STUDIO FIVE

Updated May 2024

Website Usability is Crucial

Welcome to our blog post, which will provide you with the ultimate website usability checklist! Whether you are a business owner, professional, or entrepreneur, ensuring your website is user-friendly and easily navigable is crucial in today’s digital landscape. 

This comprehensive checklist will give you the tools to enhance your website’s usability, improve user experience, and increase conversions. Incorporate these essential website usability practices into your online presence. Let’s dive in and optimize your website for success!

Why You Need a Website Usability Checklist

Have you ever arrived on a business website without exactly knowing why you are there or what to do next? Have you ever not found vital information on a website? Or did you give up exploring it because the site navigation was so clunky?

All of these are examples of website functionality that is lacking. Since that is a huge turnoff for your website visitors, I want to share a website usability checklist with you.

Put, website usability is the key to website success. The more user-friendly the website, the more time visitors spend on it. Time on site directly relates to how well your website attracts and engages visitors.

Website visitors will judge the quality of a business or brand based on the user-friendliness of their website. Maybe that’s not the best way, but especially for e-commerce retailers, it is the only way consumers get to know you. Therefore, your business has to make a great first impression on your website visitors. Only then will you increase engagement and conversions.

Use the following website usability checklist to determine whether your business website meets user expectations and to learn how to fix shortcomings.

The Ultimate Website Usability Checklist

To make this easier for you, I organized this website usability checklist by category. But I did not sort it by importance, so don’t think you can skip the bottom part. Just saying …

Accessibility

You can have the most awesome website ever, but it will not do you much good if nobody can access your content! That includes everything from how long your page takes to load to how you deal with visually impaired visitors. If you want to provide a great user experience for all your visitors, you need to focus on the following:

✓ Mobile-First

I seem to have mentioned this a few (hundred) times, but just in case you missed it, I will say it again: In 2024, your website visitors will be mobile, so your website must also be mobile-first! If you do not have a mobile-first website, none of this website’s usability checklist will be all that important.

Ensuring your mobile website is easily accessible can be done more efficiently with easy-to-implement pre-made grid frameworks. But mistakes can happen, especially when integrating videos, pictures, and interactive elements. It can take a little time to tweak everything to give the best mobile user experience.

Tip:

If you don’t have all the mobile device sizes and screens available, there are some tools you can use instead:

• Responsive Checker
• BrowserStack
• Responsinator
• Am I Responsive
• Responsive Test

✓ Optimize for Mobile Devices

Simply having a mobile-friendly website doesn’t mean you are meeting the user expectations of your website audience. I often find myself landing on websites that have not been optimized for mobile users.

In 2024, that is not a good thing!

As of April 2024, mobile device users contribute 60.28% of all website traffic. This figure was 6.1% in 2011 and 37.2% in 2015. The percentage of people accessing the internet via mobile devices has increased year over year.

In the United States, 85.38% of internet users access the internet through mobile devices.

What’s The Big Data

According to Statista, mobile retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are expected to reach more than 560 billion by the end of 2024. And 60% of US adults believe that in 2024 mobile shopping is a necessity for online shopping convenience.

By 2027, 23% of retail purchases are expected to take place online.

Forbes

First, you must ensure your website or e-commerce store is optimized for mobile devices. And that process must focus on website usability for mobile users. On a desktop computer, it’s easy for visitors to click nearly anywhere on the screen. But not on mobile devices. According to A List Apart, 75% of mobile users click using their thumbs, and 49% click using only one hand!

It’s uncomfortable for mobile users to try to reach the corners, and they might even click on something else by mistake. They will be frustrated if they navigate to the wrong page, as it adds extra steps to their process.

Tip:

Carefully evaluate your website’s mobile user experience on various devices and screen sizes. Here are a few website usability testing tools to help you find and eliminate shortcomings.

✓ Page Load Time

Modern, and especially mobile, website visitors are extremely impatient. Google recommends one second or less page load speeds, but that will be hard to achieve for many websites, especially e-commerce stores. However, I recommend aiming for a page load speed of between 2 and 3 seconds if you want to provide a positive user experience.

