User experience (UX) can have a dramatic impact on how your visitors and customers respond and relate to your website.  And remember that your competition is always just a click away so (within reason) you need to do everything you can to maximise the effectiveness and the ‘stickiness’ of your website.

Let’s quickly run through some ways you can achieve this:

Site Speed Optimisation

First of all, you want your website to load quickly.  Slow websites aren’t acceptable in this day and age, and frankly your visitors won’t accept it either. Plus it has the negative impact of lowering your search ranking as Google actively penalises slow sites.  So simply put, make sure you have all your technical ducks in a row so that your site loads fast rewards your visitors and rewards you more site traffic and more sales.

Don’t Forget About Mobile!

Mobile never used to be a consideration when developing a website, but those days are long gone.  Now, mobile is dominant, especially when dealing with consumer markets, and making sure your site is fully responsive (automatically optimised whatever the size of screen) is absolutely vital.

Easy to Navigate & Understand

Is your site logically organised and easy to navigate?  This is vital for both the search engines and for visitors.  A confusing website, or a website that requires a lot of clicks to get to the required destination, will put people off.

Now, some people say you should keep text short and to the point.  Whereas commonly mentioned advice by sales copywriters is “The more you tell the more you sell”.

Sound contradictory?

Well, the easiest way to put across all the information that’s relevant to your visitor, without overloading them, is to logically structure your site, and your pages, and make your pages easy to scan and for people to find what’s relevant to them.

Think of Amazon – its product pages certainly aren’t small!  But you can always find the information you’re looking for, right?

Answer Questions Quickly

Visitors to your site will have questions.  So the quicker and more thoroughly you can answer those questions the more likely those visitors will be to order from you.

Product specific answers should be included directly on the product page if possible.  And perhaps your site can have an FAQ section for more general questions.

And of course, be easy to contact.  By email, by phone, and even offer instant chat perhaps.  When someone is on your site, chances are they’re interested in buying, so overcome any objections they may have to buying there and then by answering their questions quickly.

Make Buying Easy

The easier you make buying, the more you lower resistance to the visitor making a purchase at that moment.  So how can you minimise that resistance? Well, make it easy for people to check out.  Complicated forms, asking for unnecessary information, making prices confusing… it all makes it less likely people will order from you right now.

And a big sticking point often is shipping.  People want to know not only how much the product is but how much it will cost to get to them.  Make shipping transparent, or even better, if you can offer free shipping, make a big deal out of it.

So these proven tactics can have a very positive impact on how visitors experience your site, and by extension how many visitors become customers.