5 Impactful Ways Of Improving User Experience & Create A Brand Impact For Your Online Store

If you own an online store or any kind of website for that matter, user experience is the most important aspects. The type of experience users have on your website can make or break your website. User experience can vary in accordance with a good or bad design. If users can navigate easily within your website, if the font is right, if the display of your website looks appealing and if the users are able to complete the task they want to on your website, they would surely think of returning to your website.

However, if your website is being difficult with your users, they would not prefer to come back.

Here are some great and impactful ways through which you can successfully ensure a great user experience on your website, this will help you in terms of creating brand awareness and it will exponentially contribute in the growth of your online store:

Use Imagery In The Right Way

It is true that you need to optimize all your website images in a certain way so that they load faster and the website speed is maintained. Having said that, it is also important to make sure that you are using imagery in a way that is appealing to the users. A human brain processes visual data faster as compared to text; therefore it is important to ensure that the visual factors reflect in your content. If the images you are using on your website are not in sync with the content, they will end up confusing the users. Make sure that the images on your website are in tune with the message that you wish to convey.

Use important aspects in your images and graphics that you think will support the point that you wish to prove. A good way to do this is by blurring out the background of the images so that the user focuses on a specific aspect of the image. You can also make use of contrasting colors for highlighting the information that you want to be seen.
Photographs can be used for different purposes. When it comes to your staff, your products and your customers, it is best to use photographs. You can also make use of typography for emphasizing on various visual elements.
All the pages on your website do not need to have a lot of images on them. Making overuse of images can damage the impression of that page. Images should only be used wherever appropriate.

A Sorted And Fast Website

Having a good website speed is not just an important ranking factor for Google but it is an important factor for your users as well. Call to action buttons and important links for navigating within the website should be starkly displayed. When someone comes to your website, he/she should not be confused about where to go next. Your website should have a clear design; the content and links should be sorted and properly placed to encourage the desired user action. Also, if your website takes ages to load a heavy web page, the users are not going to wait for that long. Even if the users like your website, they will leave it and find an alternative if your website is slow.

How do you ensure a good website speed?

Host your website on an efficient ecommerce hosting, web hosting or a cloud platform whichever is suitable for your website requirements. If your website is supported with powerful servers, it will load quickly and users will be happy with the way they can move within the website. You can also opt for a CDN as a result of which, the website pages will be served from a location that is near to the user’s location. Investing in an efficient and powerful web hosting platform will only do good to your website in the long run.
Compress and optimizes your images so that they load quickly and do not delay the overall loading time of the web pages.
Every time a certain page redirects to some other page, your website users have to deal with additional waiting time for the completion of the HTTP request-response cycle. Therefore it is important to reduce the number of redirects.
You can improve your website speed by optimizing the code of your website. Make sure that you remove the spaces, commas and any other characters that are unnecessarily present in the website code. It is also important to remove the code comments, formatting and any unused code.
If you have a WordPress website, you can make use of plugins like Autoptimize, Asset CleanUp, Jetpack, Website Speed Optimization and W3 Total Cache for improving the speed of your website.

Responsive Design Is A Must!

We all are aware that people prefer browsing websites on their mobile devices; in fact we all do that! Therefore, your website has to look good on a mobile screen. A responsive design has the ability to adjust to the screen size your users are viewing it on. If your website looks distorted on any of the screen sizes, it’s a turn off for a lot of people and you would end up losing customers.

If you are working with WordPress, you can opt for responsive themes. If your website theme is responsive by default, you don’t have to do anything additionally to make it responsive. It will look great on any screen size. There are many free and paid responsive WordPress themes that you can opt for.
Another way to optimize your website for a responsive design is with the use of tools like Uploadcare. These tools are easy to use and open source that provide you information about image breakpoints and other important aspects. This will help you in managing various image sizes so that your website images and content look great on different screens.
You can check if your mobile website looks perfect with Google Accelerated Mobile Pages tool.

Call-To-Action Buttons On Every Page

Even if the new users like your website and your offerings, they won’t opt for it right away! You have to make them do that. This can be done in the best possible way by adding call-to-action jargons at the right places on your website. Appealing Call To Action (CTA) buttons help in driving traffic. Here are some important things that you should keep in mind while creating your CTA buttons:

The first thing is to take the size of the CTA button in consideration. A CTA button should be easily noticeable by the users and at the same time it shouldn’t be unusually large to disturb the content and images around it.
Along with the size of CTA, you also need to take their color in consideration. The color of your CTA buttons don’t necessarily have to be according to the color scheme of your website, they have to be contrasted properly in order to catch user’s attention. You need to study colors a bit; certain colors invoke certain emotions, understand the psychological effects of the colors and then work with them.
Where you place the CTA buttons on the page is also an extremely important factor. They should be placed in the front, in the center or ‘above the fold’ like they say in newspaper terms. Make sure that your CTAs are clearly visible; they shouldn’t be crowded by other content and images.

Focus On All The Website Design Elements

Your website should be the perfect blend of content and design. You might be having the best possible content on your website that distinguishes you from your competitors but if this content is displayed in a sloppy design, it won’t get noticed or read. Users are always looking for more; something they like, your website has to be like that. People love to spend time on a website that is stylish and useful at the same time. Having the wrong color combination or a bad layout can have the negative effects on the visual appeal for your users.

You must focus on creating a website design that is modern and that is enticing. Apart from that, here are some important design principles that you must follow:

Make sure that your business contact information is prominently displayed on many parts of the website.
Your business logo should be visible on all the pages of your website.
Your website design and color scheme should be easy on the user’s eyes. Avoid using florescent or extremely loud colors.
Encourage your users to compare products.

Final Thoughts:

The experience that a user gets on your website drives his/her further decision whether to return to your website or not.

The color, content, design, font and all other aspects of your website should perfectly come together to convey your message.

Look at your website from a layman’s point of view and you will see a lot of scope for improvement. Your website is your primary source of information and it is a platform for driving sales as well, it has to be perfect, visually appealing and on point. Your aim should be to ensure that users smoothly sail within your website and it can be done with the factors covered in this article. Don’t mind making tweaks here or there for checking how users like it, you’ll strike the right chord for sure.