Your website gets fewer clicks from Google than ever before. When someone does visit, the experience has to count. Here are seven practical changes you can make right now to keep visitors on your site and turn them into clients.
TLDR – what we cover:
- Upgrade from “Responsive” to “Genuinely Good” Mobile UX: Moving beyond a site that simply “doesn’t break” on phones to one that is easy to navigate, with readable text and thumb-friendly buttons.
- Write for Scanners (Not Readers): Using short paragraphs (max 3–4 sentences), clear subheadings, and front-loading the most important information to cater to impatient visitors.
- Implement a Clear Call to Action (CTA) on Every Page: Ensuring every single page (not just the homepage) has a specific, verb-driven next step (e.g., “Book Now” instead of “Submit”).
- Optimize for Google’s Core Web Vitals: Improving technical speed and stability metrics to meet Google’s 2026 ranking standards.
- Prioritize Authentic Imagery over Stock/AI Photos: Replacing generic stock photos and “uncanny” AI images with real photography and video of your actual team and workspace to build trust.
- Ensure Full Web Accessibility: Making the site usable for everyone (including those with visual or motor impairments) by using proper alt-text, heading structures, and color contrast—now a legal requirement for many.
- Create Specific, Personality-Driven Content: Writing deeply helpful and unique content that provides more value than a generic AI search summary, giving visitors a reason to actually click through from Google.
How to improve your website user experience?
To improve your website’s user experience, focus on seven areas: make your mobile experience genuinely easy to use (not just technically responsive), break up long text with clear subheadings and short paragraphs, add strong calls to action on every page, speed up your loading times to meet Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmarks, use authentic images and video instead of stock photography, make your site accessible to people with disabilities, and write content that’s specific enough to earn clicks in an age of AI-generated search results.
I wrote a version of this article back in 2017, and honestly? Most of the advice still holds up. But the world your website lives in has changed a lot since then. Google has got smarter (and more possessive of its search results). Your visitors are more impatient than ever. And there are now actual laws about making your website accessible to everyone.
So here’s the updated version. Seven things you can do to your business website right now that will make a real difference to how your visitors experience it, and whether they stick around long enough to become clients.
Is your mobile experience actually good, or just technically responsive?
Back in 2017, I was telling people that 46% of web traffic came from mobile devices and they needed to make their sites responsive. In 2026, that number has jumped to around 62-64% globally (StatCounter, 2025). Mobile isn’t “nearly half” anymore. It’s nearly two-thirds.
The Shift to Mobile-First Indexing
But here’s what’s really changed. Google now uses the mobile version of your website as the primary version for indexing and ranking. Not the desktop version. The mobile one. So if your mobile site is a bit rubbish, it’s not just your phone visitors who suffer. It’s your Google rankings too.
Beyond “It Doesn’t Break”
Most business websites built in the last five years are technically responsive. They resize. They don’t break. But “it doesn’t break” is a pretty low bar, isn’t it?
Have a proper look at your site on your phone and ask yourself:
- Can you tap the buttons without accidentally hitting something else?
- Is the text readable without pinching and zooming?
- Are your most important calls to action visible without scrolling?
- If you’ve got a contact form, is it bearable to fill in on a phone?
- Does your navigation make sense on a small screen, or is everything buried in a hamburger menu?
The Financial Cost of Poor Mobile UX
The conversion gap between mobile and desktop is still massive. Desktop visitors convert at about 3.9%, while mobile sits at around 2.85%. For e-commerce sites, cart abandonment on mobile is 84.8% compared to 74.3% on desktop (Quantumrun Foresight, 2025). People browse on their phones but give up when the buying experience gets fiddly. That’s money walking out the door.
What to do: Open your site on your phone right now. Not tomorrow, now. Try to do the thing you want your customers to do. Book an appointment. Buy a product. Fill in a contact form. If it’s even slightly annoying, your customers think so too. For proper testing across different devices, Chrome DevTools has built-in device emulation (right-click, Inspect, then toggle the device toolbar), and it’s free.
Write so people can scan the page
This is one I’m so guilty of. I can talk ’til the cows come home, and when I get behind a keyboard to write about business, let’s just say it can get a bit wordy. (Trust me, the first draft of this article was about twice as long.)
Your visitors don’t read your website like a book. They scan it. They’re looking for the bit that answers their question, and if they can’t find it quickly, they’re gone.
Since 2017, this has got even more true. There’s more content than ever competing for your visitor’s attention, and a lot of it is AI-generated filler that says a lot of words without actually saying much. The bar for being genuinely useful and easy to read has gone up.
A few things that help:
- Short paragraphs. Three or four sentences maximum, then a break.
- Subheadings that actually tell people what the next section is about. Better yet, phrase them as questions your reader might be asking.
- Front-load the good stuff. Put the most useful information at the beginning of each section, not buried at the end.
- If you can say it in fewer words, do. Go back through what you’ve written and be ruthless about cutting the bits that don’t earn their place.
