That’s quite a list of acronyms in the title there. We could throw in more – FCP, LCP, CLS and TTFB. How about terms like Minify, Defer and Render Blocking? Let’s come back to all of that – we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Your site should be simple, clear, intuitive. Your user shouldn’t have to think – they should feel comfortable, not confused. Things should move swiftly, there should never be an element of ‘did I click that link?’ And they should always know the next step, feeling comfortable with jumping around the site.
If that’s not the case, if something just doesn’t feel right, then your hard-won visitors will be quietly slipping away. Let’s look at what might be happening and what you can do about it – here’s some key UX (User Experience) mistakes that might be harming your site.
1. Not mobile-optimised? Bye bye.
That’s the sound of a finger swiping you can hear. They’re gone, and who can blame them? A menu that requires a zoom to decipher, an image that never gets beyond being a spinning buffer symbol, a blank screen for more than a second or two, or just a more mundane general sluggishness – cardinal sins one and all.
We’re way, way past mobile being the thing-you-should-probably-check once the site has been built. Mobile traffic has long since passed the 50% mark, so much so that many sites are designed to be mobile-first, desktop-second.
Things you should be doing:
- Check your copy, your font sizes. By and large, headings should be smaller, body text should be larger. Ditto buttons and key navigation elements.
- Images are not one-and-done. That hi-resolution beauty on your desktop – do not force that to load on mobile, serve up a resized (smaller and therefore quicker to load) version to your phone users.
- Make sure your layout shuffles and stacks nicely, hiding some elements and re-ordering others as needed.
- Test on physical devices – actual phones and tablets, ask your friends and relatives to use the site and to give you honest feedback.
2. Site navigation – guide, don’t hide.
Don’t make me think! A user should never need a map of the night sky in order to navigate around your site. If they need to actively hunt for your contact page, you’ve failed. If your mega-menu with its multi-level nested structure is in any way, erm, delicate, you’ve failed. If you’ve tried to be cute with your labelling – well, you get it.
It used to be said that if your site needed a site-map, you’d failed. And we’d largely agree – it might be best practice to feed a site map to Google, but your users shouldn’t be forced to trawl through lists of links just to find the page that they’re sure must be here somewhere.
And on this point, a sidebar – your navigation should flow naturally from your IA – Information Architecture. For pretty much any type of site you would likely have started with a wire-frame and a flow chart of areas and sections. And in WordPress that should have translated to your Taxonomy – your Tags and Categories. These are your logical areas, your groupings of content, and these should give you a solid foundation for your navigation.
Fix your site navigation:
- Your navigation menu isn’t the place for synonyms or cryptic labelling. People search for a ‘Web Designer’ not a ‘Solutions Provider’. Perhaps your top level menu label is ‘Services’ with ‘Web Design’, ‘Web Hosting’, ‘Site Maintenance’ and ‘Website Audit’ as sub-menu items.
- Unless you’re a bleeding edge graphic designer, don’t get funky with your menu. Put your navigation up top and your ‘drier’ links in a footer. Make it site-wide, make it consistent.
- Leave the room. Come back in as a visitor. Use your site as a visitor would. What are they expecting to see front and centre?
3. Why is my website slow?
Remember that horrible list of acronyms in the first paragraph? They are why your site is slower than your competitor and why they score better in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Time to First Byte – they are why your site feels slow, they are why Google will favour a competitor over you. And don’t let you web agency blame it on hosting, simply suggesting a web server upgrade – no, it’s largely under their control. They can get you better scores. If they can’t, get in touch.
Speed up your website, some things to look at:
- All of the above plus a good trawl through the plugins and scripts that are running on your site. Scripts can be made to load more efficiently, plugins are often poorly configured and badly targetted. A lot of time a plugin has been added as a quick fix to mask a poorly built site.
- WordPress loads, by default, a lot of legacy features and things that you simply don’t need. It can be tweaked enormously. You’ll need to be on a good host, one that is ideally configured as a best-practice home for WordPress, but there is no need to break the bank on this!
