10 Ways To Improve Website Customer Experience

Customer experience isn’t just about your actual product, it’s also about aiding your customers in their buying journey. If you’re an online entrepreneur or business owner, your website is where your customers start their journey - website customer experience matters!

Every business’s goal is to make their customers happy and ultimately generate sales and make them come back to do more business with you. But you can’t do this unless you provide a good experience to your customers while shopping on your website!

If you’re looking for a way to do just that, you’re in luck because we’ve listed down 10 possible and easy ways to make your website more customer friendly!

1. Speed up the website’s load speed

Now, this is an important step to take if you want to improve the website experience for your customers. Your website could lose a lot of money if it takes a few seconds longer to load.

In fact, let's show you some numbers that will shock you. 

If a page takes one second longer to load, it could mean the following:
There were 11% fewer page views.7 percent drop in the number of sales16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction

According to a different study, more than 47% of customers expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. Even scarier is the fact that 40% of people will leave a page if it takes 3 seconds or more to load.

The numbers above are huge. In fact, it's terrible, as this article has already said. What does this mean then? This means you don't have much time to catch the attention of potential customers, who will leave your store if you don't.

How to make a page load faster

2. Make it easy for users to navigate your website

A bad experience for a customer on your website can hurt your growth. People will get mad if you make it hard for them to get around your website and don't help them find what they're looking for.

Ko Marketing says that more than 47 percent of people who visit a company's website go to the page about its products and services before looking at anything else. So making your site easy to use goes a long way toward giving your customers a great time.

More than 76 percent of the people surveyed by HubSpot said that the most important thing about a website's design was that it was easy for them to find what they were looking for.

To make it easy to find your way around a site, you need to organize it and make as many categories as you can.

You can also reduce the number of clicks on your website that aren't necessary. You also shouldn't use things like auto-scrolling or random pop-ups that make the experience less enjoyable for your potential customers. Customers should be able to quickly find anything they want on your website and should find it easy to get around.

Your site's navigation should be easy to understand and use.

3. Make it easier to checkout or pay

Online payments that are difficult to complete are the worst. You're already willing to pay the company but they're making it hard for you - it's like they don't want your money.

Believe it or not, a huge chunk of people who buy online abandon their shopping carts. Whether it’s for reasons that they don’t like the product, still thinking about it, or God knows why - making the checkout process longer and less easy just be another burden to that list, and that’s not favorable to your sales. No one wants to wait forever to finish a payment process when they can just go to another site that makes it easy to pay online.

Just make the checkout process short, sweet, and simple!

Allow guest checkout

A lot of e-commerce sites have a sign-up form right before or during the check-out process. This step interrupts the process, which makes the customer angry - we all know what happens after that.

Who would have thought that the checkout process, which is one of the last things a customer does before buying a product, would have such an effect on their experience?

Let the customer finish the process as a guest, and then you could ask him or her to sign up.

Offer multiple payment options, if not, the most universal one

This can depend on your market and where you're selling.

Let's say your customer wants to pay you through PayPal, but your website doesn't have that option. There, you lose a big point. Do give customers more than one way to pay so that the checkout process is as easy as it should be.

Let's say your customer wants to pay you through PayPal, but your website doesn't have that option. There, you lose a big point. Do give customers more than one way to pay so that the checkout process is as easy as it should be. Sign-up forms shouldn't change how things work

4. Keep people interested with long-form content

What's wrong with articles that are only 500-700 words long? Well, there's only so much you can say in a short amount of words.

Give your customers more content that will help them decide whether or not to buy from you. More customers will find you through the content you share on social media, in newsletters, and in other places.

Long-form content can be made in a number of different ways. It could be any of the following below:

You can add pictures, videos, audio files, screen grabs, and other interactive elements that will make it more interesting to the end user.

Search engine rankings are amplified by long-form content. Also, research shows that because it has so much value, a lot more people tend to share it.

Protip!

Search Engine Land says that the top ten search results on average had articles with at least 2,000 words.

Backlinks to long-form content are also more likely to be there. People are more likely to like long-form content because you can add a lot of value to it. This isn't possible with short-form content.

Users will also have a better time on the website if it has content that is useful to them. People are more likely to share the content if it is very useful. With more shares, your business will be seen by more people. This will help you get more customers.

5. Pay attention to the design

Content and design work hand-in-hand, blend them in the best way possible to make your website better for your customers. If the content is king, its queen is the design.

You could have the best content on your website, but if it's surrounded by designs that are at best average, your customers won't be motivated to take action.

