User experience is one of the most important factors for the success of a digital project. Not only to please Google and improve your SERP rankings, but also to win over your audience and increase your conversion rate.

Without a doubt, aspects such as quality content and responsive design are some of the most important… But not the only ones, far from it.

In this article, we give you a series of useful tips to optimise your website and give the user what they want.

7 tips to optimize the user experience

1. Take care of the structure and ease of navigation.

Users today want to find information quickly and with as few clicks as possible. To do this, it is essential that you build the website with convenience in mind, using as few URLs as possible and arranging them in a logical order.

You can use a drop-down navigation menu or other hierarchical elements, something that speeds up the user’s journey to find what he/she wants.

Visual elements such as images or buttons also facilitate such a route. Take a look at the most common mistakes in terms of web structure:

Cluttered website that makes navigation difficult. The user has to spend too many seconds to understand how the website is organized and eventually abandons it.
There is no search button. Many of the users who come to a website are looking for something specific. Add a search button so they can find you quickly and don’t end up going to your competitors.
Menus with too many layers. Remember to minimise submenus as much as possible and provide as much information as simply as possible. The user will be grateful.
Put acronyms or abbreviations in the menu. Unless we are talking about well-known words such as the UN or the RAE, avoid abbreviations so as not to confuse the user.

2. Opt for an attractive design

The design of your website must strike a balance between efficiency and aesthetics. This means that visitors must be able to move around the website intuitively (which is closely related to the structure mentioned above) and, at the same time, offer a satisfactory visual experience.

In this sense, attractive images (and coherent with the content!) are very useful, as well as other visual elements such as graphics, buttons…

Which brings us to the next tip:

3. Select the right colour

Colour is a fundamental aspect that must facilitate the user’s interaction with the website and, at the same time, transmit the brand image.

Here are some tips:

Use as few colours as possible so that they interact harmoniously with each other and do not create a contrast that may mislead or disturb the user.
Use the most intense colours to emphasize what is important. For example, a bright orange for links or CTAs. But don’t abuse them, or they will lose the importance you want to give them.
If you can’t decide, there are free online tools to create the ideal colour palette for your website, such as Adobe Color, Colormind or Coolors.

4. Optimize loading time

As you may have noticed, today’s user is very impatient.

If a website takes more than 5 seconds to load, you will suffer a high abandonment rate.

To make it work faster make sure you optimize all images and graphic resources, and choose a simple design that does not hinder loading.

5. Improve readability

According to some studies, most visitors do not read the contents of the website in depth (at least at first glance) but scan the site in search of what interests them or catches their attention.

In order to facilitate this search and ensure that they do not give up, you must take care of aspects such as:

The font: the simpler it is, the easier it is to read.
Colour: make sure there is contrast between the letters and the background.
The format: put the most important keywords or phrases in bold, use italics, headings, bullets…

6. Move to responsive design

If you haven’t already done so, make sure you adapt your website to different devices, browsers and operating systems.

Otherwise, you will lose numerous users. Here we introduce you to responsive web design.

7. Test the website regularly

Analysing what the competition is doing can be very useful, but remember that each website is different and what works for one may be detrimental to another.

Therefore, we strongly recommend regular testing for strengths and areas for improvement For example, A/B tests, user surveys or heat maps.

And finally, remember: you are not addressing Google, you are addressing the user. If you take care of all these aspects and manage to optimize the user experience, Google will reward you with top positions in the SERPs. Need customized help for your website? Contact us!