Google’s “helpful content” updates over the last couple of years specifically reward content that’s written for actual humans and that genuinely answers the question someone came with. Writing for your reader, not for a word count, isn’t just good practice anymore. It’s an SEO strategy.
Include a call to action
When you planned out your site, did you think about the action you want your users to take? Go take a look at it now and imagine you are your own customer. You can see your services, there’s a lovely picture of you, all very nice, but are you being asked to do anything?
This was my advice in 2017, and I stand by every word. But in 2026, your calls to action need to work even harder.
The Rise of Zero-Click Searches
Fewer people are clicking through from Google than they used to. Up to 60% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking on anything at all (SparkToro/Similarweb, 2025), because Google’s AI Overviews are answering questions right there on the search results page. When someone does click through to your website, that click is more valuable than it’s ever been. You can’t afford to waste it by leaving them wondering what to do next.
Best Practices for Effective CTAs
- Every page on your site should have a clear next step. Not just your homepage. Someone might land on a blog post or a service page from a Google search and never see your homepage at all.
- Use verbs on your buttons. “Book Now,” “Get Started,” “Send Me a Quote” all tell people exactly what will happen when they click. “Submit” and “Click Here” don’t.
- Make sure your main call to action is visible on mobile without scrolling. A sticky header or floating button can help with this.
- Don’t give people too many choices at once. If every page has six different buttons, it’s the same as having none. Pick the one thing you most want them to do and make that the star.
Pro tip: If you want to stop guessing about where people actually click, tools like Microsoft Clarity (completely free) or Hotjar (free for small sites) let you see heatmaps and recordings of how real visitors use your site. It’s genuinely eye-opening. I’ve seen clients redesign entire pages based on what they learned from ten minutes of watching session recordings.
Ensure your website loads quickly
I don’t know about you but living in rural Norfolk does not make for speedy website viewing, particularly on my phone. That hasn’t changed since 2017. What has changed is how Google measures your site speed, and what it means for your search rankings.
Demystifying Core Web Vitals
Google now uses something called Core Web Vitals to measure how your website feels to real visitors. There are three of them, and here’s what they actually mean in plain English:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is how quickly the main content of your page appears. Think of it as the moment your visitor stops staring at a blank screen and can actually see what your page is about. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is how fast your site reacts when someone taps a button or clicks a link. You know that horrible lag where you tap something and nothing happens for a second? That’s what INP measures. Google wants this under 200 milliseconds.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is whether things jump around on screen as the page loads. You know when you go to tap a link and the whole page shifts and you end up clicking an advert instead? Infuriating. Google wants this score below 0.1.
Why Speed is Your Competitive Edge
These scores directly affect your search rankings. They’re not the most important factor. Good, relevant content still wins. But when your content is similar to a competitor’s, your site speed and stability can be the thing that tips the balance. And here’s a stat that should matter if you’re on WordPress: as of mid-2025, only 44% of WordPress sites on mobile pass all three Core Web Vitals tests (MonsterInsights, 2025). That means more than half are failing. If yours passes, you’ve already got an edge.
Quick Wins for Better Performance
What to do:
- Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and will give you specific recommendations.
- Check your Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console if you’ve got it set up.
- The easiest quick win is usually image optimisation. Make sure your images are in WebP format (much smaller file sizes than JPEG or PNG, and all modern browsers support it now). Keep file sizes as small as possible without looking terrible. TinyPNG and Squoosh are both free tools that do a brilliant job.
- If you’re on WordPress, a good caching plugin and a lightweight theme make a huge difference. I’m happy to chat about specifics if you’re not sure where to start.
Be careful with the use of stock and AI images
Consumers are savvy and shiny stock images don’t fool anyone. Please ditch the smiling woman with the headset and hire a photographer. I’ll say it again louder for 2026: please, please use real images of your actual business.
And now there’s a new flavour of fake to watch out for. AI-generated images are everywhere, and they can be just as hollow and generic as stock photography. Sometimes more so, because they often have that slightly “off” quality that people notice even if they can’t quite put their finger on why.
Are your images telling the truth about your business?
Real photography of your actual team, your actual workspace, your actual products builds trust in a way that no stock image or AI-generated picture ever will. Hiring a professional photographer is still one of the best investments you can make. The images work on your website, your social media, your Google Business Profile, your proposals, your email signatures. You’ll use them for years.
If professional photography isn’t in the budget right now, a decent smartphone photo of something real will always beat a polished stock image of something fake. Just make sure the lighting is good and the image is in focus. That’s honestly 90% of it.
Something else to consider for 2026: Video. Even short, informal video clips on your website, a 30-second hello, a quick walkthrough of what it’s like to work with you, a client sharing their experience, can build trust more effectively than any photograph. They don’t need to be polished. In fact, slightly rough and honest often performs better than slick and corporate. People can tell the difference.
Make your website Accessible
This matters more than most business owners realise.
Web accessibility means making sure that people with disabilities, things like visual impairments, hearing difficulties, motor difficulties, or cognitive differences, can use your website properly. And it’s not just a nice-to-have anymore. There are legal requirements.
