3 tips to improve the usability of websites
With a website, you always have the ability to track how a visitor interacts with your website. More than on any other platform or sales channel. Therefore, this is a process that webmasters are always closely monitoring and regularly improving. In this article, we will discuss what it takes to measure user experience and what steps are needed to improve it. Let's get started.
A website has the advantage of being able to track more here than is often assumed, which is why various privacy laws have been put in place to ensure user protection. Even with functional cookies, Google Analytics, for example, provides extensive statistics to determine how your website is performing. And how you can improve the user experience. A recently added tool is Microsoft Clarity. With this tool, anyone can easily see how a website is performing. And how the user experience can be improved. They do this by offering more than Google Analytics in a number of areas. For example, the heatmap that shows you what people are clicking on, and the entire session of an individual user. This way you can see step by step how a user interacts with your website. We'll go into more detail about this in our tips.
Viewing a session in Microsoft Clarity
The individual session view in Microsoft Clarity is a great tool to see how visitors are actually interacting with your website. You can see exactly what page a user arrived at, how they interact with the page, and if they click through to another page. This gives you unique insight into a user's experience. You can literally see where he drops off, for example. Whether it's that he or she can't find the information he or she is looking for in a large piece of text, or that he or she gets stuck somewhere else on your website. With Microsoft Clarity, you can clearly see how this works. And how you can best improve this.
Of course, not every user is a good benchmark for determining user experience. So it's useful to periodically filter out a set of sessions that are, for example, very long, very short, and in the middle. It is particularly interesting to look at users who have visited many different pages. And those who stay on a page for less than a minute. Often users who stay on the page for 0 seconds or more are not an accurate measure. And they can leave so quickly for a variety of reasons. Website speed is one of them. We'll cover this in the next headline.
Enabling caching and ensuring a fast website.
Website speed remains an important metric that can give your website a competitive edge. With a fast website, you will have a lower bounce rate or website abandonment rate. A better conversion on your website and many other user experience benefits. However, the speed of a website is highly dependent on the website itself. The technology used also plays an important role. The content management system is also very important for the speed of a website and the package chosen for it. For almost any website that is built with a content management system, we recommend at least a Total SSD hosting package. This will ensure that your files load very quickly with the help of fast SSD hard drives.
It's also important that you optimize all media for a website, whether it's an image or a video. And that you load sources on your website efficiently. Large javascript files can also cause your website to load slower. Think about ads and other things that cause delays here. We've covered this topic extensively in the past and in the knowledge base. If you search our knowledge base and blogs for the term "speed website", you'll find plenty of information on this.
The design aspect
Design is of course also important for the usability of a website. Even in 2021, according to the latest website trends, less is more. Clean lines and not too much or a busy site. Information is presented clearly and without fuss. This is also reflected in most themes you can use for WordPress, for example.
It goes without saying that a website must also be suitable for mobile use and should have all the features of a desktop website. An experience for any screen size is the most important thing. Fortunately, most themes for WordPress and Umbraco already take care of this task for you. So you don't need to worry about it anymore. Test this from time to time on multiple mobile devices. And adjust your images to fit the screen size.
Again, use Microsoft Clarity to see how your site behaves on other screen sizes and if they run into any issues that cause you to leave the site. This can sometimes be difficult to determine. This is why there are agencies that will check this for you and then provide a report. As a low-cost option, you can also bribe friends and family to perform a series of actions on your website. And see what comes out of it.
We hope this week's tips are useful for your website's user experience, and if you have any additions for your website, please share them with us on social media!
