The web is full of difficult to use websites that serve to frustrate their website visitors, which is exactly the opposite from what these businesses should be doing.

The fact is how your content reads has the same if not more, importance to how your website looks visually. 

Research result after result shows that if a website visitor can’t find what they are looking for, and quick, they will abandon your website.

If your website content is difficult to understand, or the navigation menu is too complex, visitors will end up leaving your website unsatisfied. Once you lose a user, it is harder to get them back to your website.

So, how can you avoid your website doing the same to your users? Here we share six different effective methods to avoid visitor frustration with your business website.

Keep your navigation simple

There is no need to have 50 primary menu items; you need to sort your information flow better than that. Ideally, a menu has no more than 10 items in it. 

For example, if you want an ‘Our team’ page, then you should put that within the ‘About’ section, as a sub-page, rather than as a main menu item. As an example, the 6Q website shows the three main pages in the top menu, and then a lengthy list of pages at the bottom.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

There is a reason nearly every website uses the same common menu naming conventions (home, about us, contact us). Website users learn to look for these menu items, and it becomes second nature. 

Don’t be tempted to try and be more creative than you need to be, and use ‘Methods of Communication’ instead of ‘Contact Us’. 

Believe me, there are better ways of being creative than making your navigation and links too complex. All you are doing is making it harder for website visitors to find the website pages we are looking for.

Don’t hide your contact details

There is nothing more annoying for someone, than to look to your website to find your contact details, and then have to hunt around everywhere to find an elusive email address or phone number. Put them everywhere – even in the footer of every page. 

For example, on this Australian IT consultants‘ website, they display their phone number and email address on the top of every single page.

The quicker people can find your contact details, the more likely they will actually contact you, which for most brands, is what a website serves to do anyway.

Make content readable

Write short paragraphs and utilize headings and subheadings. For example, look at this article – there are no long chunks of text, with no line breaks. Everything is written with sub headings and to make it easier for people to read.

Research shows people tend to ‘scan’ a page before reading it properly. Use sub headings and short paragraphs to aid the visitor in quickly searching your content for the information they are after.

Offer different navigation methods

You could try linking text within your content to pages with more information. Another method is to have a sitemap with a comprehensive list of pages within your website. If your website is large enough, it may make sense to also have a search box.

An example of this would be any number of newspaper and media websites, who typically have a search box and navigation menu on the top of every page, which stays there as users scroll.

Different people navigate in different ways, so allow as much of your audience to choose their favourite methods.

Watch your website statistics

If there are key pages not getting any website visitors, ask yourself why – perhaps these pages are too hard to find, and need to be promoted more effectively?

Summary

There you have it – six very effective methods that will help you avoid visitor frustration with your website. Improve these elements, and you will have happier website users, and in turn, more enquiries, leads and sales. Good luck!

The post Six Ways to Avoid Website Visitors Frustration appeared first on Tech Web Space.

Now, not only do we need to ensure we write great blog content, we also need to care about our blog speed for both human users and robots like Google. Here I share eight proven methods to improve the speed of your website in no time at all – and the best part is that they are nearly all free to do!

Choose a fast hosting provider

It all starts with where you host your blog. Having a super cheap host is pretty much a guarantee it is going to be slow. The cheaper the hosting, the more sites they need to host on each server, to make money.

Try using a service like webpagetest.org to see how fast various hosting companies’ websites are. Ideally, find one of their customer’s websites to test, because they would put lots of effort in ensuring their own is faster.

You can also search for reviews of various hosting companies. For example, search “[hosting company name] reviews” or “[hosting company name] speed”

Keep files to a minimum

The issue with many WordPress themes, is they come with dozens of files that get served with each page load. Having many files, no matter how small they are, slows everything down. For example, a randomly chosen blog I looked at, although reasonably fast, still has 25 files being loaded;

• ·         9 x images
• ·         6 x script files
• ·         6 x CSS files
• ·         3 x font files
• ·         1 x HTML file
  

Those 25 files all need to be loaded by every user’s device, before they can enjoy the content!

A speed test tool like Pingdom (free) will show you how many files a site has, under ‘Requests by content type’ in the results.

Use cache plugins

There are a number of great caching and speed plugins for WordPress. My favourite is WP Rocket (paid), however I have also heard great things about two free plugins, W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache (very similar names, I know).

The reason I like WP Rocket, is that it is very granular in what you can turn on and off. I find each theme can be a little bit of work to tweak so it is best optimised, without breaking any features. It is, however, a paid product, so won’t suit everyone’s tastes.

Optimize those images!

It’s absolutely important that you add images to your blog. Quality images look fantastic, however they come at a speed and performance price.

The first task is to always ensure you resize images to the exact size you actually require. Uploading a 3,000 pixel image when you only need a 900 pixel wide image, is just wasting resources. If you don’t have a paid version of Adobe Photoshop or similar, then I recommend the strangely named but feature packed, Photo Pea. It’s free and browser based, so there is nothing to install.

Upload your photo or image to Photo Pea, select Image Size, change it to the right size and then export the result. I find using Photo Pea to export as JPG already makes the file size pretty small.

Another free tool I love is Optimizilla. Drag and drop your image files, and then let it compress the file size. I often find anywhere from 30-70% file size savings, with no loss in visual appearance. That’s well worth the 10-30 seconds per image it takes me to upload and download.

Keep all plugins up to date

It’s fairly easy to ignore those plugin update warnings, and soon enough your website or blog has 20 out of date plugins.

This can be an issue for security exploits which is super bad of course, but also there are plenty of developers who are constantly improving the speed of their plugins. So do yourself a favour and keep the ones you are using up to date at all times. This definitely will help speed up your WordPress blog.

Fix any crawl issues

Google’s own Search Console is an awesome resource for website owners. One of the features it has will highlight any issues with your sitemap or page crawls, meaning Google actually makes suggestions for improvements for you.

Signing up is free, and there are plenty of helpful articles about Google Search Console to get further advice on how to best use it.

Use a content distribution network

This sounds very technical, and it can be, however the concept behind content distribution networks (CDN for short) is that they host your blog files closer to where your users are. 

That means they have a copy of all your images and files in Australia, as well as France, in Mexico and in Africa, etc.

Whilst most CDN providers are commercial, you can get a free albeit limited account with Cloudflare, who are one of the biggest CDN providers in the market.

Uninstall inactive themes and plugins

Whilst WordPress may not necessarily load these files every time, it still makes zero sense to have a bunch of themes you are never using, or plugins that you will never activate, sitting there in your WordPress install. 

As long as you don’t plan to ever use them, and they are definitely inactive, it makes sense to delete them from your WordPress blog so you never need to worry about them in the future.

In conclusion

So, in summary, by ticking off all eight of the above speed improving methods, you are putting your best foot forward to speed up your WordPress blog, ensuring it is as fast as you can make it for both humans and robots alike.

Best of luck in keeping it up to date, and all the best for blogging success!

The post 8 Fast Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Blog appeared first on Tech Web Space.