User engagement on your website is a crucial factor in influencing the performance and ranking of your website. To enhance its levels of user engagement, every website competes with competing brands. Even if you get a lot of traffic, it won’t mean much unless you can engage the audience and persuade them to do the desired action.
The critical first stage in the conversion process is engaging users. Before you can persuade your audience to buy or subscribe, you must first engage them. Additionally, if visitors leave your website quickly, your bounce rate will suffer. So, if user engagement on websites is so crucial, how precisely do you boost it? we’ll provide 10 tried-and-true suggestions in this article to help you interact with visitors in a meaningful way.
10 Best suggestion for user engagements:-
1. Reduce page load time
Most likely, you’ve personally dealt with pages that take a long time to load. You find a link to an intriguing-looking website, click it, and are then forced to wait as the page loads. It’s likely that you leave the website since having to wait forever is annoying. According to a Soasta study, pages that load just one second more slowly can see a 56% increase in visitors who leave the page immediately. The user engagement of website will suffer as a result.
Check your website’s page load time using free resources like Pingdom to determine if it is under two seconds. If not, take the necessary actions to speed up loading by deleting extraneous items from your pages. Although photographs might be interesting, try to keep the number of images in each post to a minimum to make the page load more quickly. Additionally, you can obtain plugins that will ensure that the image doesn’t load until the reader scrolls to the desired location, reduced page load time leads more user engagement, as website’s page are more accessible in shorter period of time.
2. Improve your internal linking structure
A strong internal linking structure will improve user navigation while also improving your SEO ranking. With fewer bounces, you’ll be able to get more page views from each visitor. For user involvement on websites, both are necessary. To link to further related content on your website, try employing relevant anchor texts.
An excellent article from Kissmetrics outlines some broad principles for this. But first, the essentials
Links should be particular, hyper-relevant, and have meaningful anchor text.
They should visit a fresh location (aka: not somewhere as easily accessed from your main nav.)
For instance, in the sentence above, I used the anchor word “bounce rate” to link to an infographic about bounce rate. This is a great illustration of how internal linking functions. This can also be used to increase website user engagement. However, if you employ internal linking too frequently in a piece, it could irritate readers (and search engines).
You can also include “Read Also/Recommended for You” links in the midst of the post if there is a certain piece of content that is extremely pertinent and deserves to be highlighted, which will increase user engagement with website.
3. Display related content
Internal linking and this website user engagement suggestion are fairly comparable. Just show the most pertinent posts at the end of each page. This makes it simple for readers to access posts that are relevant to the one they were reading earlier if they need more information.
While you can do this manually, you can also shorten the process using plug-ins, which automatically place snippets for more posts or pages at the end of your content. It allows you to display these posts using either a thumbnail or text link.
Some examples of WordPress:
- YARPP
- Jetpack
- Contextual Related Posts
- Related Posts Pro for WordPress (premium – $$$)
- Yuzo
4. Simplify navigation
What if many people who visit your website depart because they can’t locate what they’re looking for?
Many websites are too challenging to use, which leads to a high bounce rate and low user engagement. Restructure and simplify your navigation system to make it easier for visitors to get the pages they need.
Look at the illustration from Threadsforthought.com below. The navigation menu in this instance is well-organized. Where to find deals or the newest lookbooks won’t be a mystery to visitors.
Several factors that contribute to poor navigation include:
Unreachable navigation bar. Depending on the design of your website, “sticky navigation”—or navigation that follows you as you scroll—might be advantageous.
Poor classification Make sure your main navigation allows users to access all of your most crucial links. However, a huge jumble of links serves no one. Put similar links together.
For lengthy loads be careful; reliable navigation may occasionally cause your above-the-fold load speeds to decrease. Make sure your navigation is planned so it doesn’t cause your homepage to load slowly. Bad Navigation or unreachable navigation leads to poor user engagement.
5. Choose your writing style
By influencing how readers react to your information, your writing style can have an impact on how many people use your website. What is effective for one audience base might not be effective for another. On the Internet, a friendly, casual conversational tone and a more formal professional tone are the two writing styles that are most common.
From popular Internet marketing websites to quirky and entertaining informational websites like Buzzfeed, the majority of websites choose to follow the first approach. However, commercial websites with more serious information could do well with a formal tone.
