How To Build An Easy-to-use Website Which Reaches Customers Most?

“Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that.” -Paul Cookson

It is obvious that a website is a wonderful channel which can help you grow your business more easily. However, be careful because if your website is way too complicated, customers will definitely run away. It is not always that big websites have the appeal to customers, simple and easy-to-use ones can be cool, too.

You are a web designer for your business but also your own customer. Therefore, think about what the website would be like when you use it, then develop a proper one to draw customers’ attention.

Table of Contents

• Problems that may keep customers away from you
• How to create a user-friendly website?
  • Understand your targeted audience
  • Make a smart-looking and responsive website
  • Crucial business information should be prioritized
  • Clear navigation is in need
  • Fewer choices but with more details
  • A useful blog
  • Simplify buying steps
  • Pay attention to mobile version
  • Loading speed
  • Website Security
• Final Words

Problems that may keep customers away from you

There are many companies which have developed their websites for many years, but they still strain to pull new customers to their online business. So, what are the reasons? These following problems may be the answer:

• Websites remain undone or unsophisticated: Perhaps some people do not have time to maintain their websites since there are many other factors in the business to concern from marketing to sales and human resources. Or some are overwhelmed by technical requirements such as coding or plugins due to a wrong chosen platform that leads to a poor-condition website. For example, many websites are full content in one language but they have nothing when you turn to English.
• Artistic but not efficient: Your website may be stunning and look like a masterpiece. However, if it does not support you in selling your products, then it should stay in an art gallery or exhibition. This might be because some business owners hire a freelancer to build their websites, but the designer could lack basic knowledge of SEO. As a result, they may attract customers, but do not reach profitability.
• Too complicated and non-friendly organized: When a customer access a website, they need it to be simple and easy to keep track so that they can find the products or necessary information. With a complicated website, customers will get lost or annoyed sometimes, which make them leave your website forever.

How to create a user-friendly website?

Understand your targeted audience

Your customers should always come first. If you have gained a potential number of offline customers, that is a great support to a solid idea for your website. However, you must plan and develop it carefully. Think about what users will do when they enter your website, or else you may be able to lose both old and new customers.

Ask yourself that with this type of products or services, what suitable platform you should choose. If you create a website like that, will customers find it comfortable and convenient to buy? For instance, your products are baby clothing, is it possible that parents would like to click and buy at a full black-themed website?

Trying to connect with new customers is also essential because they might become one of your future loyal ones. Therefore, your website should radiate some trustworthy. You need to show visitors that you are an expert in the particular field, also what value customers can get from the experience on the website, buying and using your products and services.

Tips:

• Ask your audience. Let them leave feedback or rate the friendliness of your website
• Surf around the internet for alike websites. You will learn a lot from your competitors

Make a smart-looking and responsive website

First impressions on your website are critically important. This is an element which makes your customers decide whether to stay with you or not. Imagine that you are entering a website full of unrelated information and disorganized filter, do you want to keep going? Now you will understand how customers may feel. How you should put all things together and categorize them in the right order may increase customers experience while shopping at your online store.

Customer service such as message box, FAQ or hotline should be put at an easy-to-find place. Search function definitely needs to be taken into account. Every website must have a search box so that customers can conveniently find what they want. You should consider readability as well, things like font size, contrasting color of the font and your theme. Make sure that your customers can read everything on the website.

It is also necessary to customize your website theme. Although there are many available online themes that you can easily buy to make the website more simple and professional, you should customize it to match your brand in order to help your business stand out from others. Some web designers recommend not to put many sliders and carousels to avoid bad user experience.

Tips:

• Pick a relevant theme. See theme collections for Magento 2
• Employ chatbots if necessary
• Feature a friendly instant search box (AJAX technology is preferred)
• Re-design and try to optimize your FAQ page
• You can ask for support from a team of reputable web design experts

Crucial business information should be prioritized

For many visitors, when surfing an online store, they might not find products but the company’s basic information first. You have to display your business information such as name, contact info, addresses, social media, what your company is about, your missions so that new customers can have an overview of your business and gradually conceive their trust.

