Intro

Usability and conversion rates are the two main criteria you must consider when designing your site.

Great SEO skills to draw more people into your website isn't enough. You must also do your part to make them stay on your website and turn them into paying customers.

Enhancing your site usability is essential to engaging users, making them stay on your site, and keeping them browsing.

What is website usability, and why does website usability matter?

Website usability is how easy or difficult it is for visitors to use your site. For instance, how "user friendly" is your site on multiple devices like mobile phones, laptops, and tablets? Do you make it easy for visitors to find what they want? Can visitors use your site effectively? Is it helping you achieve your goals?

As mentioned earlier, site usability is crucial if you want your site to garner leads, convert, and achieve your goals.

Let's look at the data:

• If you have unattractive site content or layout, approximately 38% will stop engaging with it.
• 57% say that they won't recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.
• 88% of online consumers say they're unlikely to return to a site if they have a bad experience.

As such, there are plenty of best practices that you need to follow to enhance your site's usability and have better conversion rates. Here are six tips for designing a usable website:

1. Focus on readability

Readability can have a massive impact on how users will use your site. It also comes in two forms:

• Content
• Fonts used

The fonts that you use in your site make it look better and make your branding stand out. But do other site users think the same? Can they read easily on various devices? What looks great on you might only sometimes be the best choice, even more for mobile users where fancy text fonts can be challenging to read. If your fonts have to be tiny, stick with easily readable fonts.

The second is content, and it may come down to shady SEO practices that some sites may be using. Usually, content should be written with a primary purpose- users and not search engines. Develop content that actually converts.

If you're trying to cram keywords into sentences and using super strong anchor texts to improve your site SEO, not only will this turn off a lot of users, but it could land you into deep trouble with Google. So, make sure that your site content is still readable for humans. Check out these content optimization tips to rank #1 on Google.

2. Simplify navigation

(Image source: sephora.com)

Make sure that you value your visitors' time. Make it easy for them to find what they want. No one wants to end up wasting hours browsing your site to find the necessary information.

In fact, according to data, the first 30 seconds are the most crucial. As soon as visitors get to stay on your page for half a minute, they'll likely stay longer.

All it takes is three clicks for users to leave your site if they need help finding what they're looking for. So, there are a lot of things to consider when designing your site.

3. Optimize your website for mobile

One of the most important things you need to do to enhance usability is to optimize your site for mobile. Still, many active sites out there need to be mobile-responsive.

In today's age of smartphones, more than half of site browsing is already taking place on mobile devices, and that percentage increases year after year. Thus, sites that need to be mobile optimized can create a better user experience for most individuals browsing the internet.

4. Maintain consistency

One of the most important things you need to consider if you want to enhance the usability and design of your site is consistency. Maintaining a similar layout on every page makes users more familiar with your site.

For instance, you can use a constant theme on every site page. You can maintain a consistent layout with the same fonts and colors. This consistency reassures users that they didn't navigate elsewhere while also presenting a more cohesive branding.

5. Increase the page loading speed

Users don't want to stay at slow-loading sites, especially with so many other online retail options available on the internet. That's why decreasing your site's load time should be a priority to stay competitive. This could benefit your search engine rankings since some web search platforms consider site speed in indexing.

One of the best ways to boost your site speed is to ensure that all your images are sized appropriately, usually under 1000 pixels. Usually, image rendering adds precious seconds to your site speed. It also provides a more convenient shopping experience to users. Ensure you compress images and eliminate any unnecessary animations and sliders on the most important pages on your site.

Another way to enhance your site speed is to decrease the number of redirects. Every redirect will contribute to the HTTP request and response process.

6. Use attractive calls-to-action

(Image source: hubspot.com)

Call to action (CTAs) use action words to allow site users to navigate your site, get exactly what they want, and where they expect to find it.

An excellent way to make attractive CTAs is by adding a cool design to a button on your site.

7. Establish relevant internal linking

Refrain from overwhelming site visitors with huge chunks of information on a single page. That's because lengthy and more detailed articles take time to take in. Also, most web users are too busy for longer reads.

Instead, make sure that you spoon-feed them with helpful content in smaller bits of information. This gives them more time to digest these concepts. Readers will also appreciate it if they can learn interesting things engagingly and efficiently and may even return to your site for more.

Make sure you break up the topics into several sub-topics and then place them on separate pages. Then, use internal linking to connect related pages. Doing so allows users to move to the next topic or return later for more information.

8. Use images

Images play a crucial role in having a usable web design. But it doesn't mean that you use an overwhelming amount of images just for the sale of using them.

Instead, you should pick the right images to complement your text and fill them with more details instead of illustrating your points. Similarly, you should keep track of the number of images you embed on a page.

9. Have a responsive design

(Image souce: typeform.com)

It's all about responsiveness. With many device types and screen sizes, you must be considerate when designing your site.

Even if it looks great on a laptop, it may look bad on a mobile or tablet screen. So, if you're striving for better usability, switch to a more responsive design.

At Sytian Productions, (web developer philippines,) we always tell clients that creating a responsive design is more complex because everything, from your page structure to images, needs to be adjusted. We also suggest that when starting a site design, you should start with the mobile version since 53.3% of world traffic comes from mobile.

10. Enhanced SEO

To enhance your site usability, you first need to improve your visibility.

While the human factor is still important, you should pay attention to search engines. It would help if you tried to fit the requirements for crawling bots so that they can deliver your content to prospective customers and users.

Fortunately, there are plenty of SEO checklists and guides that you can use and top SEO tools to help you avoid these mistakes, and have a SEO friendly site.

11. Always Test

Regularly test to know what your specific audience likes. Check your site's usability, and then analyze the conversion based on real examples and input.

One way to do this A/B testing wherein you offer users two options with the same interface or webpage segment, then grade the conversions to see which brought it more sales.

12. Create forms that are easy to fill out

The final step in making conversions are web forms. Therefore, they need to be as clear as possible. The last thing you want is to lose customers in this last stage.

Ensure you test your forms to check whether they're easy to fill out. If there are any barriers, make sure that you remove them. Aside from that, only ask for important information.

Over to You

So, there you have it. These are some of the ways on how you can enhance your site’s usability for better conversions. Hopefully, you'll follow these tips to enhance your site's usability and have better conversion rates.

The most important thing to remember is that you should always keep the user at the forefront of every part of your site. Everything on the site and every action needed should be seen in the eyes of the user. Good luck!