6 Strategies To Increase Your Blog’s User Experience

It could be that your site is too complex, unattractive, or difficult to navigate. Followers and potential customers hoping to click a quick link and find engaging content become easily frustrated and may give up before they finish reading, and in some cases before they start.

Here are 6 tips to help improve your user experience and retain more followers:

#1 Avoid Clutter

Absolutely nobody wants to be distracted by a moving background of digital confetti or automated videos that begin playing as soon as the page opens. If they’re here to read, you want to make it easy for them to read. You don’t want too many items to distract them from reading, and they don’t want to scroll through half a page of filler content before getting to the part they were looking for. Keep your site clean and streamlined.

#2 Pick An Easy Font

While you may want to personalize your blog to differentiate it from competition, doing so may be the difference between keeping your readers and turning them off. Simple black text on a white background is the easiest for people to read, hands down.

Make sure that your paragraphs are broken up into short, digestible chunks, and that users aren’t looking at a wall of text. Avoid the bizarre like red lettering on a navy-blue background. It isn’t just ugly, it’s difficult to read.

#3 Simple Site Design

Make it easy for users to navigate your page. A few simple tabs across the top, appropriately placed buttons for sharing via social media, and a way to contact you or sign up for a newsletter are all you really need. Having too many options or different methods of arranging your content can confuse and irritate potential users.
If you find yourself struggling with this aspect of blogging, consider hiring a contractor that can do it for you.

#4 Pop-Ups

Finding the perfect balance between engaging your users and annoying them can almost wholly be decided based on your pop-ups, slide-outs, or other triggered calls to action. Your readers will easily be able to accept one such pop-up. However, adding more of them is going to aggravate the potential customers, especially if they cover the content they’re trying to read. Stick to one pop-up that will trigger or slide-out when the reader has reached the end of the piece. If they liked your content, they’ll sign up.

#5 Improve Performance

If your site is slow, you’re going to lose readers. How long your readers are willing to wait for the page to load differs depending on the type of website, place, and time of the year. However, usually, if it takes more than 4-5 seconds, they may close the window before it finishes.

This is another reason to avoid pop-ups and clutter on your site as the more items there are to load, the longer it will take. If you’re not sure how long it’s taking, your analytics software can tell you. If your site is optimized and you’re still facing high load times, you might want to consider changing your hosting service.

#6 Mobile Friendly

According to recent statistics, 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile experience. If your followers have to zoom in on your content and move it all over the screen to read it, they won’t. And 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if they take more than 3 seconds to load. Making sure that your content is seen is critical to gaining and keeping followers, so don’t skimp on the mobile experience.

One of the biggest keys to converting visitors to followers is making sure that not only is the content engaging, but that it’s also accessible. Improving your user experience is one of the best things you can do for your blog.

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