92% of French households have Internet access in 2020, and each month, around 53 million people connect to it (source Médiamétrie). The Internet has become essential for information, entertainment and consumption. There is a plethora of options and users naturally favor the services and websites that best meet their needs and offer the most enjoyable experience. But how can you stand out from the crowd and offer content and design that stand out from the competition? Here are some essential tips and levers for visitors who are won over at first glance.
A visitor judges the quality of a website in just a few milliseconds. Images, fonts, interface, button style, loading speed… All these elements combined must contribute to affirming the quality of your offer, and this quality must be found on all devices: mobile and computer. Internet users are uncompromising: know that 88% do not return to a site that has offered a bad user experience. So, take care of your website because it is your best marketing and sales asset! Anything that scares away your visitors unfortunately results in a loss of revenue. And since you obviously do not want your marketing, sales and SEO efforts to fall through…
Take care of the design of your website
Ensure consistency in your interface (UI) design
Your design should be consistent across all pages of your site. Visual inconsistency between pages creates the impression of poor service and creates distrust.
So think about defining and respecting a graphic charter to maintain a unity of color code, fonts, layout, image quality, etc. In short, create the visual cues that make up your identity!
Also consider using contrasts on your pages, especially by using dark fonts on a light background and vice versa. Contrasts help with reading, and this is an important criterion for accessibility .
Highlight essential information
Highlight the most important information by organizing it in bullet points . This presentation saves time when reading and allows your visitors to spot key points more quickly.
This format can also be taken up by Google in position 0 (highlighted at the top of search results), so it’s a good point for your SEO!
Do you need to highlight elements? Illustrate them with images! Favor photos that provide information and enhance your products and your brand image. An example probably comes to mind: illustrating a product page with the photo of said product on an Ecommerce site.
To reflect the quality of your offer, make sure to distribute quality images, while ensuring that their weight will not weigh down your pages and therefore slow down their loading. To do this, you must compress your images (the new generation WebP or AVIF formats offer the best performance). This is an optimization that you can very easily automate for all of your pages thanks to the Fasterize engine.
Note that you can optimize your code to define the order in which elements appear on your pages, and prioritize the most important content. For example, to prioritize a visual or text that will be more useful to your visitors than a search feature, a chat module, or an advertisement – we’ll come back to this a little later about third-party scripts.
Make your links and CTAs visible
Your website’s interface design contributes to the fluidity of your users’ journey, so guide them so they know where to click.
Use specific colors and formatting for your links and Call-To-Actions (CTAs): favor underlined text for links, and colors that stand out from the rest of your page for CTAs. If they are not very visible or poorly placed, they risk not being clicked, and you will miss the opportunity to keep your visitors on your site by taking them where you want them to go: to the end of the purchasing process!
A little tip in passing: as we saw a little earlier that it is possible to organize the order in which elements appear in the browser, note that you can decide to give priority to a button or a CTA, for example. This is an easy technique to set up using our frontend optimization engine .
Finally, choose impactful keywords. Forget the basic “Click here” or “Read more”, be creative, really make people want to click and read more!
UX: guide your users on clear and fluid paths
Design pages with clear headings and think about internal linking.
Does your site have a large volume of pages and depth in navigation? Display a breadcrumb trail so that your visitor always knows where they are. Also favor explicit section or category titles to help your users quickly find what they are looking for, and think about internal linking (useful for your visitors and for search engines).
This will make it easier to explore your site between pages in the same category, from one category to another, etc. To do this, provide suggestions for links to articles or related content, and CTAs to encourage people to continue their visit.
Note that loading speed must absolutely support your approach: if your pages are not optimized and are slow, your visitors will think twice before clicking on a new page, because they will be afraid of having to wait for it to load. Conversely, with fast pages, navigating from content to content at lightning speed makes the experience natural and pleasant, and encourages engagement.
Here are some numbers to show you the impact of loading speed on engagement: Sites with pages loading in 5 seconds have average sessions that are 70% longer than sites with pages loading in 19 seconds.
Also, keep in mind that more than half of Internet users leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and that -0.1 second of loading can result in +8% conversions (Google data).
As you will have understood: loading speed is an essential asset for increasing engagement and the conversion rate on your site!
Now let’s tackle the thorny issue of JavaScript, which is sometimes essential to improve the quality of the user experience, but which can be a double-edged sword for your loading times.
Intelligently implement your third-party scripts and value-added services
Besides interface design and images, the perception of quality is also influenced by the value-added services you offer to your customers.
Personalization, customer support via a live chat service, geolocation, A/B testing solutions and tracking to improve the quality of the user experience… All these services contribute to satisfying and retaining your customers, but they can impact the speed of your site. Indeed, poorly implemented, third-party services can slow down the loading of your pages and degrade interactivity.
Fortunately, you can anticipate and limit this problem. As we mentioned earlier, you can define when you want the page to load different elements, including third-party scripts . To prioritize the most important content for your visitors and ensure that it is displayed first, you can load JavaScript asynchronously ( be careful, however, that staggering the loading of third-party scripts in time does not mean that they no longer weigh anything on the page, it simply means loading them at a more convenient time for the user).
So, the browser will process these third-party scripts later in the page load, to give the user the feeling that the page is displayed quickly and that they can interact without being frustrated that the site is not responding. Another good news: you can automate this optimization! This is the role of one of the features of our frontend optimization engine called DeferJS.
Finally, note that the lighter and faster your pages are to load, the more you will be able to absorb the additional weight of JavaScript. This is the conclusion of a study that we conducted on a selection of Ecommerce sites to consult here . Indeed, it is not necessarily the number of Third Parties that is responsible for the slowdown in page loading, but rather the way they are implemented.
Optimize your site speed with lightweight pages
As you will have understood, the quality of the user experience and your ability to convert depends on the design of your pages, but also and above all on their loading speed. Speed is even the number 1 UX criterion !
Fun fact, a user whose website is slow feels the same level of stress as if they were watching a horror movie alone – and you definitely don’t want to put your customers through that!
So, for lightweight pages that load quickly, here are some essential best practices to apply to your frontend :
- compress your images to next-generation formats and resize them to fit the screen size;
- optimize your fonts ;
- use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to bring content closer to your users;
- adopt a caching strategy to speed up the loading of your pages and optimize even those that contain dynamic content (we have a feature designed for this: SmartCache ) ;
- prioritize and prioritize your JavaScript ;
- optimize your HTML, CSS, JS resources (compression, concatenation, minification)…
This list is an overview of essential best practices, there are many more to make your pages fast. Start digging without further delay by reading this article and discover all our features to automate the optimization of your frontend !
All of these techniques can indeed be applied automatically to all your pages to save time and be more efficient. Also note that an automation solution allows you to maintain these optimizations over time , without having to start the same work again each time your site evolves. In short, you can speed up your pages and boost your conversions while relieving your technical teams. Not bad, right?
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