Have you ever been on a website that you clicked away from after just a few seconds without really knowing why?
Boosting your website’s usability allows you to make visits longer and more productive, allowing you to boost the quantity and quality of leads and achieve the goals of your marketing strategy.
Below are ten easy tips to boost your website’s usability.
What is Website Usability and Why Does It Matter?
Website usability is everything from the time it takes to load a page to how you utilize headings and subheadings.
Essentially, it is everything that makes your website more appealing to the eye and easier to navigate.
Website usability and its impact on marketing plays a large role in the websites people choose to visit repeatedly and recommend to others.
Whether or not you realized it, but website usability has likely affected your decision to continue viewing a site before.
It may have been because it took too long to load, or you could not find the navigation buttons and got frustrated.
Maybe you just did not like the way the text on the site was divided or the colors were too harsh.
These are all things that are website usability and drive away traffic and could be affecting your website.
How to Improve the Usability of a Website?
Once you have understood what website usability is, it becomes easy to fix. These small fixes will help your website tremendously, helping you reach your marketing goals.
1. Reduce Page Loading Times
The longer a page takes to load, the more likely a visitor is to click away. People are used to speed and efficiency, websites that lag get left behind for something quicker.
Enabling a cache on internet browsers and reducing the number of cookies you use can make a visible difference in your website’s load times, increasing the time people spend on your site.
2. Maintaining a Similar Layout on Every Page
Keeping your website consistent on each page makes it easier for visitors to find navigation buttons, instead of having to search for them each time.
Having a different layout on each page can make your website seem disjointed and confusing for visitors as they are searching for the navigation buttons, causing them to leave the site.
3. Make Your Website Responsive
A responsive website is a website that adjusts to what kind of device the visitor is viewing the website on, whether that be a phone, a tablet, or a computer.
With the number of different devices, people have, keeping your website adaptable will keep people visiting your site no matter what device they are using.
While it is important for your website to stand out, keeping your website’s navigation recognizable makes it easier for visitors to find pages on your site.
An example of this is most sites keep the home navigation button somewhere near the top of the page, so visitors can always find their way back to the home page.
5. Use Headings and Subheadings to Break Up Your Content
Long blocks of texts make it difficult for visitors to keep reading, as it can be confusing for the eyes.
By breaking up your content with headings and subheadings, you are making it easier for the reader to digest your content and remember it.
Sites that are not broken up also tend to look messy and outdated to most visitors at first glance, causing them to click away.
6. Follow Typography Usability Guidelines
Everything from the font you choose to the way you choose to capitalize sends little messages to visitors of your site.
All caps will make your website seem untrustworthy and unprofessional while using too many fonts makes it difficult to read and confusing to the eye.
Following typography usability guidelines is simple but can make a world of a difference.
7. Highlight the Key Information
Highlighting key information you want your visitors to know is more likely to catch a visitor’s eye at first glance and lead them to spend longer on your site than they may have otherwise.
Many readers on the web only skim the sites they visit and utilizing highlighting can make sure they see everything you want them to even if they are just skimming.
8. Use Relevant Images
Ever heard the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words” before?
While using too many images can increase your loading time, utilizing relevant images can help make your website more appealing and convey information faster than words.
9. Keep Website Design Simple
Keeping your website simple makes it easier to navigate and quicker to load, while remaining appealing to the eye.
A website that looks too busy can be difficult to navigate and exhausting for visitors, causing them to click away to something sleeker.
10. Use a Mobile-Optimized Design
People are using tablets and phones for more and more, so keeping your website mobile-friendly is incredibly important.
Websites without mobile-optimized design look awkward and dated on a mobile device.
How Does Website Usability Effect Healthcare Providers?
Patients want a healthcare provider they can trust and oftentimes your website is their first impression of your office.
Having a website that looks outdated or is difficult to navigate can make you look unprofessional, therefore untrustworthy, even if you give amazing care.
Implementing these simple tips can help your online image tremendously and have more patients reaching out to you than before.
Beyond looking professional, sometimes patients are looking for quick answers because of an emergency.
Having a website that takes too long to load or is too difficult to read will drive them to a website that can give them the answers they need quickly.
This makes it imperative that your office keeps up with website usability.
Final Thoughts
Making sure you are regularly testing the load times and navigability of your website by conducting a website usability audit is critical to your marketing strategy.
The internet is constantly evolving and moving forward, and your website needs to keep up with that pace.
Website usability and SEO go hand in hand, one is useless without the other, but by honing both you can grow the number of leads and quality of leads and hit all your marketing goals.
