How To Verify That Your Website Is User-Friendly

Websites have been around for so long that it seems we’ve started taking them for granted. However, they are still a starting point for many customers online.

From giving the business more authority to creating sales funnels, you can miss out on many opportunities to connect with your audience if they walk away with a bad user experience after visiting your website.

Remember that adding new content is not enough—you need to keep tracking all the factors that impact the optimization and its ranking.

There are many improvements you can make to ensure that your landing pages are user-friendly, starting with design and ending with backend adjustments. Let’s discuss some steps that’ll give your visitors a great experience and improve the SERP ranking in the process.

Simple navigation and readability

All technical buzzwords aside, the visual aspect is one of the key factors which impact visitors’ impression of your website.. This doesn’t refer just to images and good color choices (although they’re important as well). The ways you set up all elements of a page have an impact on UX which is why you should always approach the edits from a user’s perspective.

Design and content

One of the best ways to determine if your website’s visual presentation is up to standard is through user testing. This helps you get to know ins and outs of everything that could be an issue for the average visitor.

Implementing usability testing tools such as PlaybookUX could save your time in the long run. You can use it to watch real people interact with your website, see which materials resonate with your visitors and understand their needs before you add new pages. This makes the testing process easily scalable.

One of the key aspects of making everything more user friendly is content readability. Aside from a clear, readable font (never choose style over functionality when it comes to fonts), you should also think about how users will interact with it. Many visitors just gloss over text and that means you need to do everything you can to make the message as accessible as possible.

For example when you include a clickable table of contents, it makes it much easier to read through.

Source: Slack

Some ways to make content more readable include:

Appropriate headings and subheadings – Use a single H1 for the subject of a page, while thinking about H2 as chapters for the content below. If you need to go into more detail, use H3 for sub-sections.
Number or bullet lists
Paragraphs that aren’t too long. Ideally, they shouldn’t have more than 2-3 sentences.
A mix of text and images
Bold and italic fonts. Rather than using all caps or different sizes of text, use these to make information stand out.

You can also add contrasts and highlights in appropriate spots to improve readability. This is especially important when it comes to links—users should always be able to distinguish them from other text, so they need to look clickable.

Organization

Aside from being easily recognizable, links should streamline the user’s path through the website. They should also offer relevant pages to go to next and suggest content related to what the user has read.

Additionally, make sure to include CTAs—they should appear at appropriate moments in the visitor's flow and make it logical to take a certain action.

Navigating through the website should feel fluid. you need to organize your content in a way that’s logical and provides user-friendly ways to engage with it.

To do this, Consider your website’s search feature and ways to improve it. Here are some steps that’ll make it easier for your audience to improve the users’ experience:

Allow alternate spellings and typos so it’s easier for the users to reach the things they’re interested in
Offer suggestions for similar content and highlight keywords that can lead the visitors to a related page
Show the most recent additions on top so the users can save time on sorting content

Categories such as the About page, Contact information, as well as details about other business specifics should be clearly visible. You’ll achieve this by creating a clear structure, with navigation and different tabs properly labeled, so the users don’t have to do any guesswork.

Source: Airbnb

The Airbnb homepage is a good example of this, as you can see the most important category fields for your search right away.

Some additional ways that can help you organize content:

Place the most important information first
Avoid using industry jargon and confusing abbreviations
Use tags for your content so that users can search more efficiently
Don’t place too many elements in the navigation
Remove dead-ends, such as pages without links

Responsive and accessible usability

After you’ve taken care of your website's content and presentation needs, you need to dive into the technical side of things. Verify that you’ve done everything to make your website as user-friendly as possible for all users, regardless of how they access it.

Compatibility

Mobile devices excluding tablets generate more than 50% of all website traffic, so a responsive and scalable experience that’s mobile-friendly should be a standard. Each user should have a near-identical interaction no matter what they’re using for their visit.

All of the elements, from navigation to text and images, should be automatically formatted, resized, and spaced.

When we talk about your website being responsive, it doesn’t just include devices. You should also make sure that each browser and operating system is equally supported so that you can reach a broad audience.

To make the experience even more user-friendly, you should reduce loading time as much as possible. Not only are the users more likely to leave your website if the pages take too long to load, but better times also improve your search engine ranking.

If you’re unsure of how to make your loading times faster, you should avoid excessive videos, optimize images and fonts, remove non-essential widgets, as well as third-party plug-ins.

Accessibility

When it comes to widespread access, you shouldn’t just stop at the means of visiting your website. Users themselves shouldn’t have any obstacles in getting to your content.

Have in mind that people with disabilities may also visit your website. Implement web design techniques that’ll ensure a seamless experience for everyone. For example, add audio navigation to make the pages accessible for visually-impaired visitors.

Source: The Disability TRUST

For example, The Disability Trust's homepage clearly displays various accessibility options right at the top.

Users should also always know what’s going on regarding their actions. For example, each error should be clearly labeled, with a direction provided for further actions. It should always be clear to users what they need to do to get the desired outcome. Another example of this would be adding a direct call widget in the contact section.

If you’re using forms, for example, to get feedback, avoid asking for too much data and try showing a progress bar so they’ll know the status at any point of the process.

Technical setup

Finally, you need to consider ways to solve any backed issues that may come up. It’s important to run extensive tests to catch any possible bugs that may impair your website’s functionality. Broken links also impact user experience, so you need to do a clean-up that will leave you with content that doesn’t stop the users’ flow.

