How much do users love your website? You probably monitor the number of visits you get on a regular basis, but do you check how long they’re sticking around for? Visits don’t mean much if you don’t get the desired action you’re after, which is why you need to do everything you can to make them stay long enough and see it through.
Keeping tabs on the average spend time on your site is important because if it’s low, then it will increase the bounce rate of your site and ultimately impact your conversions. You can use Google Analytics to see how much time users spend on your site, and if it’s not looking great then it’s time you got to work to fix it.
Here are our top 5 tips to make your website experience more enjoyable for your visitors.
Polish your design
Review your site above the fold area in both mobile and desktop view. Is it easy to understand what you’re about and does it grab attention? Your most important message should be here. If it’s not, there’s less chance you’ll get users scrolling to read more.
Your site should be easy to look at, so if it’s too busy remove the clutter. Add high quality images that are engaging not cheesy stock photography. And make sure they’re optimised. High res images will impact your page loading speed, and a slow site will only encourage an early exit. If you’re unsure about how to improve your design then enlist the help of a specialist website designer like us!
Give your menu an overhaul
Take a look at your menu. Is it hard to navigate? You’ve established a path for users to follow, but if it doesn’t make any logical sense or the content is getting lost, then it’s time you revamped how your menu flows.
Make sure any categories and sub categories are clear and accurately reflect the content that sits on the page. Are all your navigation elements clickable? A user’s natural instinct is that they will be.
Tidy up your content
There’s a lot of things you can do to improve your content. From the quality and readability of your site, you should always be looking to make your content better. And the last thing you want is a site that’s difficult to read. You want to make sure it’s easy to scan, because let’s face it, that’s how most people read websites.
A few things that will make a difference is how you structure your content. Break up any long paragraphs with headings or bulleted lists, keep your sentences short, simplify what you’re saying (avoid jargon), and make sure your font size is big enough to read on mobile devices.
Enhance experiences with video
We all know video is an effective tool to engage and interact, and if you can capture a visitor’s attention with something of interest through video content, then you’ve already done the job to keep them on your site longer.
Offer incentives
This is something a lot of bloggers and digital marketers use to generate leads. And it can be something as simple as sharing research findings or a whitepaper when they subscribe to your mailing list, sign up for an account or complete a survey. If the information you provide is useful, then you’ll also gain their trust as a subject matter expert.
Once you’ve made a few tweaks, review your analytics after some time again to see if the average time spent on your site has improved. The key is to never let your website go stale. Continually enhancing your site – be it through design or content will encourage visitors to return and stay longer.
Want to get your website up to scratch? Give us a hola at Cloud Cartel – Perth’s web design experts.
