It is odd that you almost never hear people talking about usability and websites. People seem to get so engrossed with traffic and other things but usability does not seem to be on most peoples’ radar. But people generally understand that a site really needs to be usable; however they do not necessarily know how to optimize for usability. Of course it is obvious that your site needs to always be user friendly and motivates people to return. There is a lot to think about based on the nature of your site, and the best way to approach this is to have data about what is happening.
The only way for most of us to have some grasp of our website is through tracking visitor actions. What you can do is identify problem spots on your site, and then you begin testing that spot to resolve the issue. You are able to find free and paid for scripts as well as feature rich and very basic ones. A tracking script tracks site visitors; they all do that but many have a lot more cool bells and whistles. The best scripts will not leave you wondering about visitor conduct on your site.
When you engage in the overall process of increasing site usability, you are optimizing. The vast bulk of people only use split testing, and that’s fine because it does work well. Multivariate testing is much more powerful and different than split testing. The sensible approach to optimization and testing is to discover where your site is poor so you can fix it.
This process of enhancing does require time, but if you are serious about building a business it is worth doing. You will understand and appreciate it much more when you see what’s possible. The end game is increased success and sustained business growth.