User experience basics can make or break your website’s success. Studies show that 88% of online consumers won’t return to a website after a bad experience, yet most businesses spend thousands attracting visitors while ignoring the experience that keeps them there.
Your website isn’t just a digital brochure—it’s your 24/7 salesperson, brand ambassador, and customer service representative. If users can’t find what they need in seconds, or if your site frustrates them with slow loading times, confusing navigation, or poor mobile design, they’ll leave and never come back. Worse, they’ll tell others about it. To avoid these issues, it’s crucial to launch a successful website that focuses on user experience, branding, and clear goals.
The good news? Mastering user experience basics doesn’t require a complete redesign or massive budget. Small, strategic improvements can dramatically boost user satisfaction, conversions, and customer loyalty.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explain the fundamental differences between UI and UX design, then provide you with 8 proven best practices you can implement to transform your website’s user experience. Whether you’re a startup founder, marketing manager, or business owner, these actionable tips will help you create a website that users love—and that drives real business results.
What is UI Design?
You probably came across the term UI a lot. However, what does it actually stand for? The term UI refers to the user interface, which is the graphical layout of your website. Your website’s user interface consists of all buttons and elements that your visitors interact with, including the layout, calls to action, animations, and page-to-page transitions. So, shortly said, this is all about serving important elements in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
What is UX Design?
Before discussing UX best practices, we need to understand what UX design is first. The term UX stands for user experience—the complete journey and feelings your visitors have when interacting with your website. While UI design focuses on how things look, UX design focuses on how things work and feel.
A UX designer is responsible for determining the functionality, organization, and usability of your website’s interface. Central to the UX design process is understanding user needs, pain points, and behaviors, which serves as a foundational step for creating intuitive and effective user experiences. They ask critical questions: Is the navigation intuitive and logical? Can users accomplish their goals quickly? Are the visual elements created by UI designers easy to interact with? Do users feel satisfied or frustrated?
UX design involves human-system interaction, encompassing the full range of user perceptions, emotions, and responses when interacting with digital systems. If your website is hard to navigate and causes confusion, your users may simply abandon it and never come back. UX designers work to prevent this outcome through research, testing, and iterative improvements that put user needs first.
While UI designers focus on visual aesthetics, UX designers concentrate on the overall experience—both roles are essential and complementary in creating websites that are both beautiful and functional.
Website’s User Experience Basics: 8 Best Practices
Now it’s time to improve your website’s UX. Before implementing best practices, it’s essential to conduct market research and UX research to gather user insights, understand pain points, and inform your design decisions. Aligning UX improvements with business goals and the development of digital products ensures that your efforts are driven by users’ needs, emphasizing the importance of designing with users’ needs in mind to enhance satisfaction and performance while supporting organizational objectives. Additionally, understanding the user journey across all touchpoints helps optimize the overall experience.
To understand the “HOW,” let’s take a look at the following UX design best practices.
1. Use White Space
White space is one of the most efficient design elements with which you can pepper your website. It not only allows you to draw your visitors’ attention to the most important buttons but also makes your content more legible.
White space can increase your viewers’ attention as it makes the website look cleaner and neater. Furthermore, this is also one of the easiest methods you can apply to make your website look modern and open. Keep in mind that it is also important to find the right balance of white space and the information you want to show on the page. Too many design elements or text can make the website look cluttered and unattractive.
We simply cannot discuss white space as a design element without mentioning Apple. As shown in the picture below, Apple is a big advocate of white space. Here you can see only two call-to-action buttons: Learn More and View Pricing. When you go with the “Learn More” button, you run into another page with a lot of white space, as shown in the second picture. As you scroll down, Apple provides you with the most important elements you should know about their product without any extra information. This saves you visitors’ time and is also aesthetically pleasing. You can’t predict your consumers’ taste preferences, but you can apply this technique to come up with something neutral and less risky.
2. Optimize Your Loading Time
This is definitely one of the most important aspects and can never be enough to mention. According to Section.io, an extra five seconds of page load time can increase your website’s abandonment rate by more than 20%.
However, the loading speed of your website doesn’t only affect your bounce rate but also frustrates your visitors. So, if you don’t want your visitors to abandon your website with a bad user experience, you should consider optimizing the speed of your website. Make sure that your users can easily get what they are looking for without waiting for a couple of minutes until your pages load. In the picture below, you can find the top 10 most fast-loading e-commerce websites.
