You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention and keep them on your website. If you want your visitors to stay longer and read your content, your blog design needs to leave a great first impression.
Your site needs to look elegant, be easy to navigate, and show off useful and informative content. If your user experience strategy is effective enough, you may even get your visitors to sign up for email updates or to purchase your products.
Here are a few ways to improve your blog design and improve the users experience.
1. Reduce Page Bloat
Kissmetrics reports 40% of users leave a website if it doesn’t load after three seconds. Performance issues are a problem particularly for mobile device users because a larger website can take many seconds to load over a 3G connection.
One of the most common causes of slow performance is images. Make sure to compress your website’s resources. Check your JavaScript and CSS code to remove any redundant line breaks. See if you can take out any page elements you don’t need.
2. Make Content Everlasting
Some visitors will click on a site, notice that it was written years earlier, and leave if they notice the information is outdated. When you write posts, try to write them in a way that will remain relevant in the future.
If there’s anything out-of-date on your blog, see if there’s anything you can do to make it current again. Is there any new information on the old post’s topic such as a new statistic? Once in a while, go through your archives to see what can be updated.
3. Simplify Navigation
Determine why visitors are coming to your site and what information is most important to them. When you think about your blog design, those two pieces are crucial.
At the very least, you should have all these components:
- Menu
- Search box
- Archives page
- About page
- Contact page
People have come to expect certain things from those components. For instance, your logo should be clickable and lead back to your home page.
What other tips do you have to offer about how your blog design affects readership?