Tip:

You should check your page speed often, as it can indicate other website concerns. Here are a few tools I recommend for this:

• Google Pagespeed Insights
• Pingdom.com
• GTMetrix

✓ Clear Contrast

When visitors visit your website, they want to learn more about you and your awesome business, service, or product. Therefore, make it as easy as possible for them to read your content! The design background needs to be clear and contrasted with the text content; otherwise, important information will get lost.

Tip:

With hero images, intro screens, and full-page sliders, text content may not be completely legible due to the underlying image content. Carefully evaluate both the background image and the text position, for best results.

✓ Font Size

Next on my website usability checklist is a pet peeve of mine! If you want me to consume your content, please don’t make me squint to do so! And I am not alone here. Studies have shown that small font sizes significantly irritate most website visitors.

Therefore, website text must be easy to read in terms of font size and spacing.

Tip:

The body copy should be at least 14px; I recommend 16px. You can learn more about website font sizes here.

✓ JavaScript

Yup, cool effects can be an excellent thing for your website. And there are new applications and effects for JavaScript seemingly every day. Of course, it helps if your visitors get to see them. Keep in mind that cool effects have a not-so-cool side effect. They can significantly increase the time and resources it takes to load your website.

Memory-intensive effects often provide a terrible user experience, especially for users with older or weaker computers and smartphones. Common results range from slowdowns and missing content to malfunctioning websites not loading. Remember that as you decide how many slick effects you want to add.

Tip:

Avoid using excessive Parallax Scrolling and CSS Animations via JavaScript, and reduce the total number of required JavaScript libraries to 3-5.

✓ Well Organized

Don’t make your website visitors look around for key info—no matter how much you hope they will! Instead, organize your website into a grid and use this grid-based system.

All headlines, text content, images, support info, contact forms, headers, and footers should follow this grid. This will give the impression of a well-organized website, increasing visitor trust and confidence.

Identity

Do you know why brands like Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Amazon are recognizable? It is because they all follow a clear brand or identity strategy. So, you should probably do the same to become a recognizable brand, right? Next in my website usability checklist are identity and brand management guidelines that will help you improve usability and user guidance.

✓ Logo

Let’s start with the most important part of your website branding: your company or brand logo. Almost all website visitors will look for a recognizable brand logo in the top left corner of each page. This will immediately tell them if they arrived at the right site. A pretty cool side effect is that it will also give them an increased sense of trust and transparency. Sweet!

Tip:

Make sure your logo is sufficiently large to be crisp and visible. I recommend a minimum size of around 144px. Remember that high-resolution retina devices will require 2 to 3 times that. A nice touch is a Favicon, a small logo icon.

✓ Tagline

No, you don’t need a tagline. I know quite a few businesses without one. But if you do have a tagline, don’t hide it! Make sure it stands out from the rest of your content instead. This will help you summarize your site’s content, helping your visitors anticipate the content. The better website visitors understand the context, the sooner they act.

✓ Homepage

It’s funny how this aspect frequently gets overlooked! This is why I wanted to include it in my website usability checklist! When visitors first arrive on your homepage, they most likely are beginning their journey of conversion. That means they want to learn more about you and your business.

The most effective thing you can put on your homepage is something like this:

• How do you solve your clients’ problems? Most likely, your website visitors are facing an obstacle. What can you do to help them overcome that?
• How do you benefit your clients? Do you make them younger? Prettier? Richer? Better in bed? Make sure that part is evident right away!

Tip:

Your website visitors should be able to get this information in 5 seconds or less. Other content types, such as slideshows or animations, should load as interactive elements within 5 seconds.

✓ Company Info

Your small—to mid-sized business is likely not known to everyone. So why not tell your website visitors a bit about yourself? Smaller and lesser-known companies are often judged based on their Contact or About Us pages. Ensure these pages are easy to find, ideally as a link in the main navigation, and as complete as possible.

✓ Contact Info

Has this ever happened to you? You are ready to exercise the company credit card and purchase something from that. Could you find a way to contact them? Visiting a website is not always for commercial reasons. Existing or future customers may want to contact a company for several reasons.

Any website usability checklist should include this question: Can phone numbers, email addresses, or other contact information be accessed quickly on your business website? If not, you should fix that right away!

