12/21/2016

Factors Necessary to Provide a Good Web Experience to Your Customers

Providing a good end user experience is important for success of any online business. Apparently, the site that performs better provides the customer the higher level of comfort to do business with that company. If customers have positive experience with the website, they are more likely to become a repeat and loyal customers. For this reason, website owners use many web optimization techniques to improve their site credibility and provide good user experience to their site visitors. Despite these efforts, sometimes online businesses fail to deliver good web experience because of the challenges they face with their websites. By following certain best practices, they can overcome these challenges and provide a quality website experience to their customers.

Regularly Track Site Uptime and Performance

The existence of an online business mostly depends on the availability of the website to the end users. Some website owners make the mistake of relating end user experience with user friendly design and appearance but overlook the importance of website uptime and performance. No matter how aesthetically designed the website might be, if it is experiencing frequent down times and performance issues, the users will no longer be interested in visiting that website. The actual intent of having a website will become ineffective if the site is not fully functional for user accessibility. The best option to track website continuity and its performance is to monitor them regularly using site monitoring service. The service keeps the websites under surveillance for any possible downtime issues and immediately notifies business owners when a website outage happen.

Optimize Websites For Better Speed

Speed is another factor that decides the end user experience. There is no bench mark to decide how much site speed is acceptable but the websites that load quicker offer good user experience. To optimize the website pages for better speed it is necessary to work on various aspects like optimizing the website design & databases, build web hosting capability for peak volumes, reduce server lag by improving server response, use browser caching and content delivery networks for faster delivery of website content etc. By reducing the delay in loading times and improving the overall performance, websites are more likely to have higher customer satisfaction and retention rate.

Have a Contingency Plan

Online businesses need to have a contingency plan during outages in order to continue the working of their websites and minimize the damages caused by downtime issues. This is not something to ignore as a business owner because it may lead to several undesirable consequences such as loss in revenues, damage to reputation, extended downtimes etc. The better option is to redirect the DNS to secondary host or have a backup copy of the website with another hosting company in case if the primary hosting provider experiences prolonged downtime issues.

When The Site is Down, Use Custom Error Pages

It is very common for online businesses to have instances of outages and performance degradation for their websites. When a website is down, it is important to reach out to the customers and let them know the fact that the site is temporarily down and will be back soon. The websites that truly care about their customers keep them informed about the status by displaying a custom error message. Not responding to the customers at the time of outage will damage professional reputation and can become detrimental to their business.

Minimize Downtime Duration Using Monitoring Service

If websites fail to plan for the unscheduled downtime, it can lead to several undesirable consequences such as bad end user experience, lost revenues, damage to brand reputation, extended downtimes etc. The customers do not prefer such websites because they see these brands as unreliable. So, it is important to have a plan in place that can help online businesses deal with unscheduled outages to minimize downtime losses. The planning should include hiring a monitoring service that regularly monitors website uptime & performance and immediately alerts when downtime occurs. With the help of a quality service it becomes easy to understand the bottlenecks that is causing frequent or extended downtime and to work on resolving the issue to get the website back into operation.