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UI Design Web Design

7 Handy Tips To Improve Your Website Design

It is a known fact that today’s business is conducted online. From shopping to marketing, to communicating with providers, people depend on the Internet to help them perform everyday tasks. Without a website, businesses, blogs, and brands can’t be successful. That’s the reason why everyone is on the internet today. With millions of websites, it becomes extremely challenging to stand out from the crowd. A website usually has 4-5 secs to create an impression on visitors; that’s very little time. Therefore, website designers must ensure that they create a website design that ensures a delightful, user-friendly experience.

We often talk about the latest design trends, user experience enhancement, interface enhancement, and a lot of other things. The idea is always to keep improving the website experience by offering the best. However, a lot of times, we tend to forget some basic actions which can elevate the website design and experience to a whole new level. Here are a few tips.

Use White Space

First things first – Whitespace doesn’t mean a lot of white color, its the way designers term the empty space or negative space. Research and studies suggest that the use of white space in the left and right margins, and in between paragraphs, increases reader comprehension by almost 20 percent. Adding white space means more user interaction, the page looks better, and you can highlight your CTAs with more ease if you have enough white space to go around. It balances the visual elements by creating a visual hierarchy. Whitespace increases content legibility and acts as a separator.

Optimize The Page Speed

Website speed has long been discussed in the world of marketing, and it’s one of the main reasons why a lot of visitors bounce off from certain websites. People are impatient on the internet. They don’t like to wait and expect instant responses to their queries. If your website doesn’t load within a few seconds, to be honest, 2-3 seconds at the max, the visitors will most likely bounce off looking for other options. 

You can check your page load speed through a Google-free service, where you can get information on your page speed. Google will also offer you some suggestions for improving your page load time on Mobile and Desktop. 

To improve your page speed, start by compressing all your images before loading them onto your website. The image file size is one of the leading causes of a slow page speed — using websites like compressor.io can help you dramatically speed up each webpage you own. There are several ways to optimize page speed.

Create a Responsive Website Design

With the revolutionary advancement of mobile and other devices, your website is most likely to be accessed from devices other than PCs and laptops. It’s critical that your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate no matter what type of device your audience uses to access it. 

Google started penalizing sites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices from 2015, making the need for responsiveness even more crucial. This is probably the most valuable way to improve your website’s usability. A responsive design will do wonders for your website in terms of SEO and will help you position yourself higher in SERPs. So, create a mobile version of your website, use mobile plugins, and convert your website into a Responsive Web Design (RWD).

Make a Clear Call To Action

Some interesting facts – SAP found that orange CTA buttons boost conversion rates by 32.5%, while Performable found that red CTA buttons boost rates by a whole 21%. In creating buttons for your website you should think about color and the psychology of color. Different colors evoke different messages. Think about the message that you want to evoke for a user (trust, experience, intelligence) and choose your colors wisely. 

A second thing to consider is the actual words you use for your buttons. The words should include a verb or an action word that excites the user to do something. Use actionable words in them such as discover, start, learn, etc. Calls to actions (CTAs), clearly marked with an action word enable your website users to more easily navigate your site and get exactly what they want in the location they expect to find it.  

Utilize Social Media To The Fullest

22 percent of the world’s population is on Facebook, Instagram has 800 million active monthly users, Linkedin has more than 540 million user profiles, and Twitter has 100 million daily active users. These figures are staggering, which is why it’s important for your website to offer social buttons to your visitors. There’s a chance that they will like what they see, share their thoughts on their profiles, and boost your presence even further. 

Any website improvement ideas should involve taking advantage of social sharing and social following. Social sharing options are a fantastic way to improve website design. Use social media icons of different social media sites to allow users to share your content. The idea is to get guests to share your content when they like what they read. Sharing content puts it out for everyone else to see without you having to do any work. This will allow your website to become more popular and gain site visitors that would have never known about you otherwise.

Use Eye-Catching Images In Website Design

People across the Internet are getting smarter and faster at judging company websites before deciding if they want to browse the site further. When they first visit your site, they can easily pick out a generic stock photo they’ve already seen elsewhere or that resembles the non-personal style of stock photography. Using stock photography can decrease trust and also stand out as generic and non-unique.