Tools to measure and improve loading speed:
- Google PageSpeed Insights – Free tool that analyzes both mobile and desktop performance with actionable recommendations
- GTmetrix – Provides detailed performance reports and historical tracking
- WebPageTest – Advanced testing with multiple locations and devices
- Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools) – Comprehensive audits including performance, accessibility, and SEO
For enterprise businesses, tools like New Relic or Datadog offer continuous monitoring and alerting. Startups and SMBs typically find the free tools sufficient for identifying and fixing performance issues.
Don’t forget to check the speed of the mobile version too, as users are using their smartphones very often nowadays—mobile performance often differs significantly from desktop.
How to measure success:
Track your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be under 2.5 seconds, First Input Delay (FID) under 100ms, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1. Monitor bounce rate and average session duration in Google Analytics—improvements in load time should correlate with lower bounce rates and longer sessions. Set up performance budgets and automated alerts to catch regressions before they impact users.
3. UX Writing
When you think about UX design practices, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably well-designed and structured layouts. However, no matter what design elements you use, you should always have UX writing in mind.
Make sure that your content and the information you give are user-oriented and easy to digest. Don’t use complex words or too much terminology that will make your visitors search for definitions every two seconds. Users should be able to understand the content without extra effort.
Furthermore, you can combine well-written content with some visual treats such as images, emojis, and custom illustrations. Such additions won’t let your visitors get tired or bored.
A designer’s job should not only end with well-structured layouts. Do not forget about UX writing. Work in a team and demand quality material. Use the language that your users are familiar with, be user-oriented, and make sure that your contact with the user is transparent. Also, a sense of humor is suitable.
Although the above example is concise and on the surface a good selling point, it misses the mark on usefulness and doesn’t convey value.
Do some research on your customer segment. Detect their age range, and see what can walk harmoniously with the concept of your brand and their preferences. Maybe some humor or cartoon illustrations. That’s something you should find out.
We can tweak the heading to target the customer’s pain point more effectively.
Special Focus: Designing for First-Time Users
First impressions matter—users form opinions about your website in just 50 milliseconds. Designing for first-time users means creating an interface that is intuitive and welcoming, even for those who have never interacted with your brand before.
Best practices for first-time users:
- Clear value proposition – Communicate what you do within 5 seconds of landing
- Intuitive navigation – Use familiar patterns and clear labels
- Progressive disclosure – Don’t overwhelm with everything at once
- Helpful onboarding – Guide users to their first success
- Reduce cognitive load – Minimize choices and simplify decision-making
How to measure first-time user experience:
- Track bounce rate for new vs. returning visitors (new visitor bounce rates are typically 20-40% higher)
- Measure time to first meaningful action (e.g., sign-up, product view, contact)
- Monitor new user activation rates and first-session conversion rates
- Conduct first-click testing to ensure users can find what they need immediately
- Use session recordings to watch actual first-time user journeys
Conduct user interviews and usability tests specifically with people who have never seen your website. Their fresh perspective reveals assumptions you’ve made that may confuse newcomers. By prioritizing first-time user experience, you increase the likelihood that users will return and become loyal customers.
4. Detect Your 404s
Although search engines won’t punish or blacklist you for having 404 errors, your visitors do. When someone clicks on a link, they expect it to take them to the page they want to view. Thus, encountering a 404 error will annoy users and make them leave your website with a bad user experience. So, remember, when someone follows a specific link, the last thing they want to see is a 404 error page. Therefore, make sure that the conversion links you have included on your page actually work.
Tools to detect and fix broken links:
For small to medium websites:
- Broken Link Checker (WordPress plugin) – Automatically scans and notifies you of broken links
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) – Desktop tool for comprehensive site audits
- Dead Link Checker (online tool) – Quick checks without installation
For large websites and enterprises:
- Ahrefs Site Audit – Comprehensive crawling with broken link detection and competitive analysis
- Semrush Site Audit – Identifies technical issues including 404s, with prioritization
- Google Search Console – Free tool that reports crawl errors directly from Google
Set up automated monitoring to catch broken links before your users do. Most enterprise tools can send alerts when new 404 errors appear, allowing you to fix them proactively.
5. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendliness is one of the key elements you should consider while building a website. First, it is crucial for your SEO; search engines, including Google, consider this factor to index your website. So, if you want to perform well on Google, mobile-friendliness is a must.
However, SEO shouldn’t be the only stimulus to create a mobile-friendly website. Did you know that mobile devices account for more than half of overall web traffic? So if you’re ignoring mobile-friendliness, then you may lose around half of your potential customers.
Don’t forget to check the speed of the mobile version too, as users are using their smartphones very often nowadays. Optimizing for mobile apps is also essential, as users spend significant time on mobile platforms, making it important to deliver a consistent experience across all devices.
