Marketers have long postulated that “your website is your best salesperson,” and this statement is probably the best way to describe the importance of having a neat and informative company website that interacts with the audience. Considering the number of internet users who browse the web to find products and services they need, it’s clear why your website needs to provide seamless user experience.
Moreover, user experience can even determine the way people perceive a brand, which is another reason why webmasters should adopt a user-centric approach to building a website. Namely, as confirmed in an earlier research by PEER 1 Hosting, 76% of ecommerce decision makers claim website experience and brand perception are directly related.
Mobile is the next conversion platform
Few years ago, building a mobile-friendly website was rather optional, while today it is an imperative for businesses large and small. Even Google is preparing to roll out a new algorithm that is supposed to affect around 50% of search results according to some estimates. This means that half of the websites out there are still not optimized for mobile display, which translates into lost visits and potential purchases from mobile devices.
Given that today web users increasingly make purchases or calls from smartphones and tablets, mobile website is one of the critical aspects of user experience that needs to be considered. In a survey mentioned above, 35% of respondents pointed that mobile device compatibility contributed to overall business, which clearly points to the importance of this.
Overall design encourages people to complete actions
Once you ensure a visitor can actually land on your website, you need to make it easy for them to navigate across your pages. Here, simplicity is the key because it enables even the first time visitors to easily understand what your website is about and how to get to the specific pages they have been looking for.
Again, different studies on user behavior reveal that if a visitor doesn’t see what he or she has been searching for immediately on the page, they are likely to leave – frustrated. This is why a well-designed company website needs to display information in readable format and ensure every call-to-action or internal link is transparent. Coupled with graphic and textual elements that successfully communicate messages relevant to user’s query, such pages are more likely to drive conversions.
Speed is critical for user retention
Slow loading pages have always been seen as a major negative user experience trigger and are the most important aspect of your website you need to optimize. As reported by Kissmetrics, 47% of users are likely to leave a website if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load, while the research by Ensighten previously proved that this also negatively affects conversion rates.
Therefore, improving page load time is critical to website success and it should be done by writing a clean code, optimizing images for faster load and minimizing HTTP requests. Furthermore, the choice of a local web hosting provider and a scalable plan that supports your growth can be another way to overcome this issue. For example, if you’re running a local business in Sydney, choosing a web hosting provider that uses Australian servers would guarantee faster page load time. The same goes for businesses in Switzerland or any other region.
These are again rather technical aspects that you need to handle, but whose overall impact may well be worth your time and effort. By making the right decisions about everything from a web hosting package to the design and development team, you can ensure the best performance of your pages and, therefore, a greater number of satisfied users.
Conclusions
Considering the extent to which people nowadays rely on the internet search, it’s unsurprising that they’re increasingly expecting seamless experience on company websites. For website owners, this means that if a website fails to load properly on different devices, your prospects are likely to abandon it and try to find relevant information elsewhere. Obviously, this may translate into a lost revenue, which is certainly a scenario every business wants to avoid.
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