Tip:

Many of your website visitors are coming from mobile devices. Make it even easier for them to contact you by providing a clickable phone number that will automatically dial your business.

Navigation

One of the first things you must do is attract site visitors. But once they are there, you want to engage them enough to explore other parts of your website. This means that besides providing a great user experience, you must provide a clear and effective way to navigate your website, making it the next part of my website usability checklist.

The better visitors can navigate your site, the more time they spend consuming your content. Only once visitors understand your content will they follow your CTA.

✓ Main Menu

Your website navigation menu must be easy to understand and consistent throughout your site. What type of navigation menu you use is less important. Most websites have the menu at the top.

More modern sites frequently display the three bars of the Hamburger menu. Other sites opt for a full-screen or overlay menu. Pick the one you like, and use it consistently!

Tip:

For mobile and desktop users, the hamburger menu button is now a recognized symbol and can be used. This will also free up additional space on your page, which is otherwise required for your menu.

✓ Navigation Labels

This is where you can be cute or effective, but never both! The primary purpose of your website is to guide potential consumers through the process. You can significantly simplify that step by having clear and concise navigation labels.

If visitors don’t understand where a menu link may lead, they will not bother clicking on it, which could hide your valuable content from them!

Tip:

It is essential that each menu item clearly describes where the link leads. For example, the menu item “Colors” is much more effective for a nail polish website than “Poppers.”

✓ Menu Items

If you follow my blog posts or those of our highly caffeinated team, you may have heard us refer to the attention span of humans before. In particular, humans now lag behind the average goldfish in that regard. Regardless, we humans are just not good at staying focused. What was I talking about? Just kidding, but …

Keep in mind that human short-term memory can only remember five things without much effort. If you give people more choices than that, they will most likely not take action at all.

Tip:

If visitors want to learn what your website offers quickly, avoid using more than seven menu items in your top-level navigation. The ideal number is between 5 and 7. You can use expanded dropdown menus more as users have a stronger focus and read more slowly.

✓ Logo Link

I mentioned the importance of a clear and visible logo earlier. Here is another reason for having one: most website visitors are used to clicking on the brand logo to return to that site’s homepage. Be sure to meet their user expectations.

Tip:

A logo link to your homepage means you no longer need one in your top-level navigation menu. That can free up valuable space for another menu link.

✓ Consistent Links

I just mentioned the importance of consistent menu labels. Let me expand my website usability checklist and include the need for more consistency. Most modern websites use a combination of text links, buttons, and images as links, and that’s perfectly fine.

However, it is critical to always use the same option for the same function to avoid confusion. If all else fails, I recommend keeping it simple. As far as I know, nobody ever misunderstood a simple blue text link.

Content

Whew! OK, I’m almost done with my website usability checklist! The last remaining topic is one of the most important: your website content. Up to now, we have focused on attracting people to your site and getting them oriented. Let me wrap up by focusing on the most important aspect of your business website: your content.

Your website content is usually more important than web design and layout. The content that best addresses consumers’ problems will get the most attention. Here are a few tips to help you organize and optimize your content accordingly.

✓ Establish Credibility

The first thing your website content has to do is to establish credibility. So, let me start the content section of our website usability checklist with that. Simply put, no matter why visitors are on your website, they will not stick around if your site or e-commerce store appears untrustworthy.

What do you think a visitor’s perception of your website would be if your homepage does not include information about your services or products, your contact info, or a bit about who you are? I can guarantee you it will be negative. Take a look at what it will take to create an effective home page introduction that will make visitors stay on your website.

Therefore, your website’s credibility needs to be established right away. Otherwise, visitors will feel unsafe while navigating and consuming your content. At a minimum, I recommend you be transparent about your content, services, products, prices, and contact information. Don’t make website visitors search your entire site to find this information.

Once you have established credibility and trust in your website, your visitors will be more at ease. They will no longer worry about getting scammed or clicking on a spammy link. This will increase their chances of engaging with your content and increase your conversions.

✓ Headings

Imagine your website tells a story. Headings are simply the title and subtitle of that story. The more effective your headings, the more likely your audience will read your story. The famous marketer David Ogilvy recommended devoting 80% of your effort to your headlines!

