User engagement is an important determinant of a successful website. Typically, this means that visitors landing on your website should read through your content, interact with various forms, and click through a call-to-action that suits their search intent.
To create a successful website, you should understand user engagement and how this website factor can increase leads, traffic conversions, and revenue.
What Is User Engagement?
User engagement essentially describes the value that online visitors find in your website.
According to neilpatel.com, customer engagement is a key factor that determines search engine ranking positions.
Essentially, the main goal of search engines is to provide online users with the best answers for what they are looking for.
If Google determines that your website isn’t triggering enough user engagement, it assumes that it isn’t providing any value to readers, risking your SEO strategies.
Common examples of user engagement include website visits, clicks on links, purchases bookings, newsletter sign-ups, interaction with chatbots, social shares, watching videos, comments, and contact forms.
Key metrics to monitor include:
- Conversion rates
- Average click-through rates
- Average page views
- Number of new and returning visitors
- Website bounce rates
Website Design Tips to Increase User Engagement
Good web design is among the many ways of increasing user engagement.
Besides avoiding these web design mistakes, consider the following web design tips to increase user engagement.
Improve Your Website Speed
Your website should load faster if you want to keep your visitors engaged with your website content.
Even a one-second load speed delay can affect user engagement and conversions. Fortunately, you can get analytics regarding your site’s load speed from Google Analytics and other tools.
If your speed is below average or recommended speeds, work with WordPress developer Sydney experts to improve the speed.
Unknown to most site owners, monitoring your website speed and performance should be done consistently.
Improvements that can improve your site speed include:
- Compress images into small file sizes
- Eliminate all 404 redirects
- Use lazy load option if your images are heavy
- Minify CSS, HTML, and JS files
- Delete old posts, themes, and plugins
- Enable a caching solution
- Choose a reliable website hosting provider
Visitors will stay longer on your site and are willing to read more if they don’t feel their time is being wasted waiting for pages to load.
Declutter Your Site Layout
Apart from slow loading speed, a lot of information can confuse site visitors, leading to high bounce rates.
If your web layout has a lot of components, you should switch to a simpler design. For instance, your website menu should be staged centrally to make it easy for visitors to navigate.
Make use of white space and readable fonts to make it easy for visitors to read your content.
Your online visitors should find whatever they are looking for within three or four clicks.
If your website navigation is difficult, most visitors will ignore your website, which increases bounce rates while user engagement plummets.
To simplify your site’s navigation, provide a simple navigation menu and make good use of the landing page.
Including a search box at the top also makes it easy for visitors to instantly find what they are looking for.
Choose Your Color Schemes Carefully
It is normal for businesses and eCommerce stores to use color schemes that reflect their brand to stand out from other competitors.
However, while this is an effective way of making your website appealing, consider several study findings associating color choice to people’s perceptions.
For instance:
- Blue, green, and white colors are the best colors for gaining trust
- Blue, green, and black are thought to make people feel safe and secure
- Red, orange, and yellow are associated with speed
- Brown, orange, and yellow colors are associated with cheap items
- Yellow, purple, brown, orange, and grey are generally the least favorable colors.
Upload Longer Posts
Several studies have found that content between 1000 and 2500 words has higher user engagement than short blogs.
The longer the content, the more time people spend reading. However, writing long posts can be dangerous, especially if your text contains a lot of fluff.
Always ensure that you provide high-quality, informative, and relevant content that adds value to your readers.
Endnote
Many other web design tips, such as developing a mobile-friendly site, including a chatbox, and displaying related content, can boost user engagement.
To improve your web design and user engagement, engage the services of a WordPress Developer for assured results.
