Now that the majority of us are happy to conduct our business online rather than visit a shop or office in person, it is now more important than ever that every company has a website. But just having a website isn’t good enough – it has to be very user-friendly.
Everyone has access to the internet these days, and it is really crucial that whoever lands on your site is able to use it without any issues at all. Even people who rarely use the internet and normally have trouble getting to grips with technology need to be able to figure out your site. If users have a hard time getting to grips with it, they will quickly move on and navigate to one of your competitor’s websites.
Do you think that your website is as user-friendly as it can be? Here’s a checklist to help you figure it out.
Add Contact Information
Your website should completely remove the need for any customers or clients to pick up the phone and ask you any questions.
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All of the answers to their questions should be easy to find on the site. This includes your contact information. Your address, phone number, and email address should be easy to find so that your customers can easily get in touch with you in a variety of ways. Don’t forget to sync this up with your Google My Business/Google Places/Google local profile – https://victoriousseo.com/blog/how-to-change-business-address-google-maps/
Make It Easy To Navigate
How is the navigation on the site? Each one of your pages needs to be easy to find so that all the information on them is accessible.
There are two ways you can do this. Firstly, you should create sitemap so that all of your various pages are mapped out clearly.
As well as that, it’s worth adding a clearly visible drop-down menu that links to all of the pages.
Make Sure It’s Mobile Responsive
These days, most of us now use our mobile phones to view pages on the internet. Because most of your web traffic will be mobile, it’s necessary that your website is now mobile responsive.
If it isn’t, it will be very slow to load on mobile and tablet devices, and it could also mess with the navigation.
So, if the site can’t be viewed or navigated on mobiles, then you could lose quite a bit of web traffic.
Make Sure Your Page Experience & Load Speed Is Optimized
While site load speed has been some sort of “ranking factor” for some time, the means by which that was measured and fed into Google’s ranking algorithm hasn’t been very specific, so the general advice was to get load speed under two seconds and improve your page speed score from Google’s Lighthouse audit as high as possible.
Well, now we have more official guidance and an algorithm update that rolled its usage into the mainstream with the “Page Experience” update that now uses “Core Web Vital” scores from Google’s Lighthouse project. These Core Web Vitals go beyond just “loading”, and also measure things like layouts shifting, how quickly you can interact with a page, etc.
Link To Social Media
So, to encourage anyone who lands on your site to find your social media profiles, you need to clearly link to each profile on your website.
Lots of web users like to follow their favorite companies on social media so that they keep up to date with all of their latest news and any deals that they release.
Most CRMs and website builders will let you add social media buttons which make the links easy to spot.
Check For Bugs
There are various bugs that could end up on the website if you aren’t careful.
Thankfully, full checks should help you find them so that you know which issues you need to iron out. For instance, dead links, poor performance, and bad functionality should all be prevented.
All you need to do to test the website is to use it.
No, seriously.
Visit EVERY single page on your website, click by click. Link by link.
Note down any issues and problems that you come across and pass this list on to the website design team so that they can work on them.
It’s better that you find the bugs before your customers do!
Add A Search Feature
It can be really annoying when you visit a website looking for some specific information but come away without having found it.
This isn’t the fault of the user; most of the time, it’s the company to blame as they might have hidden the information.
If your website is quite dense with information, it will be worth adding a search function so that anyone who lands on your site can quickly find what they are looking for.
BTW if you’re finding weird pages on your site with your /search folder in the URL you may be struggling with Search Submission Spam, so here is the cure!
Cover It With Your Branding
As soon as someone lands on your website, they need to instantly know that it belongs to your company or is part of your personal brand. This is especially important if there are companies out there with similar names to you.
It’s important that you eliminate any potential confusion by covering the website with your logo and branding, so that everyone who lands on it knows that it represents your company.
Once you know that you have all of the above features and functions on your website, you can be happy knowing that it is highly user-friendly.
Don’t forget to keep on reviewing the usability as it can sometimes get worse if you don’t keep on working on it.