User Experience (UX + UI) for Plumbing Websites

What is User Experience for Plumbing Websites?

User experience is a plumbing consumer’s experience while interacting with your website. Factors include the user’s perception, the quality of the design, and the website’s ease of use.

What is User Interface for Plumbers?

User interface is how users interact with your plumbing website, regardless of experience. Of course, superior interfaces create better experiences, which should be every website’s goal.

5 User Experience Tips for Plumbing Companies

Website user experience has become vastly important in digital marketing over the last decade. As the interface between user and website becomes more defined, the user demands a more streamlined experience. And for the initiated, user experience refers to how your visitors interact and, yes, experience your website. 

Are images loading quickly? Is your site easy to navigate? Are you offering interesting or engaging content that will make the user want to hang around for a while?

These questions and others are all matters of website user experience. And they are all pivotal questions because if your website is slow, confusing, or doesn’t offer anything of value to your potential customer, you better believe that they will click elsewhere. 

In fact, a February 2021 study indicates that 40% of web surfers will leave your page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That’s almost half of your potential clientele or existing customers. And we understand it could be hard for plumbing companies to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the website user experience. 

It can be even harder to come up with ways of providing a modern UX to your visitors. After all, you run a plumbing company, not a website design company. So in the following post, we will be going over some tried and true tips that you can implement to improve our website user experience. 

1) Increasing your Page Speeds

This is number one on our list because it may be the most important. If you can’t get anyone to stay on your website for more than 3 seconds, other user experience tips become moot. So start here. First, you will need to test your website page speed.

There are a lot of free and easy ways to do this. Pingdom offers a free website speed testing tool. All you have to do is enter the URL of the pages you want to test, and you will get an analysis of how they performed. 

If your pages are loading in 3 seconds or less, then you’re fine. But if they’re not, there are some things you can do to try to speed things up without a major overhaul:

• Compress Images: Compressing any images you have before loading them onto your site is one easy way to speed things up.

• Don’t Overdo Images: Images are great for plumbing SEO. But having too many of them on any given page of your website can not only distract the user from your important content; it can also significantly slow your page load times. 

2) Segment Content

This is another fairly simple yet powerful tip that you can use today. No one wants to read huge blocks of text. That’s why it’s good to segment your written content.

Break up big walls of text into smaller paragraphs and use numbered and bulleted lists to help break up important content and make it more readable for your visitors. 

Another recent study has found out how important segmenting content is. Apparently, 70% of people prefer looking at content with bulleted lists instead of 55% of people who read content with no lists.

Simply breaking content up so it’s easier for your viewers to read can significantly differentiate how many potential customers you are moving along the sales funnel.

3) Indicative Headings

Google is really starting to crack down on misleading headings and page titles. This was a strategy that some marketers used to attract more attention to their client’s websites. But now, they are being penalized for it with indexing omissions. 

In other words, Google and other search engines are getting better at identifying misleading headlines and page titles and omitting them from search engine results pages. Plus, it’s just bad business.

To provide a quality website user experience, you need to make sure that your headlines indicate content that the user will actually read about. 

4) Fix Broken Links

Broken links are some of the most annoying problems for a consumer to run into when they need home service – fast. Imagine that a pipe under your kitchen sink just started suddenly spewing water. You hop on your phone and do a search for emergency plumbing in your area. 

You find the top result, click on their website, and hit the contact us link…only to be led to a page that says “404 Error page not found.” That’s a surefire way to lose an otherwise surefire customer. So it’s imperative to make sure that you have no broken links on your website. 

The first thing you need to do is find any broken links on your website. To do this, you can use this free tool. You can choose to check individual pages for broken links, or it can scan your entire site. If you don’t have any, great! But if you do, here’s what needs to be done:

• Replace Links: Usually, broken links are the result of simply copying the wrong URL. Or maybe the page they lead to doesn’t exist anymore. In any case, you will need to replace the link with one that leads to a live page. 
• Remove Links: It’s better to not have a link at all than to have it lead to a dead end. If you can’t immediately find the solution to the broken link or a link to replace it with, simply remove it for the time being to improve the website user experience. 

5) Optimize for Mobile

You may have already heard this tip, but it cannot be understated. You absolutely need to have your site responsive and optimized for people browsing with their phones and tablets. 76% of adults will use their phones to do online shopping and search for local services. That includes plumbers. 

So you will need to make sure that you are offering a robust and speedy mobile user experience if you want to win over customers in 2023. Here are some tips on how to improve mobile UX:

• 3rd Party Video Uploads: For your mobile site, try uploading your videos through a 3rd party site. In other words, don’t upload them directly onto your site. You can use YouTube for 3rd party uploading. 
• Don’t Use Flash: Most people don’t have Adobe Flash Player installed on their phones, and most phones don’t come with it pre-installed. So it’s usually a good idea to avoid using flash for your mobile site animations and images. 
• Make Sure Links Aren’t Crowded: Remember that mobile users will have a smaller screen to work with. And it’s incredibly annoying when links are too close to each other on mobile pages, and you accidentally click on the wrong one as a result. Space out links on your mobile pages and make your CTA buttons nice and big. 

Final Thoughts on User Experience

User Experience (UX) for plumbing websites is essential to online success in 2023. Search engines prefer to rank websites that satisfy users, which means UX can impact your keyword rankings on Google and Bing.

Furthermore, once users arrive at your website, they expect a positive user experience. Failure to provide such a UX will result in drops and loss of conversions. Conversely, a premium UX will increase conversion rates and drive more business to your plumbing company.