By selecting a brand voice, you may not only engage your customers but also set yourself apart from the competitors and gain their trust. Distilled has a fantastic deep dive if you’re seeking to learn more, and if visitors are comfortable with writing style, then they will stay more on site which leads to more user engagement.
6. Use a responsive design
52.7% of people worldwide used their mobile phones to access the Internet in 2015, according to Statista. Nearly 7 billion people used mobile devices worldwide in 2020 (!). This means that creating flexible websites is essential for Internet marketers to engage both desktop and mobile users. Good website user engagement may be hindered by the tedious nature of navigating your desktop website on a mobile device.
A fully responsive website allowed Bioware to completely engage users. After the change, they saw a staggering 119.97% rise in new users and an 80% drop in bounce rate. With an average of over 4,500 game downloads each month without any advertising support, Bioware also increased product engagement.
Several “fast” no’s if you’re trying to make your website mobile-friendly.
The obvious: pinching and zooming are outdated. Make an attempt to create a website that is compatible with mobile devices (in particular, for your checkout and product pages)
When compared to screen size, cursors are smaller than fingertips. Adapt the size of your buttons accordingly.
Ensure simplicity. On a desktop, several elements seem fantastic, but on a phone, they’re difficult to use. Get rid of them and concentrate on the important information.
7. Study your audience
By conducting a survey, you can learn more about the tastes and principles of your audience. This will assist you in producing content that your target audience will actually find engaging. Ask them about their preferences and what they hope to receive from you. Ask them if there are any design elements or areas of content coverage they feel you are missing.
Your input will highlight areas where you need to make changes to boost website user engagement. For adding polls and surveys to your website, I advise using programs like Survey Monkey. Make sure to include brief, straightforward questions in any survey you create. Don’t waste your visitors’ time with drawn-out surveys.
Other approaches to better understand your audience include:
IDIs (in-depth interviews) (in-depth interviews). One of your better options for qualitative research is this. It involves really speaking with your audience, creating reports, and gathering a tone of insightful, detailed information on how they engage with your business.
Testing of users. Examine how consumers are interacting with your website to learn where they are running into difficulties, what they find puzzling, and how you might work more effectively with them.
Transcripts of live chats. A smart technique to find issues is to read back your live chat questions. When visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, they will let you know. Listening in this manner is simple.
8. Add a prominent search box
Too many websites misunderstand this. It seems a little ironic that you have to look for the search box.
Some visitors to your website are looking for a specific item. They’ll depart if they can’t figure out where to find that. Make it simple for visitors to find what they’re looking for to engage them. Include a visible search bar that people may quickly use to find particular material.
You’ve probably noticed that the search box is typically located in the upper left corner of websites. Users typically anticipate the search box to be present. While keeping your search box design straightforward is preferable, including features like a drop-down menu or auto-suggest could increase website user engagement. Here is a great illustration of a search box that is easy to see from ShaneBarker.com. The box is more obvious since the magnifying glass is red, as can be seen.
9. Collect email addresses
User engagement with website users involves more than just interacting once with a new visitor. It also has to do with your capacity to encourage repeat visits to your website. This can be accomplished by obtaining their email addresses, which you can then utilize to notify them of new content. Great tools for developing an opt-in form and your email subscriber list are provided by plug-ins like Bloom.
The most common option is to have a pop-up opt-in form appear when visitors land on your page. On the other hand, you may add a subscription form to the sidebar of your website. After readers have thoroughly loved your content, including an opt-in box at the conclusion of postings may help to keep their interest. A subscription form may be found at the bottom of each blog article on the Crazy Egg website.
10. Hold contests or giveaways
The best method to enhance every facet of your performance is through contests and freebies. They increase website user engagement, page views, subscriptions, and conversions. Create your giveaways so that participants receive incentives for completing particular tasks. You may offer a reward for recommendations, content sharing, social media likes, or product evaluations and testimonials, for instance.
Office Adventure, an app that brings together multiple offices to embrace a fit lifestyle, is a good example of how the advantages may be plainly observed. Sweepstakes were employed to boost user engagement on the website as well as brand recognition.
Conclusion
You need to take advantage of the aforementioned advice because website user engagement is a crucial factor in determining a business’s effectiveness. Instead of just choosing one, test different options to find which works best for your website design. As you can see, keeping your website appealing, engaging, and user-friendly should be your primary concern.