User engagement measures if users find value in your product or service and can be measured by looking at metrics such as clicks, shares and time on page. Websites with high engagement will see visitors staying longer on the site, and interacting with content.
High user engagement indicates customers are loyal, leading to higher conversion rates and profitability.
Website engagement is incredibly important for businesses, and boosting engagement will often have positive results on the business as a whole.
Improve page load time
Page load time refers to the amount of time it takes for a web page to show visitors the page content. It can be calculated from the moment a visitor enters a page’s web address to when that page finishes loading on the screen.
Page load time can have a huge impact on engagement because visitors hate slow loading pages. Interestingly, studies show that 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a site if it takes over 4 seconds to load. To avoid page abandonment, try to ensure that pages load in 2 seconds or less.
Luckily, page load time can be improved. Here are a few ways in which you can reduce page load time:
- Optimize images – Images drastically slow down your page’s speed. So compress your images to prevent redundancy and irrelevance.
- Reduce HTTP requests – Because every page element is equal to one file, you need to remove unnecessary elements on a page (so you can reduce the number of files in it). The browser of every visitor pings the server to request files needed for your page to load. And the more files that are requested, the slower your page loads.
- Use the services of a CDN – A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a group of geographically distributed servers. It shortens the travel time of information (between a user and your server).
Update content
Content builds brand awareness, encourages customer retention and loyalty, and is shareable. It’s the reason 60% of marketers commit time to creating a piece of content every day.
However, not all content is created equal, and there are a few rules to follow when it comes to writing effective content.
For an improvement in user engagement, break up your content into sections. It makes it more readable and attractive to people who don’t like seeing blocks of text. You can pull this off by using keyword-rich subheadings, numbered lists and bulleted points, and strategically adding white space between paragraphs.
Breaking up content is also useful when creating longer articles — another way of improving user engagement. Studies show that content with 1,000 to 2,500 words has high engagement. Longer articles may take a lot of time to read. But they’re useful and contain more information.
Additionally, you should also take a page from the book of e-commerce giant, Amazon, and display related content, too. It encourages people to stay on your site and see what else you have. For this technique to improve your site’s user engagement, though, you should have a well-established internal linking structure. Otherwise, related content that’s hard — if not impossible — to access is useless.
Be mobile friendly
Generally, a mobile-friendly site means it performs well on mobile devices. The different terms associated with it are:
- Mobile-first – It refers to basic features and functions of mobile phones and other less powerful devices.
- Responsive and adaptive design – A responsive design means a site’s design uses flexible elements to always fit a screen well regardless of the specific device. Meanwhile, a site with an adaptive design may offer specific content if a visitor is using a mobile device.
- M dot site – It refers to a site having a separate mobile version — with its original HTML and appears differently than the main site. The address for an m dot site looks something like www.m.websitename.com.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you need to tweak it to make it so. Mobile friendly sites are not only more accessible to users, but it builds credibility and trust. It’s also a cost-effective method of boosting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
Additionally, it allows your site to grow and be part of a futuristic trend. According to Statista, the number of mobile device users will reach around 18.22 billion in 2025 — a whopping 4.2 billion increase from 2020’s 14 billion.
Here’s what you can do to make your site mobile-friendly:
- Use a responsive theme – Make your site accessible and aesthetically pleasing to mobile-users. If you’re using WordPress and other Content Management (CMS) systems, you can easily choose a responsive theme from its library.
- Use large and readable fonts – Because mobile devices are often small, they come with the challenge of causing content to be less readable to users. To avoid this, choose font sizes and styles that are easy-to-understand.
- Conduct tests regularly – Check how your site appears on different mobile devices. You can also conduct a test with the help of Google’s free mobile-friendly test tool.
Track metrics
Once your website is out in the open, it’s important to keep track of certain metrics. Doing so brings your attention to the elements that are causing user engagement levels to drop. More importantly, it allows you to get rid of those problems.
Bounce rate is one of the most important metrics to consider. It tells you the number of visitors that took the step to check out a page in your site, then exited. What makes it a great indicator is, it lets you know how useful and interesting your content is to your target audience.
If the bounce rate is high, it’s bad news for you. It means, visitors don’t find your content useful enough — and they might have formed an impression that the other pages in your site aren’t useful either.
Additionally, the time a visitor spends on a page is worth monitoring. That’s because it can determine if visitors are actually reading your content. If the time they spend on your page is long enough, it’s a sign they’re absorbing your content.
The Click-Through Rate (CTR) should be the next metric on your list. A low CTR indicates users have a poor impression on you on the search results. To solve the problem and improve CTR, you may need to refine the meta description and title tag of your site or page.
Conclusion
User engagement can make or break your site. In simple terms, a high user engagement is a sign your site’s working.
If engagement is low, you’re losing income and you have a problem. Luckily, though, you can solve the problem — be sure to refer to the steps above for help.
