Enhancing the user experience on your website: Ultimate guide for global brands

The user experience (UX) can make or break a website’s impact on engagement and conversions. Beyond just attractive visuals, a frictionless and intuitive online experience motivates audiences to interact with content and become repeat visitors.

For global companies, the challenge of smooth UX is even greater. They have to deliver consistent, high-quality website experiences that engage customers across diverse languages, cultures, and regions. 

This guide will explore how to improve user experience on websites and recommend UX best practices—like localization strategies—to support sustainable growth worldwide.

What is user experience, and why is it essential for companies?

UX refers to the overall experience someone has when interacting with a business’s website, app, or other platform. It includes ease of navigation and information accessibility. Enhancing the user experience means meeting users’ unique expectations while making it easy to find what they need and convert.

Implementing UX best practices can help businesses:

• Increase conversions: Good UX design streamlines navigation and simplifies user interfaces so visitors can take action, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
• Boost customer retention: Encourage repeat visitors and customers by meeting them with seamless and intuitive experiences at each touchpoint.
• Improve SEO: Search engines prioritize websites that provide a user-friendly experience, rewarding them with higher rankings and improved visibility in search results.
• Reduce bounce rates: Engage users with attention-grabbing design, informative content, and intuitive layouts, increasing their time on site and page views per visit.

How to improve the user experience: 6 ways to create a better digital journey

User experience optimization strategies should serve your unique business goals and audience needs, whether you want to boost page loading speeds or translate messaging for global audiences. Start with these best practices and techniques to improve the user experience:

1. Enhance mobile responsiveness

To reach users across devices, make sure your website loads quickly and displays seamlessly on all screen sizes. Mobile-optimized templates and touch-friendly interfaces improve mobile engagement and navigation.

Website designers should also consider mobile users’ unique needs. For example, they place navigation menus at the bottom of the screen where thumbs can easily reach them.

2. Improve accessibility to meet international standards 

Adhere to standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to maximize your site’s accessibility. WCAG sets requirements for details like keyboard navigation and image alt text to better reach users with disabilities. Designers can also increase the contrast between text and backgrounds to increase readability for visitors with visual impairments.

3. Provide localized content for each target audience

Localized content that matches global visitors’ linguistic and cultural preferences promotes trust and encourages sales. However, it requires careful management of multilingual content across web, mobile, and app channels. Fortunately, Smartling integrates with popular CMS platforms like Contentful to streamline this process and maintain brand consistency across multiple languages. 

You can also use Smartling’s Global Delivery Network (GDN), a website translation proxy, to quickly and automatically translate content into customers’ preferred languages. As you update your site in your language, the GDN automatically detects and translates new content so your global users always receive the most up-to-date user experience.

4. Incorporate social proof and testimonials

Testimonials and reviews build credibility and trust. If you’re expanding globally, remember to feature real user experiences that reflect the local culture and language of each target audience. This personalization encourages users to engage and convert, since they can see people they relate to benefiting from your product and using it in familiar contexts.

5. Create a user-friendly checkout process

A smooth, intuitive checkout process boosts sales and minimizes cart abandonment. Simplify and auto-populate forms, offer customers’ preferred payment options, and provide clear instructions for making a purchase. Also, clearly display security badges and transparent terms and conditions to assure customers that their sensitive information is safe.

6. Regularly test and iterate

Conduct ongoing tests to gather user analytics, identify UX roadblocks, and spot opportunities for improvement. Then, use these findings to continuously optimize your site. Satisfying dynamic customer expectations and behaviors keeps your UX fresh and competitive so you can grow your audience and reward loyal customers.

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How does UX impact SEO rankings?

UX significantly affects SEO rankings because search engines prioritize websites that offer fast loading times, intuitive navigation, and engaging content—hallmarks of good UX. When users stay longer and interact more, metrics like bounce rate and engagement improve. This tells search engines the site is high-quality and relevant, which can lead to higher rankings.

How can I gather user feedback to improve UX?

Gather user feedback through usability testing, online surveys, and feedback widgets on your site. Surveys and widgets let users quickly share thoughts during or after their visit, whereas usability tests provide metrics and insights about how they interact with your site. You can also use heat maps to see which elements and areas of your design drive the most engagement.

How often should I update my website’s UX design?

Monitor and tweak your website’s UX design frequently to keep up with changing user expectations and design trends. For example, you might conduct a major update every two years but make smaller, incremental updates based on ongoing user feedback and engagement metrics. Regularly reviewing and adjusting your UX guarantees a high-performing website that delivers increased conversions and ROI.

Optimize the website experience for your global audience with Smartling

When websites are intuitive, fast, and personalized to users’ needs, they increase engagement and turn one-off visitors into returning customers. But to make this happen, brands must treat UX as an evolving process, consistently analyzing and adapting their digital presence to meet changing expectations. 

Optimizing UX for diverse, global audiences is particularly challenging. That’s where Smartling can help. Smartling’s website translation proxy, The Global Delivery Network (GDN), offers the fastest and most cost-effective way to launch and manage multilingual web experiences at scale. The GDN makes it easy to deliver localized content to your global users without increased manual effort.

For example, ePlaneAI leveraged the GDN to make their app available in 10 different languages.

“Having Smartling as a translation solution makes translating our web app very easy and very fast for me to handle,” said Oleh Henaliuk, Head of Project Management and Business Analysis for ePlaneAI. “New pages can be translated in less than 15 minutes and now I only have to think about translation as maintenance, rather than a time-consuming, manual task.”

Read the ePlaneAI case study to learn more about how Smartling’s GDN helps businesses expand their global reach.