4 High Impact Ways To Enhance Website User Experience
Getting users to your site is only half the battle. After you win a click, it’s up to your site to convert the potential customer. While every website has some room for improvement, there are some universal practices that you can apply to just about every website to enhance user experience.
1. Broken contact forms
Imagine finding a company that provides the service you are looking for only to discover that you cannot contact them because the contact form on their site is broken. Even worse, imagine discovering you have been missing out on leads because your own contact form is broken.
Contact forms can have a number of issues that can cause them to break including but not limited to:
- Customers are not able to fill out all the fields
- The contact form has an error while sending
- The contact form isn’t responsive on mobile devices or tablets
It is important to test out every form you make to ensure that it not only looks great but functions properly as well.
Even if your contact form is working properly for users, you still may not be receiving the submissions. Sometimes these emails can wind up in your junk mail or can even go to the wrong email address.
After you make any changes to your contact form it is important to send a test submission to ensure that you are receiving these leads. It is also recommended to send in a test form every few months or if you notice your leads dropping significantly.
2. Text size & colour
Having great text on your site means nothing if users aren’t able to read it! There are multiple issues that could cause text to be unreadable including:
- Text that is too small to read
- Not enough contrast between the text and the background. For example, green text on a green background
- Too much contrast between the text and the background. For example, harsh black text on a pure white background
- Text that is being obscured by other items on the page. For example, an image or a heading overlapping the body text on a page
The biggest thing you can do to alleviate this problem is to check the entire site on different screen resolutions (desktops, tablets, phones, etc) to make sure that you are able to read all of the text. It also helps to have friends and family look through the site as well on their devices to make sure everyone is able to read the content. A fresh set of eyes can find things that you can’t!
You can also run your site through a contrast checker to make sure that the contrast between your text and background isn’t too high or too low.
3. Click to call phone numbers
Making phone numbers click to call on your site may seem like a small task, but it may have a big impact! The easier it is for users to contact you, the more likely they are to do so.
Adding click-to-call code to your phone numbers will remove the unnecessary step of making users type it in themselves. This can lead to an increased lead volume because it makes it easier for users to contact you and it removes the possibility of users misreading phone numbers as they type them in manually.
4. Broken links
Having inner links on your site is a great way to encourage users to head to relevant pages, but having broken links can only cause frustration. When a user clicks on a link they expect to go to a separate page that can provide them with more information on that particular subject. When a link breaks, however, they may end up on the wrong page or with a 404 error.
Broken links can occur in a number of ways. For example, if we want to direct users to our contact page we would create a call to action that links to https://www.adster.ca/contact. When creating this link there are a number of mistakes that can exist including:
- A misspelled URL – https://www.adster.ca/contat
- An incorrect URL – https://www.adster.ca/about
Both of these issues would lead to a user either receiving a 404 error or landing on the wrong page.
But even if you create the link correctly to start off with, issues can arise if you ever decide to remove the page you have linked to or change its URL. If this happens, there are actions you would then need to follow to ensure that the link does not break.
Removing a page
Removing a page that is no longer necessary to a website is common practice. However, when doing so there are two things that you can do to ensure internal and external links do not end up giving users a 404 error.
- Change all existing internal links to another relevant URL or remove the link
- Redirect the URL to another relevant page on the site
These actions will ensure that users are no longer directed to the removed page. If they do somehow find their way to the URL, they are sent to another page on the site.
Changing a URL
If you decide to change the URL of a page, you will need to go through a similar process as outlined above:
- Change all existing internal links to the new URL
- Redirect the old URL to the new URL
Again, these actions will ensure that a user ends up on the correct page and is not given a 404 error.
Still need assistance? Contact the team at Adster Creative and learn more about our extensive audit process!