How To Double Your Pageviews With User Experience

If you’re looking to take your business’s website to the next level, Grace and Vine Studios can help you. How your website looks and how it operates is a crucial factor in your business’s success. Having a great website allows more people to be aware of your business.

Madison Wetherill is the CEO and founder of Grace and Vine Studios. They specialize in building custom websites and brands for food bloggers, who are looking to take their business to the next level. Madison recommends her services to someone who has been in the industry for a little while but has had their website on the back burner. Her clients usually have stepped into their own niche as their business has begun to evolve and need to update their website to represent their niche.

Grace and Vine Studios will make their clients’ website stand out in the food industry, allowing it to be more of a niche resource and more than just a food blog with recipes. Grace and Vine Studios will also focus on making the website more user friendly. Madison currently lives in the Phoenix, Arizona area with her family.

Episode 088: How To Double Your Pageviews With User Experience

About Madison Wetherill

She’s a food blogger turned web designer, here to help you build a beautiful food blog that actually converts your random site visitors into a loyal audience.

Website: Grace + Vine Studios
Instagram: @graceandvine
Facebook: Grace and Vine Studios

What Is User Experience?

User experience is so important, especially in the food blogging industry.
You may not be selling a specific product, but if you’re trying to get people to pay attention and get people to stop and care what you’re sharing, user experience is the key to that process.
User experience is the focus or the emphasis on trying to make sure that your website is easy to use.
A huge part of user experience is making sure it’s easy for someone to search your website and find what they’re looking for.
Christina says there are two sides to your website. One side is the content side, which is making sure you’re an industry expert. The other side is the design of your website; visual, and functionality aspects are equally as important as the content that you’re putting out. That’s how people decide whether they’re going to make your recipe or someone else’s.
Madison says that the first important thing to do is to capture your audience when they view your site, so that they aren’t just going back to Google to look for something else.
Another important factor is page speed. If it’s too slow, users may grow impatient and exit your site.
Include the things that you want your audience to do next as close to the recipe card as you can, either right below it or right above it.
Utilize the space on your page where people are the most engaged and where they’re actually going to see things.

“You don’t want to overwhelm people with a lot of popups or ads when they first come to your site.” – Madison Wetherill

Your Ideal Audience

The first step is understanding who your ideal audience is that you want to bring to your site. You could be sending out irrelevant information without understanding who your targeted audience is.
Your ideal audience will affect what kind of call to action you use.
Attracting the correct people to your site, the people that you can help, is so important.
The basics from a web designer perspective for things that you can do to make sure your user experience is easy for users, starts with the search bar. Make sure that you have an easy to find search bar, so that if for some reason the blog post this user landed on isn’t a good fit for them, they can find something else to search around for.
The search bar should be front and center on the top, ideally it should be a part of your navigation menu. It shouldn’t take more than one click for someone to find your search bar.
You can also have multiple search bars.
WordPress is not Madison’s favorite platform when it comes to search bars. Madison recommends something like Slickstream to enhance the search experience for your users.
Madison noticed that a lot of food bloggers don’t create content without recipes, like how to double a cocktail to make it serve more people or how to take a cocktail recipe and make it into a pitcher recipe. This type of content can solve a reader’s problem.

“Understand what the problem is for your audience so that you can create the resources around this.” – Madison Wetherill

Doubling Your Pageviews With User Experience

Make sure that your navigation page is organized and really clean.
You want to make sure that your main navigation page has the most important links, and the links that are going to get someone to the place that they need to be (the home page and the recipe index are probably going to be your top categories).
You can use a footer navigation or another navigation for some of those non-essential links (your privacy policy, your disclaimers, or your contact us page).
Make sure to limit the website interruptions, not having too many popups, and making sure those popups are delayed. The popups should not be popping up the second that your page loads.
Madison says that the scrolling percentage 40-60% of the page is helpful. The second delay can be around 3-5 seconds, but it also depends on how long your page takes to load.
If you have the flexibility to have a popup set up in multiple ways, Madison recommends doing 40-60% down the page and an Exit10 on desktop.
User experience will contribute to traffic because the less annoying your website is, the more likely it is that they will stick around.
It will increase the likelihood that someone is going to click around on your site for something else. Hopefully, someone will at least click to one other place after their initial click onto your website.
It may not be more users visiting your website, but it’s more engagement. This is how you get people to stick around and come back in the future.

“If it’s important enough to have on your homepage, it’s probably important enough to have on your navigation.” – Madison Wetherill

What’s Next

Make sure you grab your FREE download >> The Vine Podcast.

You can connect with Madison Wetherill on Instagram.

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