6 UX Best Practices For Your Website [Infographic]

Even the best content won’t be read or shared if it lives on a third-rate website. From the moment visitors land on your site, they’re having experiences that can dictate whether they come back or disappear.

Thankfully, there are some UX (user experience) best practices — that can help your site become a fan favorite. Our infographic explores six UX best practices to help take your website from a mess to the best.

1. Design for key interactions

Before you start designing or writing, figure out your site’s end goal. What is the action you want visitors to take? It might be buying a product, filling out a form, watching a video, or signing up for a newsletter. Once your goal is clear, you should design your site to make taking that action as quick and straightforward as possible. Don’t hide the desired action from your visitors; guide them to it with simple navigation, engaging copy, and bold design.

2. Minimize load time

Ever clicked on a website only to wait ages for it to appear? That’s the quickest way to frustrate users, and unhappy users are unlikely to come back to your site. According to Hubspot, 47 percent of users expect a website to load in under two seconds. A key UX best practice is to tune your site for speed. You can do this by optimizing images, enabling browser caching, compressing pages, and keeping any JavaScript files lower down the page.

3. Improve site navigation

Likewise, users will be left frustrated if they can’t find what they came for. If you’ve advertised your website as featuring an insightful blog, don’t hide it under layers of navigation. Make sure to signpost each section of your website and make your menus easy to use — especially on smaller screens. Remember, 67 percent of mobile users will leave a website if the navigation is frustrating, but it’s a simple fix if you pay attention to site navigation from the outset.

4. Make text readable

Not everyone who visits your site will have perfect eyesight — even those that do will struggle to read gray text on an orange background. The Web Accessibility Initiative lays out an accepted minimum of accessibility on the web, and it’s important you adhere to it. Experts recommend using a 12-point font for text and 1.2 spacing for body text. Avoid using illegible fonts and color contrasts.

5. Prioritize mobile-friendliness

Mobile use accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide, Statista found, so ignore mobile optimization at your peril. Mobile web browsing has spiked in recent years, and a study by Sweor found that 85 percent of adults expect websites to look as good or better on mobile than they do on a desktop. Google knows this, and mobile-friendliness is one of the top signals it looks for when feeding search results to users. UX best practices, therefore, require you to think about how your audience will use your site on small screens as well as big ones.

6. Use analytics

Websites create a boatload of data, so use it to your advantage. Check the analytics in your WordPress.com dashboard regularly to monitor your traffic. If users are bouncing from a page quickly, it might indicate an issue; if they’re failing to make the jump from your landing page to your most relevant content, you might want to reexamine how you’ve designed your web page. Analytics can help you to optimize for both UX best practices and for audience growth.

No matter what tactics you use to optimize your website for your readers, user experience is a key factor to keep in mind. Armed with these six tips, you can put your best foot forward and engage your audience more effectively.