Often, a website is the first impression potential clients have of your company. High-quality web design can create a sense of confidence in your business that converts readers to customers. In part one of this series, we discussed attracting more customers by employing emotional language and prominent Calls to Action. Now we are going to tackle two key web development topics—load time and mobile experience.
Load Time
You do not want the first emotion associated with your brand to be frustration. And it’s frustrating to users when they visit a website that is slow to load and where elements appear at different times. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. On top of that, speed is key for site engine optimization (SEO). Google specifically targets site speed as one of the signals to its algorithm to inform search rankings. Plus, a slow load time means that search engines can crawl fewer pages, so some of your carefully curated SEO keywords may not get picked up. All in all, fast page speed is better for both SEO and user experience.
Mobile User Experience
Creating sites that are accessible across platforms is an essential part of web design. According to Global Digital Future in Focus (2018) from comScore, the majority of users access online content on multiple devices — desktop, smartphone, tablet, etc. And, mobile users spend more than double the amount of time online compared to desktop usage. To keep pace in the modern world, your website needs to be easily viewed on a mobile device.
Ideally, your site should be both mobile responsive and mobile-friendly. A mobile responsive design creates dynamic content that changes based on the size of the screen. The images and text may be in different relative locations on a desktop than on a smartphone. The navigation menu is condensed, images are optimized, and the padding and spacing are corrected for the screen size.
Mobile-friendly content is about intentional design. The layout should make it easier to consume on mobile devices. Offer fewer menu choices, and instead create longer pages so users can scroll for more content. Many sites are mobile responsive, but most are not laid out to be mobile-friendly. By employing both mobile-friendly and mobile responsive design strategies, you create a vastly improved user experience. This creates more leads that value your services more.
Once users are on your website, you want to keep their interest. In our next post in the series, we will be talking about audience engagement strategies for websites. While you wait, check out our post on using blogging as an SEO strategy.
