Creating a good user experience (UX) is essential if you’re going to start a successful blog. There’s nothing more frustrating than a website that loads slowly or is frustrating to use as people aren’t always that patient when they’re trying to find something online. If they can’t navigate your blog easily, they’re going to get annoyed and they probably won’t come back anytime soon.
Everyone wants a website that loads quickly. It doesn’t matter if you have a e-commerce website, lifestyle blog or are trying to sell your homemade art quilts. If you’re struggling to build a regular readership, it might be because your blog isn’t very user-friendly.
Here are a few tips on how you can improve the UX of your website or blog to attract more customers, clients and maybe even land a paid sponsored post gig with Get Blogged or your favorite athletic clothing brand.
Please note: this is a contributed post.
Page Loading Times
How long are you willing to wait for a web page to load before you give up on it and go elsewhere? It’s probably not that long, maybe 5 seconds, 10 if you’re a patient person. Most people are the same so it’s vital that your page loading times are quick. There are a lot of different reasons why your pages aren’t loading properly.
Sometimes, it’s down to the theme that you’re using on your site. Some WordPress website themes load a lot quicker than others so, if you’re having problems, try changing to a different design. This might be all that’s needed to sort out your slow load time right away. If that doesn’t work, you may have bigger problems.
Often, pages load slowly because they’re just overcrowded. If you’ve got loads of pictures and videos that play automatically when the page loads and there are all sorts of animations on there, it can clog up the page and make it load slowly. Consider streamlining things a bit and stick to the things that you actually need on the page.
Your hosting service might also cause problems with loading times on the site. If it was working fine when you started out but, now that you’ve got more readers, things are starting to slow down, it’s probably because you aren’t equipped to handle that amount of traffic. It might be worth changing your hosting service to a better one that can handle the amount of hits that you’re getting.
Create a Mobile Friendly Website
These days desktop computer systems are almost a thing of the past. Many people are using their smartphones or tablet devices to get access to websites. If you don’t optimize your site for mobile devices, such as a refurbished iPhone, people will still be able to view your site, but the size will be off and it’ll be a real pain to navigate.
As soon as people go onto a site and find that it isn’t optimized for mobile, they’ll immediately assume that you don’t know what you’re doing and they won’t bother exploring the site further. That will result in people leaving your website as soon as they navigate it, causing the bounce rate in your Google Analytics to go through the roof. It’s an extra cost but it’s definitely worth it because it makes your blog a lot more professional and ensures that your readers have a good UX experience.
Easy Login Services
Having a login service is a good idea because it gives you the chance to offer a more personalized experience for your readers. You’ll also need it if you’re selling products through your blog or offer a subscription based service to your clients and customers. But people will find it frustrating if the login page is difficult to use.
Having a ‘remember me’ or ‘save my information’ function is important so people don’t have to type in their information every time they come onto the blog. You could even consider using Jumio, the world’s leading identity verification service. Your customers can use a facial recognition service to login which is far more secure than using a standard email and password setup and it’s a lot easier for them as well.
Use Familiar Layouts
Doing something interesting with your blog is important because you want it to stand out, but you have to be careful with your ideas. If you create a website that is completely unrecognizable, and it doesn’t have any obvious menu options or an easily accessible search function, readers are going to struggle to find what they’re looking for.
People don’t want to spend half an hour searching around a website to find the post that they’re looking for. It’s fine to experiment with your website a bit and come up with something inventive, but you still need the basic fundamentals on there so it’s easy for people to navigate the website without too much hard work. Always have a navigation bar along the top of the page on every page so people can quickly jump to the right section of the blog. It’s also important to have a home button so people can get back to the front page or landing page easily if they take a wrong turn.
Suggestions and Resource List
If people read a post and they enjoy it, they might want to read more. If they’re going to have a seamless experience and get lost in your blog, you need to make it easy for them to find more content that they’ll enjoy. That’s why suggestions for similar posts at the bottom of each article is very important.
Making your blog easy to use is one of the most important things to do if you’re going to build a regular readership.
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