Does your brand provide such exclusive products or content that will make your visitors put their phones aside, grab a laptop and spend more time accessing your website? No harsh feelings, but I am not really sure about it. You probably have lots of competitors, and if users are not satisfied with the user experience on your website, they will likely turn to your competitors.
Mobile-friendliness is one of the UX design best practices. Providing a seamless website user experience across devices is crucial for the entire customer journey and overall customer experience. This allows your audience to access your page whenever they want without causing any extra inconveniences. I’m not saying that this approach will give your customers a WOW effect, but it will ensure that they don’t leave your site due to a terrible user experience.
What to do?
Below you can find several ways to make your website mobile-friendly.
- First of all, use the following platform to see whether your website is mobile-friendly.
- Optimize the content of your website your customers find on a desktop for mobile devices. Make sure that you provide them with the most important points which also fit their display.
- Consider placing the call-to-action buttons in the central parts of the screen. This is done to make sure that people can easily reach them with their thumbs.
How to measure success:
Beyond Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, analyze mobile-specific metrics in Google Analytics: compare mobile vs. desktop bounce rates, conversion rates, and session durations. Use Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity to watch session recordings of mobile users—this reveals friction points that metrics alone won’t show. Track mobile page abandonment rates and form completion rates to identify specific mobile UX issues. Aim for mobile conversion rates within 20% of desktop rates.
6. Keep Your Website Design Consistent
By consistency, we mean matching heading sizes, coloring, fonts, buttons, illustrations, and spacing. Consistent choices will make your website’s design coherent. Sharp and unexpected design changes will cause confusion to your visitors. Besides, consistency will also help you to increase brand credibility and awareness. Your brand will become more recognizable if you use consistent design and wording on all your marketing and sales channels. This design consistency not only fosters brand loyalty by creating positive user experiences, but also acts as a key differentiator that gives your business a competitive edge in the market.
So, if “am I in the right place” isn’t the first thought you want to trigger in your visitors’ minds, then you should consider keeping your website consistent. So, make sure that your design and choices make actual sense when your users navigate between the pages.
In need of some inspiration? Elementor have put together lots of free downloadable brand boards.
How to measure success:
Conduct regular brand consistency audits across all digital touchpoints. Use tools like Frontify or Zeroheight to maintain design systems and track adherence. Measure brand recall through user surveys—ask users if they can identify your brand from screenshots with logos removed. Monitor time-on-site and pages-per-session; inconsistent design often leads to confusion and shorter sessions. Track customer support tickets related to navigation or “where to find” questions—these indicate consistency issues.
Common UX Pitfalls to Avoid
Even well-intentioned websites can fall into common UX traps. Here are the most frequent issues and how to detect them:
1. Poor navigation structure
- How to detect: High bounce rates, low pages-per-session, navigation-related support tickets
- How to measure: Tree testing, card sorting studies, navigation click-through rates
2. Confusing layouts and information architecture
- How to detect: High exit rates on key pages, low scroll depth, session recordings showing confusion
- How to measure: First-click testing, task completion rates, time-on-task metrics
3. Lack of clear calls-to-action
- How to detect: Low conversion rates despite high traffic, heatmaps showing no clicks on CTAs
- How to measure: Click-through rates, conversion rates, A/B tests of CTA variations
4. Ignoring accessibility standards
- How to detect: WAVE or Axe accessibility audits showing errors, user complaints
- How to measure: WCAG compliance score, keyboard navigation testing, screen reader testing
5. Prioritizing business goals over user needs
- How to detect: User feedback expressing frustration, high cart abandonment, low NPS scores
- How to measure: User satisfaction surveys, task success rates, qualitative research
How to avoid these pitfalls: Conduct regular usability tests with real users—not just your team members who know the site intimately. Analyze usability data for different user groups to identify which segments face more challenges or specific pain points, allowing for targeted improvements. Use a combination of quantitative analytics (what’s happening) and qualitative research (why it’s happening) to identify issues early. Balance business objectives with user needs by ensuring every design decision can answer: “How does this help users accomplish their goals?”
At Passionates, our UX researchers conduct comprehensive audits to identify these pitfalls and our designers implement solutions that balance business goals with user needs—all within our subscription model’s rapid delivery framework.
7. Segment Key Information
Adding some bullet points can be yet another method to save your customers’ time. This will provide them with the most important information about your product or services. The simpler and clearer your content, the easier for users to understand and digest it.
