Nothing turns a website visitor off than the inability to have fluid access to a website even if you’ve taken out time to put up great content on your website. Imagine visiting a website and you see the texts being stretched out or too zoomed in that you constantly have to scroll sideways to read a sentence. Or you log on to a website and finding your way around becomes a great deal of work. How does that feel?

Annoying right?

The thing is, access to website is vital just as the website itself is vital to showcase your products and/or services. People, especially millennials, have no patience at all on the web – thanks to the speed of this generational technology. This could also mean that if your website is slow or inaccessible, there’s a higher chance that your website won’t even get the chance to convert leads.

To help web visitors gain access to website, there are certain factors website owners and website developers are briefed on. So in this article, we are looking at the top 6 tips you can make your website easy to access.

Let’s get on with it already!

Use Content Management Systems That Support Accessibility

Some popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress and Wix seamlessly help people build their website and provide them access to thousands of plugins and templates to choose from.

When choosing your website template, it is important that you choose a template that grants you freedom over every feature on the template just in case you need to do any necessary edits or adjustment to your website, like creating menus and layouts.

Format Your Text Rightly

Doesn’t sound like something that can hinder access to a website right? Wrong. Text is also an important factor in a website for accessibility. Remember that text is what holds 80% of your content and if it goes all wrong, then there is probably almost nothing to offer your visitor.

When we talk about text, we look into three factors:

Size

Color

Style

Size: A tiny text size would be strenuous to web visitors and also a huge text size. Some web browsers offer the ability for users to zoom into texts on a webpage but, hey! Isn’t that stress to your visitors? So to take out that stress, you should aim for somewhere between 12pt to 18pt.

Color: When it comes to color, be mindful so that the colors you pick should complement each other. Usually, a dark-colored text would go on a light-colored background and vice-versa which makes up for reading ease. By default, we would have black text on a white background. Most people just stick to that.

Style: Since we are aiming for readability here, choosing your ideal text font or style should revolve around a style that is easy for people to read. And not some fancy italics style usually used on cards.

As you can see below, in our homepage, we have a well-balanced use of text size, color and style which grants web visitors easy access around our website.

Use Light Media Content

Media contents are what make a website rich. This also helps website owners pass information in dynamic ways to get the attention of a web visitor.  This media content includes images, audio, and videos. The question would be how do media contents affect access to website?

Media content can be great tool used for promoting your brand. You can make a video of yourself explaining what your brand is about or post super-high-resolution images of your products. But how does all this content affect the health of your website?

If you have made a video of yourself explaining your brand and have taken super-high-resolution images and posted them on your website, there’s every tendency that your website would be sluggish in loading these media contents which in turn makes your website laggy and inaccessible. And that’s no good news.

Before posting these rich media contents, take a few steps to ensure that the content can be available to those who may not be able to view the video, or to those who can’t enjoy it completely – smartphone users.

The way out? – try shrinking down the size of heavy images so that they can run in kilobytes using image resizing software on the internet. Usually, shrinking videos affect its quality so why not add a button or link to a separate page where you can express more about that service or product.

Use Headings Correctly

Headers run from the <H1> tag to the <H4> tag with H1 as the biggest and down to H4, the smallest. Not only are headings used to show a ‘heading’, but they are also used in the auto-generating table of contents which are usually grouped. If placed incorrectly, you may confuse a web visitor’s navigation through the web content which in turn, breeds poor access to the website.

<H1> Heading 1 </H1>

<H2> Heading 2 </H2>

<H3> Heading 3 </H3>

<H4> Heading 4 </H4>

Headers are important not only for making your website content look organized; they are also the ways screen readers and bots crawl your website to know how to display information to users.

The <H1> tag is known to be the biggest heading and it’s used only for headings. While the <H2> tag and below to <H4> is used for sub-headings.  Meanwhile, don’t skip the heading levels.

Do Proper Design

Every website does not only need content to stand tall, it also needs an amazing design. The kind of design that says, ‘hey, we are the best!’ Poor website design can contribute to slow loading time, which rolls over to become a problem with your website ranking on search engines. For the basics, if you don’t rank on search engines, your website is not going to be accessed by web visitors in the first place.

So when designing your website, be careful with colours, avoid using tables as layouts and sidebars, design your forms for accessibility; fields and buttons should be labelled accordingly, and required fields should be correctly indicated. You can also get assistance from different tools that can help evaluate your website’s color contrast.

Use Responsive Sites

Having a responsive website is a great way to make sure anyone using any device can access your website and the contents will still adjust to fill up any screen format. This eradicates the stress of one having to scroll vertically to read a sentence or interact with media content.

Now over to you. What tip stood helpful to you? What other tip do you think would be helpful for access to website? Now head over to the blue floating icon by the bottom right that says, ‘We are here!’ and tell us what you have in mind.

Remember, we appreciate all input!

Meanwhile, if you have this kind of problem and looking for who to handle it perfectly, we are here to help.

Feel free to share this article with friends who might need to improve access to their website.