How to improve your website user experience?

If you’re looking to improve your website’s user experience, understanding how to avoid intrusive interstitials and dialogs is crucial. This guide is designed for website owners who want to ensure their site is user-friendly and meets Google’s guidelines. It covers everything from creating unintrusive dialogs to common mistakes to avoid.

Here are some key aspects to consider:

1. Intrusive interstitials and dialogs: These are page elements that obstruct users’ view of the content, usually for promotional purposes. They can be overlays on the whole page or just a part of it.
2. The impact of intrusive dialogs: Interrupting users with intrusive interstitials may frustrate them and erode their trust in your website. They also make it hard for Google and other search engines to understand your content, which may lead to poor search performance.
3. Creating unintrusive dialogs: Users should be able to access your content without being interrupted by a dialog. This applies to all kinds of promotional dialogs, including app install prompts.
4. Using banners: Instead of full-page interstitials, use banners that take up only a small fraction of the screen to grab your users’ attention. These can be implemented in various ways, such as browser-supported banners or simple HTML banners.
5. Using common libraries: Many CMSes have plugins that create standard dialogs and interstitials for the most common use cases, such as newsletter sign-up prompts. Using such plugins can be helpful for Google, other search engines, and the internet in general.
6. Avoiding common mistakes: Unless they’re legally mandatory, avoid obscuring the entire page with interstitials or redirecting the user to a separate page for their consent or input.
7. Mandatory interstitials: Certain sites are required to show an interstitial due to the kind of content they are publishing. For example, a casino site may need to show an age gate. However, it’s recommended to follow certain best practices, such as ensuring that the content is overlaid with the interstitial and not redirecting the incoming HTTP requests to a different page for collecting consent or providing data.

How to improve your website user experience?

Avoiding intrusive interstitials and dialogs is a crucial part of improving your site’s user experience and meeting Google’s guidelines. By following these best practices, your site can become more user-friendly and search engine optimised.

For further insights into SEO, consider exploring our Google penalty recovery services and our guide on how to get Google to crawl and index your website quickly. If you’re just starting with SEO, our free SEO checklist could be a valuable resource. With a wealth of experience spanning two decades in SEO and online marketing, I’m here to guide you through the intricate digital landscape.

For more information on avoiding intrusive interstitials, refer to Google’s developer’s guide.