Web Development: 7 Smart Tips To Make Your Site More User-Friendly

A strong online presence is close to a requirement for a business to thrive now. A beautiful website isn’t enough on its own, though, it also has to be robust and easy to use, or you’ll lose visitors’ attention before you ever get the chance to convert them.

Want to learn how to create a website that’s genuinely user-friendly? Here are seven things worth getting right.

1. Speed up your website

Users expect a page to load in under two seconds, mobile included. Miss that window and a visitor is gone, loading speed is one of the most common reasons people abandon a site before it even finishes rendering.

It’s not only a usability problem either. Speed feeds directly into search ranking, so a slow site costs you twice: once on visitors who leave, and again on the traffic you never rank for.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights will tell you exactly where you stand and what to fix first. From there, this guide on cutting page load time walks through the actual optimization steps.

2. Make sure it’s responsive

Mobile has made up more than half of consumer traffic to top US sites for years now, so a non-responsive site isn’t a minor gap, it’s turning away the majority of your potential visitors before they even see the page.

As Sage Blog put it: “A responsive website gives every user a flawless online experience whether they’re viewing your site from a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.”

The easiest path is starting from a free or paid WordPress theme that’s already built responsive, no CSS knowledge required.

If you’d rather handle it yourself, CSS and HTML let you resize, hide, or downsize elements per screen size. Either way, start from your existing non-responsive layout and work out where the breakpoints actually need to change.

3. Simplicity is the key

Simplicity gets called the fundamental principle of UX design for a reason.

A complicated site is a hard-to-navigate site. A crowded one buries the content visitors came for. Neither reads as user-friendly.

That’s not an argument for stripping everything down, though, oversimplifying just as easily guts the original idea and leaves the experience flat.

It’s part of why some site owners redesign every couple of years, not purely for a rebrand but because the analytics and the audience research point somewhere new.

4. Add your contact information

People go online looking for answers fast. Hide your contact details and you’re making it harder for them to reach you, and you’re spending some of the trust you’ve built doing it.

A 2015 B2B Web Usability Report found 51% of people think websites commonly have incomplete or missing contact information. That’s a credibility problem as much as a convenience one: more ways to reach you generally read as more credible.

Someone looking for your contact info usually has commercial intent already. Bury that information and you’re losing conversions you’d already earned.

5. Produce relevant content

Content is what ranks your site and what keeps visitors on it, but the real value is that it’s what turns a visitor into a customer. It’s the information they need to actually decide on your product or service.

Make that information hard to find and visitors assume you’re hiding something, or worse, that you’re not the provider they’re looking for.

How you present it matters just as much as having it. Courtney Boyer put it well: “Your website should present information in appropriate sections so visitors can navigate to what they are looking for with ease.”

Get that wrong and people hit the back button and keep searching elsewhere. Not a result you want.

6. Implement precise CTAs

Good content gets a visitor most of the way there. Getting them to actually take the next step is the job of the call to action.

A few things that make a CTA work:

Use a color that pops
Write something simple but action-driven
Make it easy to find on the page

Do you actually have a CTA sitting somewhere a visitor would notice it?

7. Keep Miller’s Law in mind

Back in 1956, cognitive psychologist George A. Miller published a paper called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”

His finding, now known as Miller’s Law: the average person holds about seven pieces of information at once, give or take two. What does that have to do with web design?

Everything, once you’re organizing content. Group information into roughly five chunks, and rarely more than nine, that’s the range working memory can actually hold onto.

A first-time visitor especially has limited patience for a wall of text. Chunk it wrong and you overwhelm them before they’ve read a word of what you actually wanted to say.

Is your website user-friendly?

A website isn’t just text on a page anymore.

People expect it to educate and entertain them. An unfriendly, hard-to-use site sends a message whether you mean it to or not, that you don’t especially need the visitor who just left.

Get the seven things above right, and that’s one less way to lose them.