Users no longer want just the bare minimum when it comes to their user experience. People like to hang out on websites that look good and have a lot going for them. If you don't catch a small spelling mistake for a long time, it could mean the end for you.

The wrong color or layout can make a big difference to a person with a good eye. Adobe says that 38% of people will stop looking at a website if it doesn't have a good layout.

Look for designs in the same niche as yours that look modern, load in almost no time, and have all the colors planned. Add modern design elements to the website and make sure they only improve the customer's experience. All of the best practices for design should be done to the letter.

Some other things to keep in mind about the design and layout of your website are:

6. Define your brand's personality

Even if you're not a big company with a lot of money and time to spend on clever marketing, you can still be interesting and impress your customers by using your imagination. Asking yourself questions about your business can help you figure out the personality you want your brand to have. A few simple questions can give you the ideas you need to build the personality of your brand.

Here are some questions to help you figure out the personality of your brand:

What sets you apart?

• Is there something special about you that makes you stand out?
• What do you want people to think of your business?
• Think about the things you sell. Is there a way to find a theme or mascot that ties them all together? Create a brand personality by building on this idea.

Copy what your competitors are doing. It's not wrong to use the ideas that your competitors are working on. In fact, it is a good idea.

7. Make sure your site's content is the best it can be

Good content is without a doubt a great way to improve the experience of customers on your website and make more sales. Break the content you want to be written into simple ideas, and then write those ideas down.

The copy on your website shouldn't be boring, either. The more interesting it is, the better. Tell your customers how your product can change their lives in the content.

Even if it doesn't look like it, customers are listening. A small spelling mistake might be all it takes for your "target market" on social media to make fun of you.

People are less likely to trust a business that gives wrong information or misspells words. Even though there are tools you can use to reduce mistakes, it is better to hire a professional proofreader to meet your needs. You can also polish your writing with free tools like Grammarly.

Grammar can make or break your image

People are less likely to trust a business that gives wrong information or misspells words.

Check the grammar of the text on your website, too. It has to be free of mistakes and easy enough to understand in one reading. You can also use different tools to speed up the process of making content. A new set of tools for GPT-3 speeds up the process of making content. One tool like this is called Jasper AI.

8. Improve customer service 

Customer service is, was, and always will be a key part of giving customers a great experience, whether they are shopping online or in a store. But you don't have to take care of them every time, which used to be the case.

Most customers today prefer self-service customer support, like chatbots, where they can follow instructions and fix problems on their own. This not only takes some of the stress off of your staff but also cuts down on the costs of running customer service. It also saves the customer from having to wait for someone to help them on the other end of the line.

Create an FAQ section

FAQs make it easier for people to help themselves, which is why you shouldn't send too much information to a certain segment. Make sure that frequently asked questions get to the point.

But that doesn't mean that all customers will like that. There are still parts that want a personal touch and choose to call or email. When that happens, you should train your team in the right way. They need to understand what your customer is going through, listen carefully, find out more about the problem, and be able to solve it right away.

9. Pay attention to customer feedback

Customer reviews are yet another way to make your website better for your customers.

Quick facts!

• Google notes that pages with reviews that include a keyword or the name of the city tend to rank higher in the local pack.
• Studies show that 88 percent of people trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations.

But you need to place reviews strategically on the product page so that your customers can see them easily. By doing this, you help your customers make better decisions about what to buy.

At the same time, customers feel valued when they have the chance to post reviews. This also makes your brand seem more trustworthy, which makes customers more likely to stick with you. What else? You learn more about them and can serve them better. Thanks to these helpful reviews, you can figure out what they like, what they don't like, what they need, and more.

10. Optimize your website

Everything discussed above is probably elephants in the room that no one is aware of until they’re pointed out, optimizing your website on the other hand is the opposite. The answers aren’t obvious unless you have a specific tool to let you know which part needs revamping and which parts are doing great. You don’t see it with your naked eyed.

What should you do?

Use a conversion rate optimization(CRO)  tool that comes with a website heatmapping feature. This type of tool gives you a visual of the exact spots on your website and web pages where the customers are clicking or not. If they’re not clicking where or scrolling they’re intended to, that means you should probably change your CTA or move some elements to where your website visitors can see them – that and among other recommendations, you can get from Conversion Rate Optimization tools. 

You can use Howuku’s CRO tool to understand your customers better with the help of a heat mapping tool! You can try it out for free!

Your website is your customers' main source of information, and in most cases, it's also where they buy from you. As a responsible business owner who wants to do well, you want to make sure that customers have a good time when they visit your online store. And if that is what you want in the end, you need to work hard to improve how your customers feel about your website.