As a piece of additional advice, you can add some icons to them to create eye-pleasing bullet points. Such creativity sparks will help to segment the key information without using the traditional method of “bullets.”
Thus, info segmentation is something you should consider. With this technique, your customers will easily access the key points they need without struggling to find them on their own.
8. Measure, Test, and Gather Feedback Continuously
Last but not least, listen to your customers and measure the impact of your UX improvements. To truly improve your visitors’ experience, it’s essential to actively measure UX using various methods such as usability testing, user feedback, surveys, and analytics. You need both qualitative insights (what users say) and quantitative data (what users do).
Qualitative research methods:
- User interviews – One-on-one conversations to understand motivations and pain points
- Usability testing – Watch users complete tasks on your site to identify friction points
- On-site surveys – Ask targeted questions at key moments (e.g., “What almost stopped you from completing this purchase?”)
- Customer feedback forms – Dedicated space for users to share thoughts about your website’s UX
- Session recordings – Tools like Hotjar or FullStory show exactly how users navigate your site
Quantitative measurement methods:
- A/B testing – Test variations of pages to see which performs better
- Analytics tracking – Monitor bounce rates, conversion rates, time-on-page, and user flows
- Heatmaps – Visualize where users click, scroll, and spend time
- Form analytics – Identify which form fields cause abandonment
- Funnel analysis – See where users drop off in conversion paths
Key metrics to track:
- Task success rate – Percentage of users who complete intended actions
- Time on task – How long it takes users to accomplish goals
- Error rate – How often users make mistakes or need to backtrack
- System Usability Scale (SUS) – Standardized 10-question survey scoring overall usability
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Measures likelihood to recommend your site
How to implement: Create a continuous feedback loop by combining these methods. For example, use analytics to identify pages with high bounce rates, then conduct usability tests to understand why users are leaving, and finally run A/B tests to validate solutions. Ask users direct questions like “How can we improve your experience?” or “What frustrated you most during your visit?” Analyzing this research data allows you to extract actionable insights—specific, practical recommendations that can be prioritized to directly inform design decisions and enhance user experience.
This approach not only creates a strong connection between you and your visitors, making them feel that you care, but it also provides the data-driven insights needed to prioritize improvements that will have the greatest impact on user satisfaction and business goals.
At Passionates, our Optimize tier includes senior UX researchers and CRO specialists who can design and execute comprehensive measurement strategies, conduct usability tests, and implement data-driven improvements—all within our rapid 1-3 day delivery model.
Implementing UX Improvements: The Passionates Approach
While understanding these UX best practices is essential, implementation is where many businesses struggle. Traditional agencies can take weeks or months to deliver improvements, and hiring in-house UX specialists requires significant investment in salaries, benefits, and training.
Passionates offers a different approach. Our subscription-based model provides on-demand access to senior UX designers, researchers, and CRO specialists (all with 5+ years of experience) who can implement these improvements rapidly—typically within 1-3 working days per request. While automation and AI tools can assist in the process, human designers remain essential for creating personas, providing real-time feedback, and developing intuitive digital products. Our Optimize tier includes:
- Qualitative and quantitative UX research to understand your users’ actual behavior and pain points
- CRO and experimentation strategy to test and validate improvements
- A/B and multivariate testing to measure the impact of changes
- Advanced analytics and reporting to track performance
- Ongoing audits and optimization to continuously improve your user experience
Whether you need to redesign a single landing page or overhaul your entire website’s UX, our unlimited request model and ability to scale resources ensures you can move at the speed your business demands—without the overhead of traditional agencies or in-house teams.
Book a consultation to discuss how we can help improve your website’s user experience.
Final Words
The experience your users obtain while interacting with your website’s interface is detrimental to your success. Do they abandon it frustrated, or do they stay on your page without encountering any significant inconveniences? These are questions you should ask yourself as a website owner.
User experience covers a wide range of factors, including the person’s perceptions, emotions, and responses before, during, and after interacting with your site. All the effort you put into building and designing a website is to share some important information with your audience and find out about your brand and its products. If they are not satisfied with the user experience, then what was the point of creating a website in the first place?
A positive experience leads to overall satisfaction, which can provide a significant competitive advantage by increasing user retention and brand loyalty. Following core UX principles and adopting design thinking methodologies are essential to ensure your website remains user-centered and effective. Looking ahead, emerging technologies like augmented reality and the ability to automate tasks with AI are shaping the future of user experience, making it even more immersive and efficient.
Hopefully, these tips about how to improve your website’s user experience can help you get more satisfied website visitors and attract more of your target audience.
