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Tag: website speed optimization

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UI Design Web Design

7 Handy Tips To Improve Your Website Design

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
Design SEO Web Design

5 Ways To Improve Website Performance By Combining Web Design And SEO

Website Performance

In today’s world, where approximately 93% of the buying circles start on the internet, it’s critically important to maintain a high-performing website. And, you must realize that there are several factors which should be considered while trying to improve your website performance. For starters, your website must rank high in Google search to enhance your presence. The better you rank, the more is your web traffic and conversions. People think that only focusing on SEO will fetch them high rankings. Well, it takes more than just SEO. Your website also needs to be designed well, or you risk blowing away all the organic traffic.

SEO and web design go hand-in-hand more seamlessly than many people might realize. Their components mingle and flow together so well that, when executed correctly, your visitors should simply start navigating through your site, without actually noticing anything about what you have created.

So, what are those elements where SEO and web design collaborate? Let’s check them out.

1. Mobile-Friendliness

Anyone who’s even slightly familiar with SEO or web design should already know the importance of making your website mobile-friendly. Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor in 2015. It then introduced mobile-first indexing in 2017. It’s obvious how much importance Google gives to mobile-friendliness. Sill, a lot of websites don’t acknowledge the importance of creating a mobile-friendly website.

Read More About Mobile-First Indexing Here

The trend of searching has changed over the last decade or so. People are searching more on hand-held devices, especially mobiles, and searching less on desktops; the number is steadily increasing. More than 50% of all web traffic is driven by mobile devices, which means more than 50% of your audience is most likely to be accessing your website through mobile phones. Without a mobile-friendly website design, you could be unintentionally squandering half of your users. If your website has a high bounce rate due to not loading properly on a phone or tablet is going to send wrong signals to Google, and your rankings will tumble down.

2. Website Speed

We all know how important website speed is for the success of a business. People on the internet are impatient, and they want answers to their questions within seconds.  If you haven’t been ranking well, it could be that your website is just too slow and people are bouncing quickly.

And, If your website loading speed is slow, you must know what’s slowing your website down? It could be something to do with your web design. Website speed is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, and it’s a primary deficiency for many websites.

Ideally, your website should load in two seconds. When it takes longer than three seconds, half the users visiting your site are likely to abandon it. Page speed is more critical on mobile devices, where people are even less likely to spend time waiting. Web designers can consider various elements like image optimization, content suppression, CSS optimization, etc. to speed up the site.

3. Sitemaps

Web design can help with the crawling of your website in more than one way. A sitemap is a crucial element to have in place if you want search engines to be smarter about how they crawl your website. Your sitemap provides search engines with a guide of all the pages and content on your website. This gives you the chance to tell search engines what pages are most important to your site.

In addition to their benefit to search engines, sitemaps also aid in user navigation. A new visitor to your site can refer to your sitemap to get around it. Sitemaps also contain essential metadata about your web pages to give them a better chance of ranking highly.

4. Easy-to-Read Design

If you’ve been working on improving your SEO, you would have been focusing a lot on the content. Some people might not realize what a huge impact the design of a website can have on your content, or at least the presentation and structure of it. A poorly designed website can make it impossible for users to read the information on your website. Oddly placed content blocks, with a lot of hyperlinks, don’t serve a clear purpose. 

At some point, you’ve probably been on a website that had a text that was impossible to read because of the page design. Maybe it was a light-colored text on a pure white background or a dark color on black. But the issue is not always color. The text may also be too big or small or written in a hard-to-read font. Like websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, sites that are difficult to read on any device or desktop are going to turn people away quickly. 

Web designers understand how to create websites that make it easy for users to absorb your content, so you get the most for your money. White space, line length, and any extra elements such as images can all affect how people pay attention to your site. Also, remember to consider people with disabilities by going for an inclusive web design format.

5. User Experience and Trust

Unlike some other SEO factors, you really cannot measure how much people trust you or your website. However, gaining trust is still a huge part of getting your website to rank higher. There’s no doubt that most people are quick to form opinions, and once they have them, it can be challenging to change their minds. Over the years, we have gotten used to seeing perfected websites that provide phenomenal user experiences. This is what we naturally expect to see when we open a website. We want something clean, easy to navigate, and that can quickly give us the information we want. We tend to think these kinds of sites seem more trustworthy.

If a website looks old and outdated or is too difficult to use, most people will be left with a bad impression, and they could leave and not come back. You could have a product or service that might be exactly what they are looking for, but your website doesn’t convey this. A bad website will make it look like your business or organization simply doesn’t put in much effort.

Conclusion

Higher ranking in popular search engines is crucial, for which SEO is vital. But, not just SEO. If the best practices of website designing are carried hand-in-hand with best SEO practices, your website will become more efficient and perform better. Please speak to our web design experts for more details.