we make daily blogs and build useful resources for everyone who is having issues with open source while using it.