How To Improve UX By Focusing On Just One Factor

Great user experience is something that determines a successfulness of a web development process in approximately 50%. It's a thing you cannot fail to ensure, otherwise, your site no matter how incredible it is will be forgotten and gone into oblivion. Empires like Google, Amazon, Apple and others spend millions of dollars on just one component that basically affects overall website performance and user experience as well. What's this magic component? Well, sit back and pay careful attention to what the Program-Ace team is about to share. In this article, you can learn the very first thing you should consider when creating an astonishing UX, how to improve the performance of your web pages and how to hold desired target audience.

Let us ask you, what comes to your mind when you think about the user experience? Generally, it's quite common for the people to consider graphics, cross-platforming (responsiveness across various devices) and navigation as the main factors of great user experience when they judge about the UX of the website. They google the term 'best UI/UX practices' or 'best UI/UX design' and find concept terms like attractiveness that cannot really be tested manually. However, they completely forget about their personal experience and preferences.

If you are one of those people all you need to do is to think about the thing that bugs you most when you pull up a website. We can give you a bit of a clue. This thing has nothing to do with an attractive design or intuitive navigation. Even if you spend a hundred hours designing a bewitching art and put it on your website or hire a professional content writer that ensures you with top-notch content, this one big thing could happen and destroy all your efforts.

No clue yet? All right, we are lifting a curtain. This BIG component that many manage to mess up, although well aware of its existence, is a loading speed of your website. Quite easy, right? However, a lot of website owners and developers when building a site focus too much on the way the website looks instead of how it works. You should realize that nowadays users are spoiled and unwilling to wait. Moreover, with tons of other websites out there they can be easily distracted with another opportunity. In addition, your users can be far from a location of your web hosting. We can assure you, it all matters. People are likely to interact with a website when they can focus on the content instead of waiting for it to download.

Once you realized that loading speed will provide you with a significant part of UX, we guess, you are ready to move to the identifying of a page that fails the speed test. To help you deal with it, we gathered a small list of services that can help you to find a black sheep.

Tools & Approaches For Identifying Pages That Provide Bad UX

#1 Initiate a Speed Test

There are many free tools and services that give you a clear picture of the loading speed of your pages. Each of these testing tools has its own exclusive techniques of assessing the page speed and evaluate different parameters, so you can get a comprehensive picture when you try each of them. Generally such services analyze the code, server response speed, media content and give you recommendations on how to advance the website loading speed. We advise you to try:

• Pingdom Tools

The summary table gives an exhaustive data about every request that has been sent to the server and average load time of a particular page. The Amazon.com hereinafter will be our test subject just to give you insights about the data you can receive.

• GTmetrix

Test the website through its Canadian server provides a lot of analytical data and loads recommendation from Google and Yahoo about optimization measures.

• WebPageTest

This service loads page twice, compares the two tests and shows detailed stats for each of them. In addition, the service keeps screenshots of how the website looked at every second of downloading.

• Google Developers Tool - PageSpeed Insights

This tool analyzes the page loading speed in Google, evaluates it on a scale from zero to one hundred. Moreover, this service demonstrates weaknesses of the website right away and leaves advice how to improve the speed.

• Monitis Tool

This service examines the download speed in different regions of the world and shows stats of each test.

#2 Run a Comparison Analysis

The second approach can be represented by two great services. One of them is MaxCDN that analyzes the website loading speed from twelve locations all over the globe. The second one - Dareboost - initiates the competition between two websites, for instance, one is yours and another one is your competitor's.

Moreover, you can repeat the test up to 100 times and get an average loading speed. Nevertheless, it's better to be faster than your competitors because that way it's much easier to win more leads and sales. In addition, you can use another service - Whichloadsfaster - to compare the loading speed between any two websites.

#3 Take a Closer Look At Google Analytics

Bounce rate is the most important parameter you should consider in Google Analytics when you want to improve your loading speed. Bouncing is a situation when a user comes and immediately or after a couple of moments leaves without paying attention to other pages. If your bounce rate is high, you should better fix the loading speed and review the quality of your content at the same time.

Basically, the free tools above are designed to help you to improve your website loading speed and as soon as you start considering the recommendations and improving the site performance, you will notice the grown in page visits and conversion. Fast websites provide good UX at first sight and users are more likely to let some other problems pass, for instance, media content optimization.

Of course, if you are a website owner that has no practical experience in implementation of the recommendations received from all these metrics, you should give it into the hands of professionals. The Program-Ace web team delivers an astonishing user experience to a lot of users and helps many business owners to optimize their website in order to ensure great UX.

Victor Terekhovskyi, Marketing Specialist at Program-Ace