Within five seconds of landing on your website, can your visitors determine what your
company does? Could users easily navigate to the blog if they need to? Is the layout of your
pricing easy to understand? Does your website have a low bounce rate?
If you're finding yourself answering ‘no’ to these questions, it might be time to take a
hard look at the way you’ve been designing and optimizing your website.
A website truly excels when it has a design that feeds into your website's user experience,
functionality, and appropriately complements your content.
It can be super easy to neglect these things, thinking these updates are the lowest
thing to worry about on your totem pole of website priorities, but a successful website has
both high performing content and an exceptional user experience needs to have balance.
Poorly optimized website performance is overwhelmed with a number of issues
including slow loading times, being non-user friendly, user incompatibilities, and so on. These
issues show that your website is not just losing conversion on the website, but in the future,
this loss is magnified to worsen site results. The final impact – lots of potentials leads down
the drain because of a few seconds difference.
Loading time is the total time taken to present your website in front of visitors. So, a
website taking more time to show up for users will tend to lose its visitors and conversions
resulting in a high bounce rate. Therefore, Boosting the website performance from an SEO
perspective enables you to achieve new benchmarks in the journey of customer acquisition.
Wondering how to improve? If you want to better your website performance and
loading speed with improved user-friendliness for the users, you should look at what Google
recommends.
There may be plenty of reasons for your poor website performance, consider:
➢ heavy HTML, CSS, JAVA codes.
➢ Unoptimized images or videos or video links in your content.
➢ Redirects
➢ Improper cache handling
➢ Server hosting
➢ Increased blocking time
➢ More time to interact – FCP, FID, LCP
➢ Unused or hulking Plugins
Below are important things to do in order to optimize your website;
❖ HAVE A PLAN
Now that you’ve acknowledged that your site likely needs some improvements, it's time
to work your way backward and create a plan detailing how you’ll tackle them.
Start by mapping out your customer journey from the first time someone visits your website
to the moment they become a customer.
When doing this, think about which pages are they going to view, what content are they
going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on. Understanding this will help you
design a site that actually helps nurture leads through the sales funnel.
❖ REMOVE DISTRACTIONS AND REDUCE FRICTION
Certain elements on your website are going to detract from the value and message you're
trying to convey. Complicated animations, content that’s too long, and “stocky” website
images are just a few examples.
With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to make it
abundantly clear what your user will learn on the page they're viewing and your design must
not detract from this.
This starts with making sure you have consistent brand guidelines you can work off.
This should detail your font styles, colors, imagery, iconography, and logo usage.
Without this, it’s easy for brands to struggle when designing pages. You’ll likely start to see
arbitrary colors and varying font styles and sizes used, which in turn, can distract from your
message or create visual confusion for people trying to convert.
It’s also important to avoid too many on-page animations or interactions. If you're
scrolling through a page and see every button pulsing or a section of icons each with their
own animation, it can feel overwhelming and distract them from reading what's on the page.
❖ CLEAN UP EXCESS PLUGINS
Excess of plugins can make your activity harder and more confounded than it should be.
This can back off your website’s stacking speed and furthermore, it can accidentally give
security gaps where people can abuse it to get access to the backend of your website. If you
have some plugins installed that you no longer use or find unessential, you should deactivate
and uninstall them.
❖ OPTIMIZE YOUR IMAGES
The significance of images in connecting clients to your items has been proven. If your
website takes over 3 seconds to load, clients are bound to desert it which will radically expand
your bounce rate and in the long run, it will influence your conversions. Image optimization
enhances Page load speed, SEO ranking, boost conversations, enhance user engagement.
❖ OPTIMIZE YOUR DATABASE
Optimizing your MySQL database tables is one method for making enhancements to your
website. This is something you ought to do all the time, particularly if you use WordPress or
some different CMS that depends a lot on database utilization.
❖ MOBILE FRIENDLY AND RESPONSIVE
Mobile Friendly Website
There really is no argument here. Of course, you want several things in place to
improve your website design. But no matter what anyone tells you, a mobile friendly and
responsive website should be at the top of your website design tips list.
Having a website that is not mobile friendly or responsive hurts you in several different
ways. Not only does Google drop you in rankings (started in 2015) and searches, but you
lose visitors anyway because they have a hard time looking at your content in certain formats.
While responsive and mobile friendly work together to create a streamlined user
experience, they are actually two different things.
➢ Mobile Friendly: Your website can be viewed properly on any mobile device and looks
correct on all phones and tablets.
➢ Responsive: Your website responds to screen size, browser choice and displays
properly no matter what those are.
More than likely you have created a responsive and mobile friendly website by now. If you
use WordPress or another popular platform for your website then you are definitely good to go.
However, if for some reason your site is not mobile friendly and responsive, this is the
first website design tip you should tackle to improve the overall look, feel and functionality.
❖ SIMPLE NAVIGATION
Simple Navigation
Look at this from a user’s perspective. How often do you visit a website and find the
navigation is cloudy and muddled? Is it difficult to get around the site? Are menus, links and
other information displayed all over the place?
It is important that you simplify the navigation for users. Even if you have a lot of
content and need to map it out differently, simple navigation will give you a traffic spike
almost immediately.
Here are a few things to remember when simplifying website navigation. These can be
followed loosely but following them closely will help.
➢ No more than 7 items in your main menu (this does not include the dropdown
portions).
➢ Users should be able to access any point of the site from any other area within 3 clicks
or less. It’s better to strive for two clicks, though.
➢ Be as descriptive as possible with your labels and links.
➢ Keep your navigation bar fixed.
