How to make your website more functional

While having a website design that is unique and contemporary is important to attract your online audiences attention, if your site is difficult to navigate it can cause visitors to leave early, otherwise known as a high bounce rate. Unfortunately, this may result in loss of sales, especially if you have an e-commerce website, because the longer your audience spends on your site often increases your chances for sales opportunities.

When you have a website built, it's important to incorporate features that make it functional and easy to navigate. To assist you in this process, we've highlighted some of the things to consider.

Timely loading speed

There's nothing worse than having to wait ages for a website to load. A vital factor in having a functional website is ensuring your site loads quickly. In fact, when surveyed, 40% of web users said they would leave a site that took more than 3 seconds to load. If your customer or user is left waiting, you'll often find they won't bother staying unless they desperately want the products or services you sell.

Page linking

By adding links between pages you can make your website more functional, so your online audience can navigate it with ease. Often online consumers will want to find out more about products or services, so linking these pages to your contact page means it's a simple and streamlined process for visitors to send an enquiry.

Make it easy for the user to go back

If users have ended up on the wrong page by accident, they will quickly want to go back immediately. An easy way for your customers to trace where their path went wrong or return quickly is with an ever-present drop-down navigation menu or with breadcrumbs, which show the pages a user accessed to get to where they are. Users can easily click on these to get to where they'd like to go, adding more fluency to your web design.

Another tip is to regularly review your links to check for any that aren't working and either fix those links or create page redirects. That will eliminate any instances of users landing on a 404 page, which can result in site abandonment.

These are some of the essential features that will increase your site's functionality. If you need help creating a functional website, our team at Canberra Web have the expertise to assist you. We specialise in building user-friendly, fully responsive websites on a broad range of platforms including WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Open Cart, Mojo Shop and Woo Commerce. Contact us today to get started!