With an audience that only has an attention span of 5-6 seconds, you need to create a lasting first impression that easily gets the main points across. This should be done with short, powerful sections of content and applicable photographs/icons that are sectioned off by clear and concise headers.

Website design is the foundation of user experience and needs constant attention and improvement. Are you looking to revamp your website? Or, need help in deloping your website from scratch? Talk to our experts now!

Categories
Technology Web Design

How To Optimize Your Website Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights

Today, the entire web revolves around Google, and therefore it becomes very critical to analyse our websites based on Google’s algorithm, to do necessary changes. According to Google, a website can lose almost half of its visitors while loading. This highlights the importance and criticality of keeping the page load times to a minimum, to maximize user experience. That’s valuable information, but what’s the next step? Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools may be just what you need to leverage data collected through speed testing.

PageSpeed Insights

There are a lot of factors like too many large images, files, and plugins, which slow down a website speed or server response times and that is where PageSpeed testers come in. It’s a known fact that Google offers a variety of helpful resources for web developers and PageSpeed Insights is just one of the many free web performance tools that can help you check your speed score, boost your page load times and significantly improve the user experience. PageSpeed Insights is designed to direct your actions against slow speeds, resulting in bad performance. You’ll get a swift operation across all devices.

PageSpeed Insights is not an advanced level tool (which developers use for advanced analysis of slow load times), but a relatively lower-level tool that is useful for small websites, particularly those that run on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.

To use PageSpeed Insights, all you have to do is enter a URL into the address bar on the PageSpeed Insights page, then click “analyze.” The test will take a few seconds to complete, and results for both mobile and desktop devices will be displayed in separate tabs. You’ll want to repeat this test for each page on your site or at least those with concerning speed issues.

Now that you know about Google PageSpeed Insight, here’s how you can optimize your website to achieve a better page speed using the insights from PageSpeed.

Optimize Images

High-quality, heavy images are the most common factor contributing to slow loading of a web page. This warning from Insights is best solved by installing a plugin such as Optimus Image Optimizer from KeyCDN. With a bulk optimization feature and a focus on compression without any loss, this plugin can drastically decrease the image size, without affecting the quality. With one click, you can compress your entire existing library, and all images will be compressed upon upload. To top it up, the plugin can compresses images to the .webp format, which can be used in combination with WordPress Cache Enabler to ensure much faster download.

Minify Javascript And CSS

Minification is the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser. A Javascript or CSS issue can be highlighted by the PageSpeed Insight tool and it can also be fixed by installing a plug-in. The Plugin by the name of Autoptimize is the best way to deal with this issue. Within Autoptimze’s settings, you have the option to enable HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code optimization.

Render-Blocking Resources Above the Fold

Any JavaScript or CSS file that is above the fold is render-blocking. This issue can crop up from two sources – JavaScript/CSS files and Fonts. If the issue is of JavaScript/CSS files, it can be fixed by saving the following settings in Autoptimize:

Uncheck “Force JavaScript in <head>” under the JavaScript Options section
Check “Inline all CSS?” under the CSS Options section.

Some fonts can be problematic since they use CSS above the fold. Depending on what type of font you use, whether it’s Font Awesome, Google Fonts or any other type of font, all workarounds require you to bring these elements below the fold code-wise.

Use Browser Caching

This is an issue that can be solved with the KeyCDN plug-in alongside WordPress CDN Enabler. These two plugins deliver assets with cache-control headers. However, there are some cases in which themes or certain elements are not delivered with the CDN. In this case, you will need to play around a little bit with the code in .htaccess file in order to manually add cache-control headers to the server of origin.

Reduce server response time

Server response time (SRT) is the amount of time it takes for the web browser to receive a response. If the server response time of your website is relatively high, then that can lead to slow loading of web pages. If this pops up, you would need to first ensure that you have sufficient resources to handle your traffic. Choose your web server carefully, and optimize your web servers and database.

Talk to our experts to get more info on Google PageSpeed Insights and how it can be used to efficiently optimise your website.