Ecommerce websites have become the most powerful tool for entrepreneurs. It is open to welcome the customers at any day and anytime. Unlike conventional brick-and-mortar stores, it doesn’t need sales staff, an accountant, or a store manager, to run the errands. A small eCommerce can even be handled by the entrepreneur alone, who will have the total share of all the profits.
But wait…when will the profit generate? When a store sells its products to customers, right? The higher the profits an entrepreneur wants, the more they must keep their customers happy and improve the user experience.
If a website fails to provide a smooth user experience to its customers, it cannot survive in the cutthroat online world. One mistake, and you will lose your customers to your competitors.
It has become imperative to make your website attractive and convenient for your customers. The arena of the digital world is changing rapidly. New technology, features, and elements are integrated with the website to facilitate the customers to shop with more convenience without any hassle.
Now, you don’t have to spend a fortune to reconstruct or redesign your website, no. In today’s article, we will discuss and share 12 simple tips that will answer your queries of how to optimize your eCommerce website and improve the user experience for customers.
Table of Contents
12 Simple Tactics To Improve Your Website’s User Experience
1. Use White Space
White space is a necessary element to improve a user’s experience on your website. The text surrounded by white space is readable and can be easily comprehended. Moreover, the audience focuses well when there is adequate white space around text or images.
The majority of the giant eCommerce stores, such as Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, have a white background on their website. It gives a fresh, neat, and professional look to their websites.
Provide proper spacing between each image, paragraphs, and other elements of your website. Failure to provide adequate space will result in a cluttered website and difficulties for customers to read the content, view the pictures, and find their desired articles.
On the other hand, using too much white space on your website will make it look sparse and divert your customers’ attention from the CTAs. Keep an optimum amount of space on your website to make it easy for your customers to look at the products without getting distracted.
2. Optimise Page Speed
Nothing is more frustrating for an online user than a slow-loading website. There are millions of websites in the world. If yours takes longer to load, users will exit your website and go to another to find their desired products or content.
More than 40% of the users abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
A slow-loading website also affects the ranking of the website. The high bounce rate sends a negative signal to the search engine, and it impedes the website to rank higher on the result pages.
The ideal time for a website to load is between 1 and 2 seconds. Do not lose the traffic that comes to your website due to the slow speed of your website.
Your website can have a slower speed because of high-resolution images, videos, sliders, unnecessary elements, and heavy plugins. To optimize the site’s speed, compress the code files and images. Remove the videos and embed them from YouTube or Vimeo. Moreover, remove the plugins that you have not used in a long time. Clean the excess load on your website to make it load faster for your users.
3. Select Proper Colours And Fonts
Entrepreneurs want to make their website fancy by selecting multiple colours rather than sticking to a few colours for their website. Using too many colours on your website makes it look cluttered, diverts your users’ attention, and makes it uneasy for them to engage on your website.
Remember, the simple rule of thumb for selecting your website’s colours; aim for a good contrast. It makes it easier for people to read the text and distinguish the CTAs from the background. The most common example of website colour is white background and black font colour. It gives a simple, neat, and professional look to the website.
Fonts are an essential thing to consider. If a user doesn’t understand what you have written on your website, he will exit your website in a matter of a few seconds. He won’t be patient enough to zoom the text to read and comprehend it. Do not select thin, cursive, or sleek fonts. Use the ones that are easy to read. Prioritise user experience on your website to make it appear fancier.
4. Make Your Checkout Process Seamless
All your hard work pays off when your customers share their credit card information and confirm their orders. It is also the customers’ typical behaviour to abandon their fully-loaded carts at the checkout stage.
Do you know why?
Many customers are turned off to complete their shopping because of a lengthy checkout process. Around 28% of users abandon their carts because of a long and complex checkout procedure or making an account to place the orders.
It is pretty heart wrenching to see your audience leave your website when they were very close to place their orders. Just as you pay attention to every tiny detail of your homepage and landing page, do the same for your checkout page.
Refrain from asking for personal or irrelevant information as the user will not feel comfortable entering such information online. Moreover, display a progress bar at the checkout page. It will keep your users patient while he is filling in the form and give him the feeling of reaching near the end.
Also, provide multiple channels of payment to your customers. Let them select the one which they are most comfortable using.
5. Mobile-Friendly Website
When was the last time you switched on your laptop to order goods online? It’s probably been a while since our lives have become dependent upon smartphones.
Mobile phones are no longer used for communication; instead, they are used for entertainment, education, and shopping. In the last six months, more than 79% of cell phone users have used their devices to place online orders. If a website is not optimised for mobile phones, it can lose massive traffic and revenue that could’ve been earned.
Responsive websites are a must-have for businesses who want to flourish in the market and provide an excellent customer experience. Shopping from mobile provides an ease to people as they can order their favourite goods without having to open a laptop or desktop.
The layout of your website, fonts, CTAs, menu, images, and other elements must function properly on mobile devices. If the website fails to display or function properly, get ready for a high bounce rate.