Aside from functionality, you also need to perform regular security checks to make sure everything’s up to current standards. Google prefers websites that are secured with a SSL certificate. This distinction indicates a couple important factors that both raise your search engine ranking and give users additional assurance that they can trust you:

Website data, including passwords and e-mail addresses are protected from hackers
Your page’s identity is identified through a third party so nobody can use your website’s name for malicious and deceptive pages.

One of the best ways to ensure that you have the green light is to run the URL through the Google Safe Browsing tool.

If you don’t set it up properly, users will be warned that they shouldn’t visit your website, so you could miss out on a lot of traffic.

Source: Websiteplanet

The easiest way to check if your website is secure is to look for a padlock symbol next to the URL address, indicating the available protection.

You should also keep your plug-ins up to date to make your website even less vulnerable to outside risks.

Summary

When verifying that your website is user-friendly, it’s important to go over all the ways your users will interact with it and test whether everything flows as it should. This way, you’ll avoid users’ frustration, which can impact your website’s ranking and the business as a whole in the long run.

Start with a usability test and run through your content. Think about how users can perceive it, whether the design is easily readable, and whether everything is sorted in a simple, efficient way.

Your Next step should be optimization and ensuring that as many users as possible can access your content without obstacles, including devices, systems, or personal obstacles.

Finally, dive into the technical side of things and keep security as tight as possible to further improve your ranking and prove to your users that they can trust you.

FAQs

What is website usability and why does it matter for SaaS businesses?

Website usability is how easily visitors can navigate, read, and take action on your site without friction or confusion.

For SaaS founders, a poor user experience does more than frustrate visitors. The majority of visitors who experience usability problems on a website never return, which means every broken flow or unreadable page is a direct hit to your acquisition funnel. Clean navigation, readable content, and fast load times also influence where Google ranks your site, which compounds the cost of ignoring UX. Trial-to-paid conversion starts long before someone signs up, and your website is where first impressions are made.
How do you test whether your website is user-friendly?
You verify website usability by running structured user tests that observe real visitors completing real tasks on your site.
- Use a usability testing tool to record real users navigating key pages
- Identify where visitors hesitate, drop off, or fail to find what they need
- Check mobile responsiveness across devices, browsers, and operating systems
- Run your URL through Google Safe Browsing to confirm your site is trusted and secure
Usability testing focuses on confidence-building and error prevention before issues reach your users. For SaaS businesses, friction at this stage quietly kills trial sign-ups before they ever reach your pricing page.
What makes website content readable and how does it affect conversion?

Content readability is how easily a visitor can absorb and act on the information on your page, and it directly affects conversion rate.

Short paragraphs of two to three sentences, clear heading hierarchy using H1 through H3, and a mix of bullet lists and images all reduce the cognitive load on a visitor. Links should look clickable, bold and italic text should highlight key information, and calls to action should appear at logical points in the user flow. For SaaS landing pages, poor readability means visitors gloss over your value proposition and leave without converting, which raises your customer acquisition cost without adding a single subscriber.
Why is mobile responsiveness important for website user experience?

Mobile responsiveness ensures every visitor gets a consistent, fully functional experience regardless of the device, browser, or operating system they use.

Mobile devices excluding tablets now generate more than half of all website traffic, so a site that breaks or loads slowly on a phone is actively turning away the majority of potential visitors. All page elements including navigation, images, and text should resize and reformat automatically. Slow load times compound the problem: pages that take too long to load increase bounce rate and drop your search engine ranking. For SaaS founders, every percentage point of bounce rate lost to a poor mobile experience is acquisition spend that never converts.
How does website load time affect user experience and search rankings?

Slow page load times increase bounce rate, reduce time on site, and directly lower your search engine ranking, which makes acquisition harder and more expensive.

To reduce load time, remove excessive video autoplay, optimise image file sizes, avoid unnecessary third-party plugins, and streamline fonts. Every second of delay raises the likelihood that a visitor leaves before engaging with your content or reaching a conversion point. For SaaS businesses with content-heavy product pages or long-form blog posts, even modest speed improvements can meaningfully improve organic traffic and trial sign-up rates.
What is web accessibility and how should SaaS websites approach it?

Web accessibility is the practice of designing your website so that all users, including those with disabilities, can navigate and use it without barriers.

Practical steps include adding audio navigation for visually impaired visitors, clearly labeling every error with guidance on what to do next, and showing progress bars in any multi-step forms to reduce uncertainty. Accessible design also means avoiding jargon, using high-contrast text, and ensuring interactive elements are clearly distinguishable. For SaaS products targeting a broad user base, accessibility is not a nice-to-have. It expands your addressable audience and reduces the support burden that comes from users getting stuck.
How does website security affect user trust and search engine ranking?

A valid SSL certificate signals to both Google and your visitors that your site is secure, which improves search rankings and reduces drop-off caused by browser security warnings.

You can verify your site's status by running the URL through the Google Safe Browsing tool or checking for a padlock symbol next to the URL in the browser. Without SSL, visitors see a warning before your page even loads, and most will leave immediately. Keeping plugins updated reduces your vulnerability to exploits that could compromise that trust. For SaaS founders, a site flagged as unsafe does not just hurt organic traffic. It actively damages the credibility you need to convert a visitor into a paying subscriber.

How To Verify That Your Website Is User-Friendly

Table of Contents