- Images – aside from the obvious ‘don’t clog things up with very large (heavy) images’ you need to look at serving images in newer, friendlier formats and also serving smaller images to mobile users. A lot of this can be automated, done for you automatically.
4. You need strong yet simple CTAs.
Long, long before you are looking at Funnels and A/B Testing, you need to be sure that you’re CTAs are actually Calling to Action. We’ve already talked about UX and ‘don’t make me think’ … for your CTAs you need to take it a bit further and tell them what to do.
They’ve read your content, they’re on board and then … nothing, they’re gone. All of your pages need a clear next step, one that catches their eye and leads them to the finish line; they shouldn’t be guessing, you shouldn’t be hoping – take their hand and tell them what to do.
Fix your site CTAs:
- Be clear, clean and direct. ‘Get in touch’, ‘Book a call’, ‘Get a quote’, ‘Download a sample’, ‘Send us a message’.
- Let buttons be buttons. They need to stand out not subtly blend in.
- So that’s a CTA with a clear label and an eye-attracting ‘click me NOW’ button – now just make sure they’re in the right place – sure in the footer, yes in the top navigation, but also have one keeping them company during their journey, always ready and accessible.
5. Your website needs to be accessible.
Long, long before you are looking at Funnels and A/B Testing, you need to be sure that you’re CTAs are actually Calling to Action. We’ve already talked about UX and ‘don’t make me think’ … for your CTAs you need to take it a bit further and tell them what to do.
They’ve read your content, they’re on board and then … nothing, they’re gone. All of your pages need a clear next step, one that catches their eye and leads them to the finish line; they shouldn’t be guessing, you shouldn’t be hoping – take their hand and tell them what to do.
Fix your site CTAs:
- Be clear, clean and direct. ‘Get in touch’, ‘Book a call’, ‘Get a quote’, ‘Download a sample’, ‘Send us a message’.
- Let buttons be buttons. They need to stand out not subtly blend in.
- So that’s a CTA with a clear label and an eye-attracting ‘click me NOW’ button – now just make sure they’re in the right place – sure in the footer, yes in the top navigation, but also have one keeping them company during their journey, always ready and accessible.
6. Check, test, rinse, repeat.
We’re getting to the common-sense stuff here – doesn’t mean it gets done, doesn’t mean site owners just assume everything is fine because, well, there haven’t been any emails to the contrary, have there?
If your site is broken, subtly or silently, it’s likely no visitor will let you know. Always assuming the contact form is actually working. And of course nothing may be broken but your site is still not delivering as you hoped for. Test everything, test in different browsers on different screen sizes and devices; get friends to try and use the site with a specific goal in mind, check your forms, your navigation, just check everything on the front end. And then do it again, week after week, month after month, because updates break things, and rarely in an obvious way.
Things you need to be looking at:
- Check your analytics, check to see if people are leaving in a hurry and where that departure point is, likely because they simply aren’t finding what they came for.
- Use Heatmaps or session recordings to follow your users in real time – you may well very soon see an emerging pattern, a signal failure, a bottleneck or plain dead-end where people will just be hitting the back button.
- Look at your error logs for 404 pages (dead inbound links to pages that either never existed or have been moved) and run link-checkers to see if your own internal links are all behaving.
Feeling overwhelmed?
Hopefully the above will be of use, of comfort even, as the key message is that things can be improved with a diligent and professional approach. Some you can do yourself, lots will need to be looked at by your web developer or agency. But it is all eminently doable and all pretty much necessary to keep traction and visitors.
And if you’re not getting the answers you need, if you’re feeling that the people who should be helping you are dragging their heels, please do get in touch with us. Tell us what’s wrong, tell us what ‘right’ would look like, and we’ll talk. We won’t pitch to you, we’ll take a look and respond with some honest, helpful advice and take it from there.
