5 Ways to Improve Your Website Customer Experience

Your website is a major part of how your customer’s experience your business.  As more and more customers prefer to do business digitally, businesses need to pay close attention to the journey that your customers go through with your website.

Below are 5 ways that you can improve your website customer experience.

Check out the Customer Experience for Small Businesses course for customer experience tips, strategies, and resources. 

Unclutter Your Site

Have you ever been to a business that was completely cluttered with products, signage, and marketing material?  How did that experience make you feel?  If you are like me, you were probably anxious to get out of that environment.  Your website is no different.  It should be free from clutter and unnecessary components.   Customers should be able to quickly identify that they are looking for in an aesthetically appealing way.

One way that you can unclutter your website is to increase the use of white space. White space is essentially just empty space on your page.   White space allows you to direct your customers attention to exactly where you would like them to focus.   They don’t have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant information to find what they need which greatly improves their customer experience. A perfect example of this is Google’s homepage.  Their homepage is about as uncluttered as possible and their search (which is what customers are looking to find) is right in the middle of the screen.

Ensure Your Site Matches Your Brand

Branding is so important for your business because it builds trust with your customer. It helps your customers identify your business and feel comfortable doing business with you.   Everything that you put out in the universe should work to build your brand identify.   However, you would be surprised at the amount of businesses that have websites that don’t match their brand.   They don’t work to incorporate their brand elements into their website at the detriment of the website customer experience.

Luckily, you can easily ensure that your website is “on brand“.   For starters, your website should contain your logo, brand colors, and fonts.   It should also match the tone of your business. For example, if you have a fun and lively floral shop, your website should be fun and lively. If you own a funeral home, your website should be more subdued and professional.  The more that your website matches your brand, the better their experience will be and the more they will trust the information provided.

 

Responsive

Quick poll, are you reading this article on a mobile device or a computer? Consider this, mobile internet usage has grown 504% in daily media consumption since 2011. Furthermore, almost three quarters (72.6 percent) of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025.   So the moral of the story is that you need to ensure that your website is responsive to all screen sizes and orientations.

Having a mobile responsive website ensures that your website is easily readable without requiring zoom, there is adequate space for links and buttons (no fat finger issues allowed!), and there is no horizontal scrolling.  Not only does having a mobile responsive website improve you website customer experience, but it also ensures that your website is found in the first place.  Mobile responsiveness is one of the factors that Google uses to rank searches. Meaning if you don’t have a mobile responsive site, you will likely be pushed down in the search results.

Speed

Another important factor that Google uses is website speed. The reason that they weigh site speed so heavy is because it can make or break the website customer experience.  Humans are incredibly impatient. In fact, 40% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.  You have THREE seconds.

Google has a free site speed checker that you can see how your site is doing.  Google will then provide you with specific things you can do to improve your site speed.  You should take some time to use this speed and incorporate some of their recommendations. You should also reach out to your hosting service to see if they have any recommendations to improve your site speed.

Intuitive

Another thing you can do to improve your website customer experience is to make it as simple and intuitive as possible.  Having an intuitive website means that your customers know exactly what to do on your site. They know exactly where to go to get the information that they need or achieve whatever they are trying to achieve.

The first and most critical step in making your website intuitive is to really understand your customer.  What are they are looking for? What knowledge do they have? What is their experience level? The more detail that you get here the better.  Next, ask yourself what type of websites is your customer interacting with?  For example, if you are an online clothing boutique your customers are likely using sites like Amazon and Target.  Try to ensure that your website is mirroring those sites as much as possible.    If you are still wondering how to make your website more intuitive, do some usability testing.   Ask to watch a friend or family member (hopefully someone that matches your ideal customer’s demographics) navigate your website. You can even give them a list of tasks that yo would like them to accomplish.  Watch where they click, have them describe their experience, and see how quickly they can accomplish the task.   Try to take that feedback and make your website easier to navigate.

What questions do you have?  How steps have you taken to make your website easier to navigate?