Understanding the Legal Landscape
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make “reasonable adjustments” so that disabled people aren’t disadvantaged when accessing your services, and that includes your website. For public sector organisations, the accessibility standard is even more specific, requiring compliance with WCAG 2.2 (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) Level AA.
If your business sells products or services into the EU, the European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, and it applies to UK businesses trading in the EU with more than 10 employees and over 2 million euros in annual turnover (Damteq, 2025).
The Business Case for Inclusion
Beyond legalities, over 20% of working-age adults in the UK have some form of disability (Scope, 2020). That’s a huge number of potential customers who might be struggling to use your website right now.
Easy Steps to Improve Accessibility
The good news is that the basics aren’t difficult:
- Alt text on images. This is the text that screen readers read out for people who can’t see the image. Describe what the image shows. “Sara working at her desk” is useful. “IMG_4532.jpg” is not.
- Proper heading structure. Use H1, H2, H3 in order, like a table of contents. Don’t skip from H1 to H4 because you liked how H4 looked. Screen readers use headings to help people move around the page.
- Good colour contrast. Make sure your text is readable against its background. Grey text on a light grey background might look sophisticated, but it’s a nightmare for anyone with a visual impairment. WebAIM’s contrast checker (webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker) is free and takes two seconds.
- Keyboard navigation. Can someone get through your entire site using just a keyboard? Not everyone uses a mouse.
- Captions on videos. Not everyone can hear your audio. And plenty of people watch video with the sound off anyway.
A lot of these things are good for everyone, not just people with disabilities. Clear headings, readable text, and good contrast make for a better experience full stop. And they tend to help with SEO too, because search engines read your site in a similar way to screen readers.
Create Specific, Personality-Driven Content
I said earlier that 60% of Google searches now end without a click. Let me explain why that matters for your website, because it changes how you should think about the whole thing.
Your website is competing with Google for your visitor’s attention (and Google is winning)
Google has been rolling out something called AI Overviews, powered by artificial intelligence, that summarise answers to questions directly on the search results page. If someone Googles “how to improve my website user experience,” they might get a neat little AI-generated summary right there, without ever needing to click through to my blog (or yours).
Research from Pew in 2025 found that about one in five Google searches produced an AI summary, and people were noticeably less likely to click through to a website when one appeared. For informational content, the kind of “how to” and “what is” articles that many small businesses rely on for traffic, the impact has been significant.
This doesn’t mean your website doesn’t matter. If anything, it means it matters more. Because when someone does click through, they’ve chosen your site specifically. That visitor is more intentional, more interested, and more likely to become a client, but only if the experience is worth the click.
Here’s what this means in practice:
- Your content needs to be genuinely helpful and specific to you. Generic advice that could have been written by anyone (or by AI) is exactly the kind of thing Google will summarise and serve up without sending traffic your way. Your personal experience, your opinions, your local knowledge, your specific expertise, that’s what makes people click through and stay.
- Structure your content clearly. Google is more likely to cite well-structured, clearly written content in its AI Overviews. Use clear headings, answer questions directly, and make your content easy to pull information from.
- Build your audience directly. Email lists, social media followings, returning visitors who type your URL directly, these are all ways of reaching people that don’t depend on Google sending you traffic. This is worth investing in.
The businesses that are doing well in this new reality are the ones where the owner’s personality and experience come through in their content. (Good news if you’re a small business, that’s your built-in advantage.)
What to fix today:
Can I ask you to do one thing after reading this? The same thing I asked in 2017, because it’s still the best advice I’ve got.
Imagine you are your perfect client. Pick up your phone. Go to your website. Try to do the thing you want them to do. Book an appointment. Buy a product. Get in touch.
Did anything annoy you? Was anything confusing? Did you give up at any point?
Fix that thing. Just that one thing. Today.
You don’t have to do all seven of these at once. Pick the one that will make the biggest difference for your visitors and start there. Progress over perfection, always.
And if you get stuck, or you’re not sure where to start, you know where I am. I’m always happy to have a look and point you in the right direction.
Frequently asked questions about improving website user experience
What is the most important thing I can do to improve my website’s user experience? Test your own website on your phone as if you were a customer. Try to complete the action you want visitors to take, whether that’s booking, buying, or getting in touch. Whatever frustrates you will be frustrating your visitors too. Fix that first.
What are Core Web Vitals and why do they matter? Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to score how your website feels to real visitors: how fast the main content loads (LCP), how quickly the site responds when someone taps or clicks (INP), and whether elements jump around on screen while loading (CLS). These scores affect your Google search rankings, and over half of WordPress sites are currently failing them.
Does my website need to be accessible? In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that includes your website. If you sell into the EU, the European Accessibility Act (June 2025) sets even more specific requirements. Beyond the legal side, over 20% of UK working-age adults have a disability, so accessibility directly affects how many people can use your site.
How does AI search affect my website traffic? Around 60% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website, partly because Google’s AI Overviews answer questions directly on the search results page. This means fewer visitors overall, but the ones who do click through are more intentional. Making your website experience count when they arrive matters more than ever.
0 Comments