Updating your website to improve user experience
July 28, 2025
In this series, we’ve recently explored factors that could help determine if a custom website is the right solution for you. We’ve identified key reasons to explore developing a new website and how custom website development can support your brand and marketing objectives. Now, as we near the end of this series, it’s time to look at arguably the most important factor of all: supporting your end user and their goals.
In the modern day of connectivity, your website is often your first impression of your business for potential customers. It is critical to your success generating business leads or improving conversion rates that it sets the standard and performs well for all users. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which a custom web design can improve your user experience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The first important factor is ensuring your site is found by new and familiar users alike. Ensuring your web project will rank well on search engine result pages (SERPs) is the first step in helping your users achieve their goals with your business. A custom website can have a very big positive impact when it comes to improving your SEO ranking.
When your site is built using a theme or a page builder, there isn’t a direct focus on structuring your content or your code in a way that search engines will deem successful. A custom web design should incorporate a planning phase to properly plan your site’s content and layouts, and custom web development allows for the inclusion of key schemas, metadata, and the proper semantic markup that is proven successful in increasing your search ranking.
Successful SEO efforts lead to improved organic traffic and increased client or customer growth.
Functionality
The most obvious benefit of a custom development project is the ability to expand your site’s functionality. Often out-of-the-box solutions, like a template, will hinder your ability to scale systems, improve efforts, and integrate with third party solutions. Whether you’re sending leads to a CRM, integrating tools for users to interact with on the front end of your site, or have a unique use case that requires planning and development, functional integrations can make or break a project.
While planning a website from the ground up, these tools can be considered from the start and seamlessly factored into your overall efforts. The ability to reduce friction, improve internal processes, and ensure your site works exactly as your users expect is crucial in retaining audiences and reducing drop off or bounce rates.
Performance
Finally, the last consideration we’ll review in this post is how performance can help you retain an audience once they’ve found your website. If a site is not performing up to expectations or a user can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, you’re likely to lose users due to frustration or impatience.
A user on your site will determine whether they want to stay within milliseconds and very often this can be determined by lackluster web design or confusing UX. A custom web design can not only focus on clearly defining user journeys through clear calls to action and strategically planning your content around your goals but will also focus on developing a clean markup that loads quickly – even as you add more content and expand your business.
Another important consideration for successful site performance is that it works well for all users and on all devices. By developing a custom web design, you can ensure that the site is responsive, mobile friendly, and accessible to users of all abilities. Often, accessibility and responsiveness are two of the most challenging and forgotten considerations when it comes to templates and page builders.
As demonstrated in this series of posts, there are many benefits to a custom website, but what should always be considered is supporting your customers or clients along their journey. Not only is it important to ensure that everybody has equal access to your website, but it can help you improve your business objectives by putting users first.
We’ll be wrapping up this series in our next post where we finalize by discussing all the benefits of custom web design. Be sure to check back soon, where we’ll be linking to the post here!