Attracting a visitor is one thing, but captivating and retaining is another. It only takes him a few seconds to make his decision. The slightest frustration can make him leave your site and increase your bounce rate.
The consequence? Your SEO will start to tumble because search engines analyze the time that users spend on your site and deduce that your content is not quality.
For this, we will see 3 essential rules to respect so that your visitors feel at home when they browse your website.
OPTIMIZE USER EXPERIENCE (UX)
To capture the attention of your visitor, they must feel comfortable on your site. For that, each action with the interface of your site will have to be as fluid as possible in order to make him live a pleasant experience and to give him the desire to continue to consume your contents.
Here are some tips that will help you improve the user experience on your website.
Do not frustrate your visitors
The user does not like to be lost on a site and his degree of tolerance is close to 0. So if he starts looking too long for information or does not understand how your site works, it will generate him a sense of frustration. It is precisely this emotion that will trigger your visitor’s desire to leave your site.
Create landmarks
Navigation must remain fluid. For this, your visitor must make the least effort possible to perform an action.
The user interface (UI) of your site must have markers in order to be easy to navigate. Your menus, buttons, icons should include familiar elements so as not to confuse your visitors.
Example: For an e-commerce site, one usually uses the icon of a shopping cart to signify the shopping cart. Everyone is used to this. If you replace the shopping cart with an inventory type icon, your visitor will wonder about the meaning of this icon, because it does not appear in its usual landmarks. And hop, we trigger a small dose of frustration.
You can, you must innovate in the design of your site, but keep in mind that you must not disturb your visitors in their habits.
Avoid interactions that do not trigger any action
We still see too often on some sites animations that trigger the passage of the mouse pointer, but when you click on it nothing happens. It’s pretty, but it’s useless. Again, a small dose of frustration for the road.
Make your site readable
The choice of your typography is fundamental to increase the readability of your content. A bad font choice and your visitors will tire of reading your content. Choose a sans serif font, because it will be more readable on the screen. Choose a font size for each format (mobile, tablet and desktop). Air your texts, make short sentences and many paragraphs.
Optimize the display of your site for mobile
According to Statista, more than half of the global web traffic comes from mobile devices, this percentage is even higher in some areas of the world. For example, more than 65% of web traffic in Asia comes from mobile devices.
In addition, Google is now using the mobile version to rate your website’s ranking in search results. This point must be treated with the greatest attention.
OPTIMIZE THE CONTENT FOR YOUR TARGET
Remember that you design content for your target, not for search engines. You must optimize them for your SEO, but it is your visitors who will consume them and therefore judge them.
Who are your clients?
Who is your product, service for? If you are not able to answer precisely this question, you risk aiming next. You will be exhausted in producing content that will yield little or no result.
Study your target
The only way to capture the interest of your audience is to consider their needs and goals. For this, there is a method based on personas that can represent the typical profile of your different customers.
Personas are used to humanize your target and better understand their interests. A persona has a precise identity (name, first name, age, contact details, gender, etc.), a history, values , and behaviors. It also indicates its motivations, its brakes as well as its professional objectives.
The creation of your personas is a preliminary work on which you can later rely to adapt the design of your website and your content.
DECREASE THE LOADING TIME OF YOUR PAGES
There is one thing that the surfer cannot stand today is to wait. So, a site that takes 10 seconds to load is 90% of visitors running away.
In addition, the speed of loading a page is an important criterion for Google as part of the SEO of your site. You think to make a good impression in 10 seconds to the first visitor of your site … But today! You only have 3 seconds to attract the attention of Internet users. The speed and accuracy of navigation will make the visitors attractive. According to a study, 50% of users expect the instant opening of pages, less than 2 seconds.
A successful design is no longer attractive if it is too slow, loaded with a gadget or offset. Your website needs to be faster Prioritize the speed of loading pages during the web design process, speed as a major parameter. A website will no longer be credible if it takes 5 seconds to display the page, the user will not wait!
To optimize the loading speed of your site, there are several techniques. Here are a few:
Reduce the size of images
The images are mostly the elements that take the most space on a page and it is, therefore, essential to optimize them.
To reduce their size, you can:
- Reduce their dimensions.
- Compress your images.
- Give priority to JPG, PNG and SVG formats.
- Enable browser caching.
- Browser caching is a setting to configure on your CMS.
I personally Prefer SVG over JPG, PNG, and GIF. According to SitePoint, SVG uses numbers, shapes, and coordinates — instead of a pixel grid — to makes it resolution-independent and infinitely scalable by rendering graphics in the browser. Also, the SVG format is lighter than other formats. All you need to do is optimize SVG animation for faster loading speed.
It makes it possible to make sure that when a surfer comes to visit your site, his browser stores the data of the pages on his hard disk. When your visitor goes to visit another page with common elements (like the logo for example), those will load faster, because his browser will have stored in memory the data of your site.
Use caching of your resources on your web server
Whenever a browser requests the display of a page, the web server will generate this page by executing all the code of the latter. This time that will take the server to calculate the display of the page (a few milliseconds to several seconds) will cause a latency more or less long for your visitor.
To reduce this generation time, you must set up a cache system on your CMS server that will allow you to store all the pages already generated. When these are requested in the future, rather than regenerate them, your server will directly display those in the cache.
The caching of the browser (client side) and that of your CMS (web server side) are complementary.
Enable GZIP compression
To view a web page, your browser needs to download a number of files containing information about your content. These files carry a certain weight and will take some time to download. To speed up the transfer, you must activate the compression of these files (GZIP) on your server beforehand to reduce their weight.
Minify your HTML, CSS, and Javascript files
Minification is a process that will reduce the code size of your HTML, CSS and Javascript files. It’s still a few kilos bytes gained on the weight of your pages.
Prioritize loading content at the top of the page
This technique will not decrease the loading time of your page, but postpone the loading of non-visible contents above the waterline (imaginary line below which the content of the page is only visible if the ‘we are going down).
While the user reads the content available at the top of the page, the rest continues to load without having to wait for your visitor.
Digital Strategy — Web Developer
As you can see, there are many techniques to keep your visitors on your website. Do you have an opinion to share with us? Post your comments on the subject!
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