Now a days everybody has become a writer and everybody wants to start a blog online but very few of them are focusing on blog reader’s user experience.
Just writing tons of lengthy content is not useful you need a proper mechanism to deliver that content with a great user experience.
Understand Your Users
Understand your users, and understand how your users are interacting with your blog. How are they reading your content? Are they facing any issues while reading the content? Are they happy with your content? Understanding users will not only help you deliver user friendly content but will also boost your user’s overall blog reading experience.
How to understand your users?
The best way to understand your users is by allowing them to submit feedback about your blog pages. But even before that you can ask 10-15 people to use your blog and submit feedback then you can work on improving user experience based on their feedback.
Why user experience matters for Blogs
If you blog is cluttered with Ads, If your blog reading page is very narrow and sidebars are wide filled with ads it will definitely downgrade your website or blog reader’s overall experience. When users do not like to read your content your blog will not rank higher in Google SERP despite writing a great content.
Remember it’s not just the content that matters, it’s how you deliver that content, that matters the most.
Writing and delivering a Good Content can increase your website SERP and higher SERP means more leads for your business. More leads eventually bring more customers and that leads to more profit.
Minimalist Approach
When it comes to blog posts, minimalistic approach works the best because any user who is coming to your blog is not coming to buy your products or clicking on ads that you have placed everywhere. They are just coming to read the content. It’s the content that will bring you more clicks and clients and not the ads you are placing everywhere.
How to Apply minimalistic approach?
- Avoid sidebars on both sides of the blog page – Sidebars are not necessary for blogs. Having 1 sidebar on the right side is more than enough. Sidebars take up space and distract blog readers from the content. Hence having sidebars more than one should be avoided, if possible remove both sidebars.
- Avoid placing too many ads – Too many ads reduce the user experience. Reduce the number of ads you serve on your blog pages. Too many ads will not generate too many clicks because people tend to avoid visiting web pages that are cluttered with ads. People are more inclined towards those blogs that provide valuable content and a great user experience.
- Optimize your images to load faster- You should always lazy load your blog images. Reduce the size of images you post to your blog by using image compressor software. Images with big sizes tend to load slower, so this type of image must be avoided.
- Avoid too much coloring of blog pages – Do not color your fonts with different color. Keep your blog page font and background color uniform. It should not be a pain in the eye.
- keep it simple like a plain book – Writing articles like old-school books work much better than adding an artistic approach to blog pages.
Always remember, reading area should be bigger than any sidebar. Avoid sticky headers with too much animation. Animation looks good but sometimes it becomes hectic because intention of user was not to see animation but to read your content.
Follow this CSS styles for better content
- font-size: 1rem;
- font-weight: 400;
- line-height: 1.78;
- min-width: 672px;
Use Black and White Color and White space around texts as much as possible because white space around texts increases user attention to texts by 20 %. As I said earlier don’t clutter surrounding areas of blog posts with any other texts or images because you are just distracting the user from the real stuff that is your content. Ensure that your paragraph has readable fonts and a light background color.
Page Speed
Increasing your blog or website page speed is one of the most important parts of web development. There are online tools like https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to measure the current speed of your page. Remember your users are not going to wait for a longer time for your content to load they will just click the back button and visit another website.
To improve your page load time increase your server response time. Use CDN to deliver your JavaScript, stylesheet and image files.
Reduce the number of total HTTP request- Your website or blog should not make too many Http request to other website before loading.
Minify JavaScript and CSS files, this is a great way to reduce the file size of JavaScript and CSS files. There are many websites online that can minify your files. If you are using WordPress , you need to install plugins such as Wp Rocket that can automatically minify the files.
You should clean up your blog’s database every 3-6 months, so that it does not contain any unnecessary stuffs.