If you ask an online entrepreneur “What’s the one thing you need to get it right in order to succeed online?”, he’ll most probably tell you that it’s the website.

For any business, having a website that is well-designed, properly coded and filled with good content is of utmost importance. And here are three reasons why:

1. First Impression is the Last Impression: If you’re a business that hasn’t been around for long, the impression that visitors will have of your business will entirely (or at least mostly) depend on how your website looks and functions.

2. Satisfaction is Key To Any Business: Since you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store where people can go to check out your products or speak to someone face-to-face about the service you offer, your website is the only way that you can satiate their need to “know stuff” before they click on the “Buy Now!” or “Subscribe Now” button.

3. Word Of Mouth: Although there are various marketing strategies to make your business popular, word of mouth still remains the most powerful strategy of all. And it’s only if the visitors love your website will they take a liking to your brand and spread the word to friends and family.

All of the above factors can be taken care of through awesome website design. Create a design that is creative, innovative and different from the rest and it’s sure to make a good impression on your visitors.

Well, at least that’s what you think. But is it really the case?

When it comes to a successful website, the one thing that is as important as (or even more important than) website design is its usability. How user-friendly is your website? Does it allow your visitors to seamlessly go through your web pages and have a great experience, or are they irritated and dissatisfied by the end of it?

Testing your website for usability is an important task if you want your website to soar high and and create a buzz in social circles (and everywhere else). Given below are the top 3 factors that affect usability, and how to test them:

Step 1: Navigation

Navigation is the most important factor that decides if a website is user-friendly or not. When users land on your website, they should be able to move through its various pages and go back to any desired page without much difficulty. Some of the things to pay attention to while enhancing the maneuverability of visitors on your site is your information architecture (how well your pages are categorised) and search options to find relevant information (like search boxes, archives, links, etc.).

Here’s how you can test your website’s navigation:

Card Sorting: You write content categories on cards, and ask participants to place them in groups. This will give you an idea of the hierarchy of content, and test if your current categorisation is correct. You can conduct this activity remotely with OptimalSort.

Tree Testing: Here you generate a list of topics and sub-categories, and then you test how easy it is to find a particular category based on the tree. Treejack will help you test the same online.

Site Maps: Creating site maps is also a great way to check the effectiveness of your navigation path. Writemaps helps you to create and manage site maps.

Step 2: Content

Yes, we all know how “Content is King”, and how good content is instrumental in helping you climb up the success ladder. So we’re not going to talk about what to write, but how to write and present it to the audience.

Agreed that you have great content on your website, but the question is “Does your audience also feel that it’s as great as you think it to be?” There are many factors that contribute to this:

Is your content easy to comprehend? No matter how good your content is, if the visitors cannot comprehend it, its of no use. Avoiding jargons, and making sentences and paragraphs concise and to the point will help you gain more readership.

Is your content easy to read? Using fonts and font sizes that are strenuous to the eyes is not a very good idea, even though it may look awesome on your website. After all, you need the visitors to read, so make the task easy for them.

Do you provide a good reading environment? The reading environment is as important as the content itself. So make sure that the background makes the content stand out (contrast elements), the colors used are subtle, and no flashy images/videos/ads are there. In other words, avoid everything that will distract the visitors from reading your content.

You can use apps like JuicyStudio and Read-able to test the readability of your website.

Step 3: Website Speed

Website speed is an important factor in checking a website’s usability. The reason is simple. People who are online are in a perpetual hurry. They want all their information in front of them in super-sonic speed (at least that’s how fast they’d wish it to be!). Once they click on a link/button and your web page doesn’t load fast (and that is under 3 seconds), chances are that the visitors will hop on to another website.

There are three things that you need to consider while checking the speed:

The response time: The time it takes for the web page to load on the browser

The file size: How heavy the files are

The coding: If the coding of your website is done while following the best practices.

Some of the tools that help you check your website speed are Pingdom, GTmetrix ands Webpagetest.

So the next time you have an awesome website that you’re proud of, make sure you get it tested for its usability. Go any more tips to share? Feel free to comment!