How to encourage a user journey through your website

Encouraging a user-journey throughout your website helps you to usher your visitors to key landing pages, with the minimum visitor loss and maximum in user experience. Whether you’re an eCommerce shop, a membership website or an online hub for information on a specific topic, you’ll have KPIs and goals for your site that you’ll use to measure its success.An intuitive user-journey is all about UX. To make sure you’re doing it right you must utilise a range of techniques. Everything on your website from its copy and SEO to its design and development contributes to a user-journey, so it’s always well worth reviewing what you can do to make that journey smoother.

A/B test page layouts Making a new website that works isn’t simply about what looks pretty. All websites have a function, and if you’re sacrificing substance for style, it might be time for a rethink. If there is a difference in opinion on two designs, or if you’re looking to try something new like a hamburger menu instead of a top-level navigation, the best way to figure out which will work best is to split test them. The process testing should be ongoing as it will help you to continually refine landing pages and content. Use website analysis software Google Analytics and other analysis software can be valuable for assessing the performance of your website and its pages. You can use this to track visitor pathways and determine the most popular pages too.Such software should also be used to see where you’re losing your website visitors – pages with high bounce rates or low engagement could indicate a poor user experience which should be addressed. Page loading time A well designed, high-quality website should load quickly. It’s no secret that website users today aren’t a patient bunch, so it’s vital that your website load promptly. Slow loading pages send visitors elsewhere and can impact your search rankings. If you have large videos or images on your pages, make sure they’re optimised, as this is the easiest way to decrease page loading time. Aesthetics This one may sound simple, but the colour and phrasing of buttons and content on a website can have a significant effect on a visitor’s likelihood to explore. For example, studies have shown that people are far more likely to want to click green buttons over red ones, so making calls-to-action green is a sensible choice. Again, it’s a good idea to do a little split testing so you can see exactly what phrasing and colours appeal to your audience the most.