Is your website engaging your users as much as it should be?
A lot of businesses struggle with website interactions and bounce rate. If you’re getting the traffic but not much is happening after that, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong!
The success of your website depends entirely on you, so if you’re unhappy with your website interactions it’s up to you to improve them. Luckily, there are lots of ways you can do this!
Take a look at our guide on how to boost website interactions and start improving your site today.
1. Reduce Your Load Times
If you’ve taken a look at the heatmaps of your site (like these from Decibel) and you’ve realized that not many people are even scrolling past the first page, let alone clicking anywhere else, it could be your loading speeds. There have been tons of studies into this, and the evidence is conclusive; the longer your site takes to load, the higher your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the number of users who click off your site before having moved around it and clicked on any other page, so it’s vital you keep it as low as possible!
For example, this study found that at 2 seconds, websites have an average bounce rate of 9%, while 4 seconds soars to over 20%, and at 5 seconds you could be losing 38% of your traffic before they’ve even had a chance to take a look at your site! If you’re looking to increase website interactions you need to reduce load speeds by keeping your site simple, optimizing your images, and make sure you have a host who can cope with your needs.
2. Improve Your Internal Links
Links are important for a website for so many reasons, including SEO! But, did you know that internal links could also improve user engagement?
By adding links to your pages to direct users, you can help to create a journey for them to follow. You could have a link to your products on your home page, for example, and a link to your about page on your products page, encouraging your audience to keep moving rather than clicking off. This is such a simple way to boost your engagement, making including it a no-brainer!
3. Simplify Navigation
Users don’t want to have to work hard to navigate your website. So, make sure yours is easy enough for even a 5-year-old to get around!
Include a clear navigation bar at the top of your page with bold page headers. Try and minimize the number of pages you have on your bar, using drop-down menus if you need to rather than cluttering your site menu. A great way to make navigation simpler than ever is to have your site menu scroll with your site, making sure that your users can switch pages even when they’re halfway down one.
4. Make Sure Your Site is Responsive
When it comes to website user engagement, you need to be thinking about all devices. With billions of people now accessing the world wide web on mobile devices, making sure your site works on these is vital to its success! You should optimize your site for desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones to make sure everyone can access it.
This means making sure your features work across devices and changing them if they don’t. Your pages should also be formatted to fit different screens, otherwise they’ll be all over the place! If you’re not sure whether your device is responsive, access it from a mobile device and see how well it works; if it’s not designed to be responsive, it will be pretty clear.
5. Look at Your Insights
When you have a website, you should have access to insights and analytics, too. These look at your traffic, bounce rate, which pages are the most popular, and where people leave your site; and that’s just a start! There are tons of different analytics you can pull from a website, and using them is essential to your success.
In fact, a lot of professional sites launch first as a basic version. They then tweak their websites and conduct A/B testing to see which features their users respond to positively and which they don’t. It could be something as simple as changing the color of your call to action buttons that boosts user engagement, and analytics will help you work that out!
6. Collect Email Addresses
User engagement isn’t just about new customers and trying to lead them through your site, but also about keeping them coming back. If you can increase your list of loyal browsers, you’re going to automatically boost your engagement and, in turn, your profits! One great way to do that is through emails.
By collecting user emails, you can keep in touch with them. You can send them offers, inform them of new products, and make sure they remember your brand! Eventually, you’ll build long-lasting relationships with people who want to browse your site.
To collect emails, make sure you offer something in return. For example, you could offer a 10% discount sent to their inboxes when they sign up to hear more from you. People won’t want to give you their email for nothing, so always make sure you give them an enticing deal.
Boost Your Website Interactions
Boosting website interactions isn’t hard when you know how, although it can be a time-consuming process. But, in the long run, it’s well worth it! If you think that this is a bit beyond your skill level or you don’t have the hours to put in, it could be worth hiring a website developer to help you out.
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