Website usability can be loosely described as the experience of your visitors as they interact with your website. Usability takes into account all aspects of a site’s design that makes it user-friendly to the visitor.
Very often webmasters become so obsessed with using different SEO tactics, that they forget the actual aim of SEO is sales conversion. This is where website usability plays an important role. For the more usable your site is, the higher the chances are of your visitor coming back or taking an all important action like subscribing to your e-newsletter or calling to enquire about your services.
Making sure that your website lists high on the usability factor is of vital importance as a website with low usability frustrates visitors and drives them away. Listed below are ten easy ways to improve your website’s usability.
- Use a simple and uncluttered design: This is the best way to attract users. Upon arriving at your site, your readers must clearly be able to see what you can offer them. This attracts them and will draw them deeper into your pages. Be sure to remove all extraneous and unnecessary materials that distract your reader’s attention.
- Compress all of your images: Compress your images to the right file type (JPEG for photos and GIF for simpler pictures with only a few colors) to enhance website usability. Also try to place your images on a different domain by hosting your pictures on a sub-domain. This will reduce loading time.
- Make the site functional: A functional and effective site increases usability. Visitors to your site should easily able to get what they are looking for. When you website meets your readers’ needs or answers their questions, they are more likely to come back.
- Avoid using Flash based animations: Use Flash based animations only when needed. Flash presentations eats up bandwidth causing unnecessary delay when loading.
- Find a good quality host: Choose a host who provides you with one or more dedicated servers. This will help in speedy loading of the website.
- Use trouble free navigation composition: Navigation bars, menus, footers need to be easy to observe and trouble-free to click and if possible placed in the same way throughout the website.
- Use an appropriate body text: Never make the mistake of using a curly font or a small font size. Stick to the commonly advised body text and size prescribed for websites. Using Verdana, Tahoma or Arial is a safe bet.
- Separate your website and database: Databases take up a lot of your servers CPU space. Try hosting your database on a different server to prevent your website from having to share its bandwidth.
- Split your JavaScript: Splitting your JavaScript (in the same way that you split up your CSS) is a great way to improve your website’s speed and loading time.
- Add notification buttons: Using notification buttons (for example, “your registration was successful”) on your website increases its usability by making the user more aware of their actions and status.
