Try Out These 6 UX Practices to Improve Performance

As a publisher, what do you care about the most? We think that the answer is quite obvious: trafficunique visitors, and their engagement. That leads us to the next question: how can you enhance a site performance and build the loyal audience interested in your content?

The very first step would be auditing your web design and content to understand if it is easy to navigate the site. You need to understand what your visitors expect and whether they find your articles useful. After figuring that out, we would recommend to try out a few basic UX practices that will help enhance performance and attract new users.

Why bother? In 2018, good user experience equals higher engagement. Make the navigation and browsing as easy as possible and people will come back to get more of your content.

How to Measure User Experience

There are three metrics to look at to understand how your site is performing at the moment. These are:

  • Bounce Rate
  • Unique Page Views
  • Visit Session Duration

These rates are essential to understanding if a user likes your page or not. If the Bounce Rate is high and the number of unique page views is low, you’re definitely doing something wrong.

You want to tailor your site according to your visitors’ needs, not your personal preferences. Get yourself a good analytics tool and keep an eye on these metrics to monitor behavior and make necessary changes.

Things to Improve

Different categories of people expect absolutely different things. An easy example: mobile users tend to expect your site to be faster than visitors coming from desktop. To come up with the right strategy, find out more about your audience.

The main point here is to build your site around their interests. While younger generations prefer minimalist, easy designs, seniors prefer text-heavy pages with lots of straightforward information. Demographics really matters. Do a thorough research to understand your average user and think about what he or she might like.

Although your strategy heavily relies on demographics, there is a couple of things that are valued by all Internet users. In this article, we will tell you what you can do to improve your performance regardless of the audience you are working with.

Speed Up Page Loading

Most web visitors expect a page to load within a couple of seconds. If it is longer than that, there are high chances they will click the close button. The study shows that even 1 second delay leads to 11% fewer page views, and after 2 seconds this number drastically increases. FYI, Google does not like it as well.

To improve the loading speed:

  • Remove heavy images and GIFs
  • Use fewer plug-ins
  • Reduce redirects and HTTP Requests

Clean Up the Homepage

No one likes heavy, slow homepages. Tidy it up as much as you can while saving the core message that explains what your website is all about. Get rid of all distractive elements and keep it real simple.

Try not to overcrowd your white space. If you have sidebars or distracting widgets, it’s better to put them in the footer. Internet users don’t like to get confused while surfing the Web.

Remove Unnecessary Text

Even for publishing websites having too many long-reads is not that good. However, if you feel like you cannot reduce the amount of text, at least make it readable by adding bullet points and keeping paragraphs relatively short. And spice your posts with visuals like infographics and charts.

Use the Right Language

Develop the right language to talk to your audience. You don’t want to use slang to talk to seniors, and of course, you do not want to address younger generations with complicated classic-literature epithets.

All Distractions Must Go

For sure your visitors didn’t come to your page to see tons of ads, rich media, and slow pages. Clear your site up to make it explicit and minimalist. While high ad density might be good for your revenue, it is not the best tactic for building the loyal audience. In the long run, having fewer but better quality ads is the key.

Be Responsive

Make sure that all users, regardless of the device they use, can easily access your resource. Your content should look impeccable on desktops, mobile, and tablets. What comes to your mind when a site you’re loading on a smartphone fails to adjust to the screen size? Probably that it is broken, so you leave it without having second thoughts. This is a bright example of bad user experience that you need to stay away from.

Test the Changes

Chances that you will hit the jackpot straight away are quite low, so keep going. Try tree testing to see how easy it is to find what visitors are looking for. It will help you organize the website structure and make the navigation flawless.

Don’t worry if you don’t see instant results; it might take some time to take it off. In the meantime, the Impactify team is here to help you with your UX endeavors. If you’re looking for UX ad formats do not hesitate to contact us as Impactify is the first of the kind video ad network providing smart, UX-oriented video ads enhancing publishers’ productivity.