Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
You will have favourite websites that you return to repeatedly. They have earned loyalty by efficiently providing high-quality goods and services that meet your needs. Your website should do the same – providing a consistent and relevant user experience (UX) to your visitors and customers is vital. Here are a few suggestions to help you avoid UX errors and to create an engaging site.
Tailor content to your users
Okay, you’re thinking it’s obvious you should tailor your website’s content to meet your user’s needs but unfortunately many companies still focus more on SEO issues, such as keyword placement and page optimisation, when creating content. SEO is important but it is only effective if your content resonates with people who visit your site. In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google’s first principle tells you to design your web pages primarily for your users, not for search engines.
Clearly define what your business does
One of the first things visitors should see when accessing your site is a clear statement of what your company does. People come to your site with a purpose in mind, and if they can’t quickly determine if your site meets their needs, they will leave and look elsewhere, possibly never to return. Sometimes you only get one chance to gain a customer, so don’t frustrate potential customers by making them search through multiple pages to figure out what you do.
Provide an aesthetically pleasing site
You want your visitors to have a memorable experience but you want it to be memorable for the right reasons.
Use layouts with a mix of text and eye-catching graphics and photos. A site with many pages that only contain text will not keep a visitor’s attention for very long. Check your color scheme to ensure the colors are compatible with each other and don’t detract from text readability and image visibility.
Don’t use stock photos – they’re easy to spot, and you will give your visitors a poor impression of your business. Be sure that any photos you do use are high quality and appear up-to-date.
Don’t overwhelm your visitors with call-to-action (CTA) buttons – use them strategically by placing them at logical decision points on your site.
Reduce page load times
Visitors will not stick around if your site loads slowly, so you should monitor page load times to be sure your site loads quickly and provides a high-quality UX. If you find that it’s taking more than three seconds for your site to load, there are several steps you can try to improve load times short of doing a complete website redesign.
Image files can cause pages to load slowly, so consider using an image optimisation tool to compress the size of your image files before you add them to your site. The size of pages with high-quality content can exceed 100kb, so consider compressing them to reduce bandwidth and improve your page load times.
Plugins also can cause slow page load times. If you have numerous plugins on your site, experiment with disabling some of them to see if they are the cause of your slow load times.
Sometimes we are so concerned about SEO that we don’t spend enough time optimising our website’s UX. We need to remember how valuable a positive UX is in today’s competitive online marketplace.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
In the Age of AI, Operational Memory Matters Most During Incidents
7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to
James Barnes
April 10, 2026
AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See
10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about
James Barnes
April 2, 2026
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026