Many successful brands have created an application for mobile users. The customers can shop their favourite goods just by tapping the icon on their screens. Moreover, an application loads faster than a website. Mobile applications store the data on cell phones.
Whereas the website’s data is stored in web servers. Therefore, the data from an app can be retrieved much quicker than a website. Your customers will not have to wait for a website to load to access its contents.
6. Use Attractive Call-To-Actions
Compelling call-to-actions (CTAs) are like a signboard that directs the users about their next course of action on the website. Your CTAs should be attractive, persuasive, and distinguishable from the rest of the webpage.
Choose a colour for your CTA that is bright and creates a good contrast with the background to catch and hold the users’ attention. Do not use a similar colour of the CTA as your background or font colour. It will blend the CTAs with the rest of the website.
Your CTA copies should be persuasive. Do not repeat the exact text that a user reads on every website. The CTA’s text should be clear, concise, and compelling. Be very specific about the action you want your user to take; for instance, you can display the CTA for email signup on the homepage. Similarly, on product pages, you would want your customer to purchase the goods, and hence, you will use the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’ button.
Moreover, do not bombard your pages with CTAs. It will confuse the user about which action he should take next. Ideally, one webpage should have one or two CTAs.
7. Make Your Information Scannable
A simple rule for creating content on a website is; less is more.
Online users do not have time to read every piece of information published on your webpage. An average online user has time to read only 28% of the displayed information on a webpage. People are more attracted to visual information than textual.
Therefore, do not write long descriptive paragraphs about your business, products, or services. Similarly, if you are publishing articles on your blog page, make it scannable for your users. People refrain from reading information that is long and hard to scan. Use headings, sub-headings, bullet points, infographics, and images to break down your information and make it easy for the readers to comprehend the information without reading the entire thing.
8. Use Hyperlink Differentiation
If you want your users to click on a link, make it stand out from the rest of the text. It is a common practice by the website to use blue colour and underlined text to highlight it as a link.
However, you can use other colours, font-weight, style, or size, to distinguish the links from the rest of the page. If you fail to make the links visible and different, your user will probably not notice it.
Select the colour of the link that stands out from the standard text on your website and contrasts with the background colour. Moreover, your links must inform your users about what they’ll find after clicking the link. For instance, a simple ‘click here’ lacks clarity, and the user won’t know what he’ll find. Whereas using ‘Learn more about UX and UI’ clearly informs the users about the purpose of the link.
9. Navigation
The visitors to your website mustn’t feel lost. They shouldn’t be searching for navigation or a menu to move from one page to another. If a visitor fails to find where he is and where he wants to go, he will exit the website and might give up the idea of visiting again.
The navigation of a website should be immaculate to help the user move and explore. A website can have the following types of navigation menus:
Main Navigation
This menu is often located at the top of the website and includes links to all the important pages of the website, such as homepage, contact page, product page, FAQs, and blogs.
Secondary Navigation
This type of navigation menu is not compulsory to have. However, it makes it easier for your users to access the page of a particular category—for instance, a news website. Users can click on the news based on weather, crime, economy, current affairs, etc.
Secondary navigation is placed under the main menu. These navigation menus are also used by eCommerce websites, such as Amazon.
Footer Navigation
Like the main menu, footer navigation is also compulsory for improving your user’s experience.
It should contain the links to all the important pages and social media handles of a business. Some footers also include the ‘back to top’ button.
10. Site Search
One of the most effective tools for website optimisation is the site search option on the top of the website.
Online users are in a hurry. They do not have time to move from page to page to look for the content or items they require. By providing a search option on your website, your visitors can easily find the products without wasting their precious time.
The quicker they find their products, the quicker they’ll check out and reward you with profits.
11. Fix Your 404s
Broken links put the users in a bad mood as it disrupts their journey on your website. Error 404 increases the bounce rate; after all, what do you expect the user to do on your website if the page he wanted to visit is no longer there? It also affects your website’s SEO ranking.
To improve your customers’ user experience, frequently check all the internal and external links mentioned on your website to ensure that they are working correctly and not broken.
If you find any broken links, mend them or replace the links.
12. Live Chat Option
Your customers should not feel alone and helpless while exploring or shopping from your website. Be available for them and answer their queries via a live chat feature.
There are numerous plugins available on the internet that allow the customers to interact with the salespeople if they are facing any problem or discuss their concerns.
Helping your customers and taking prompt action for their problems will help you gain their trust and loyalty. They would love to come back to your website because of the excellent customer care service.
Connecting The Dots…
Keeping the customers happy is the priority of every entrepreneur and website owner. Happy customers mean an increasing revenue and growing business.
We hope that the tips we have shared in this article will help you revamp your website to make it user-friendly without breaking the bank.
What other simple tactics or tools for website optimisation would you suggest for improved user experience? Please share it in the comments below.
Author Bio
Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify – free Shopify theme, helping drop shippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.
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