✓ Consistent Color Scheme

Your website colors play an important part in user experience and satisfaction. You can have an awesome website with brilliant info; if you have a neon green and hot pink color scheme, I doubt many visitors will stick around long enough to notice. Ouch, my eyes, my eyes!

Tip:

For the best possible user experience, select colors that match the nature or type of your industry. Look at how color psychology can affect user behavior and apply that to your website. The more harmonious the colors coordinate with each other, the more advantageous.

✓ Typography

Earlier in this website usability checklist, I mentioned organizing your website in a grid system. However, organizing your text content, starting with typography, is equally important. A website should convey clarity and organization using well-balanced web fonts.

That does not mean you should go overboard here! I strongly recommend limiting yourself to no more than two font families; you can always use variants for different effects. You must also follow the proper hierarchy for your H1 through H6 headings.

Tip:

To find the right pairings for Google fonts, you can use this Fontpair tool.

✓ Minimal Pop-Ups

I’ll be straight with you; I am not a big fan of pop-ups. I understand why marketers like them, but those people have weird tastes. I am softening my stance regarding exit-intent pop-ups; stay tuned for an upcoming blog post.

But for today, I want to focus on pop-up use on your website. Pop-ups or fade-ins that cover the entire screen annoy most visitors, especially on mobile devices. Google has issued a stern warning about Interstitial Pop-Ups. Therefore, you should completely avoid or at least greatly limit the use of pop-ups on your business website.

Tip:

If necessary, popups should only be used where they will not interfere with expected user behavior. For example, avoiding pop-ups in your e-commerce checkout process is essential.

✓ Content Structure

Sorry to mention that poor goldfish again. The shortened human attention span will require a few changes to your content structure. Modern and especially mobile consumers don’t read content on your website.

Instead, they skim over the content and stop reading more when it seems interesting enough. It is, therefore, important to break your content into individual paragraphs. Remember, you are not writing a book here.

Tip:

A common rule from journalists is “One paragraph per thought.” A simple rule from our UX designers is, “More than five lines of text without a break is too long.”

✓ Paragraph Headings

One important aspect of your content structure is your paragraph headings. Think of them as short advertising blurbs for the content ahead. If visitors like the look of that, they are more likely to read that paragraph. Otherwise, they are likely to look elsewhere.

Tip:

An effective paragraph heading should briefly summarize the content and arouse curiosity. You can use the heading to personalize the message to your users and present reasons for purchasing from your business.

✓ CTA (Call to Action)

The last item in my website usability checklist is one of the most important parts of your business website: the Call to Action. Surprisingly, many websites don’t have one, or it gets lost in the background noise. Neither is overly effective for meeting your business objectives.

One common mistake is placing your call-to-action too early in your consumers’ conversion journey. That will most likely not lead to the results you envision. Potential consumers will want to learn more about you, your business, products, or services before they heed your CTA.

Therefore, it is better to place CTAs directing visitors to other parts of your website throughout your content. That way, you are aligning yourself with their conversion journey. Clear calls to action or other links should also be placed near or at the bottom of all pages. This is the only way for users to stay on the site.

Final Thoughts on Website Usability

Every website’s goal should be to get visitors to take a specific action: the call to Action. What you need or want visitors to do depends mainly on the nature of your business, industry, product, or service. This website usability checklist will provide you with the insights you need to get your visitors to take action as well.

Exceptional website usability and implementing these website usability tips are the basis for increasing your conversion rate. If your website visitors find your site easy to navigate and use, and if your content meets their expectations, they are more likely to spend more time on your website consuming your content. Which is precisely what you want.

Ensure your business website meets users’ expectations and supports your objectives. Use the website usability checklist provided to identify and address any areas that may be lacking. Take action now to improve your website’s usability and enhance your online presence. For more information, please contact us.

Not Sure How to Make This Website Usability Checklist Work for You?

We are here to help! Studio Five offers a full range of WordPress website consulting and design services for businesses and product brands.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your web design needs, reach out to us! We offer a full range of consulting and design services for businesses and product brands.

If you are still unsure how you can improve your website or its usability, let’s talk! Our expert team will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best way to implement all the items from our website usability checklist on your website or e-commerce store. That is one of our specialties, after all!