You may want to show some great comments of your biggest partners or customers on the home page to raise credibility. Or some infographic about your company’s ranking (if it is helpful) can be a plus point to prove your excellent business.

Clear navigation is in need

As mentioned above, do not let your customers get lost. Try to keep your navigation bar basic to not freak the customers out. You need to be clever when placing names for various content pages on the menu. It depends on your navigation strategy and what you think customers may follow in the most convenient way.

There is a standard that you may want to remember. Most people have a tendency to look at vertical navigation on the left side of the page and horizontal navigation on top of the page. Find what is more suitable for your site to make it simple and smart for users.

Among e-commerce websites, the term layered navigation is not unfamiliar at all. Especially with stores selling many products, clear and user-friendly navigation is a must

Tips: Don’t play with your visitors’ familiarity with the navigation. They will always prefer the left sidebar Keep the navigation and menu bar simple and easy to search for products AJAX loading in layered navigation is good for loading speed

Fewer choices but with more details

Less is more. Remember to know what makes you different, do not try something beyond your capabilities. It will be more efficient when you understand your ideal customers and offer what they actually need. By doing so, you will learn how to make your products and services more profitable and create opportunities for a prosperous business.

Also, to make customers less confused about your products, add more details. They will be more comfortable to read a defined description about a product, several feedbacks or perhaps a tutorial video of how to use it (according to Forbes, 65% of senior executives visit a vendor’s website after watching a video). Customers always seek professional of a website so that they can place their trust in your business to keep going.

A useful blog

This is where customers may justify whether you take care of your website or not. A blog can share other helpful content to support your customers. Fresh content should be created regularly on the blog so that you can keep your customers up-to-date. Do not hesitate to be creative, you can insert videos, photos, graphics or any new form of content to make your blog an interesting place to read.

Tip: If you’re looking for a free tool to build your blog on Magento 2, take a look at Better Blog extension.

Pay attention to mobile version

It is a big mistake for many companies that they focus too much on building their websites but totally forget the mobile version. In this era when everybody possesses at least a smartphone and/or a tablet, people tend to buy things through their phones rather than PCs or laptops. So if your website is friendly to computer users but not to smartphone lovers, you are about to lose a great number of potential customers. If you want to improve the situation but are stuck with the idea, you can read this article for some help.

To attract mobile users, your checkout function also needs to be quick and simplified. Pay great attention to this. When customers purchase a product by their phone, they are not able to see all the information due to limited screen size. Therefore, buying steps should be optimized to bring the most convenience to your audience.

Loading speed

The speed of loading your website is crucially important. Customers may want to stop visiting your site if they get irritated by slow-loading process. You should assess and invest in how your website loads on both mobile and desktop devices. Ask your programmers to fix it if there is any problem occurs. This is a technical issue that can totally be handled, so you must improve it immediately. If you need assistance with optimizing your website’s loading speed, consider consulting with a professional web development chicago agency. They have the expertise and knowledge to enhance your website’s performance and ensure a seamless user experience.

Tips:

• Optimize images appeared on your website. See tools which help.
• Minimize HTTP requests
• Prioritize lazy loading
• Uninstall unnecessary plugins on your site
• Reduce redirects
• Monitor the speed over time, and don’t forget to test the speed on mobiles

Website Security

A lot of customers are always in worry because of security problems on many websites. You should have an HTTPS certificate to ensure your collected data is safe from hackers. Some situation that you need to collect sensitive data of your visitor such as credit card information or personal contacts, make sure that they cannot be stolen. This is why you can use a good WordPress table plugin to make sure the data sets are presented properly and safely.

Learn more: Security for Magento 2 - a tool to secure and protect your online store

Final words

A website is considered as an effective promoting employee for your online business. Therefore, you should make a clear plan to build an easy-to-understand site for your customers so that they can have a wonderful experience shopping at your store. By doing that, not only will be more customers attracted to your site, but also your business will have more chances to thrive.