One of the best ways to attract and maintain traffic and visitors to your website is by having an effective design. No one wants to waste time on a website with messed-up interfaces, poor optimization, and a navigation that isn’t user-friendly. They would instead look for an alternative with the same great content. This is why companies and corporate organizations with exceptional website designs always have their visitors returning. They did not get to that stage by default, but with conscious efforts.
Determining how effective your website design requires certain metrics. Most people only resort to experts and other few people when trying to improve or resolve website issues. However, some of the best ways are to solicit user feedback and to use a web analytic tool. Here are five ways to determine the effectiveness of your website design.
Using a Web Analytic Tool
Aside from the content, having a standout and high-performing website design requires the incorporation of tools that makes it user-friendly. To track and understand why people spend more or less time on the site, the locations, where most of the signings come from among others, their interest, etc. you need a web analytics tool.
Web analytics serves diverse purposes when building, maintaining, and improving website performance. Spending quality time to analyze data from analytics can give you an edge over your competitors. The data obtained from an analytic tool does far more than you think as it can also help to identify website design flaws. If your website traffic keeps dropping at a particular session, then there is a problem. If users continue to receive 404 errors there is something to fix. You can check with your hosting company or developer to resolve the problem.
Insert a Heatmap
Heatmap provides an insight into how web pages perform as visitors interact with the website. Data from heatmap helps web managers to take action on underperforming pages. The software tracks the movement of a visitor’s mouse; hence, you can identify the pages and elements having the most and no clicks. The software utilizes colors to present an easy to analyze visual report of whatever visitors do on the website. Each color represents the amount of time and intensity of activities that took place. The colors red and orange represent areas/elements highly utilized while green and blue highlight the least interacted portions. When you’re out looking for a web design, authorities within the industry, such as Nodex will tell you it is imperative to get accurate data on visitors’ activities within your website. This information goes a long way towards improving the design of the site, and the type of content you’re serving the visitors.
Offer an Incentive for Feedback
Companies use website feedback as a means to collect honest reviews from visitors. It helps to understand the activities of users and their expectations. When combined with web analytic tools like Google Analytic, companies can track and receive reports on the overall performance of their website. The information can help to generate more traffic and convert leads into sales, whiles improving user experience.
Techniques like live chats, website popup surveys, feedback buttons, and offering incentives are all effective ways to solicit user feedback. In incentive feedback, a company decides to dash gifts or provide additional services to visitors who provide feedback. These incentives encourage people to leave feedback after visiting the website. It helps to increase astronomically the number of responses. You can start an email campaign for feedbacks during which incentives are offered to responders. So, any user who gives feedback has the chance to win the ultimate prize.
That said, offering incentives for feedback can affect the quality of response. As such, there should be mechanisms in place to check this through the type of questions asked and who even qualifies to give a review.
Optimize the load time
If you want your website to be ranked high, then take page loading time seriously. It is one of Google’s metrics for ranking websites. That aside, no web user entertains a tortoise-running website, which means your traffic can drop significantly. Sometimes slow loading may be due to the user’s slow internet connection, and that has nothing to do with the website. But if the challenge is from your end, resolve it by choosing the right web host, adopting a content delivery network, optimizing image sizes, and streamlining your HTML.
Mobile Friendliness
More people currently access websites through smartphones and tablets compared to computers. If you stick to only desktop mode, you would surely lose the traffic battle to your competitor. Your website must therefore be mobile-friendly by supporting all screen sizes and be easy to navigate like the desktop view. Improved your website design mobile-friendliness by allowing caches, using content delivery network (CDN), minifying and combining files, and optimizing image among others.
