If you want to get traffic and generate revenue from your website, you must focus on improving user experience.
Many web designers give little attention to the quality of user experience on their websites. If you fall under this category, you are doing a great dis-favour to your business. Every business focuses mainly on continuously improving user experience by having the most ideal web design.
There are several ways of improving the user experience on your website. Most of them centre on content, design, and usability. A site that gets all of these three right gets high levels of web traffic. As you know, more traffic translates into a higher ranking on Google SERPs.
5 Ways of Improving User Experience
Emphasize Functionality
When it comes to design, some developers focus on aesthetics and neglect functionality. It is worth noting that visitors will abandon an attractive website if it is not functional. When you are designing a site, ensure that it does not confuse its users.
Unique designs are a smart way of making your brand easily recognizable. The problem, however, is that they can hurt the user experience on your site. Also, people have a bias toward predictable platforms. This means that if your website does not conform to modern standards, users are likely to leave.
If possible, try to implement the layout used on most WordPress websites. The header should be at the top, the content in the mid-section, and the footer at the bottom. The good thing is that these layouts are easily customizable. You can easily add a few design elements to give your website an appealing outlook.
Ultimately, what you want is a clean website that strikes the ideal balance between appearance and functionality. If you put in the effort, it is not difficult to achieve.
Simplify Navigation
While browsing your site, a visitor should be able to find what they are after effortlessly. The website should have multiple navigational elements that simplify this process. Such features include the mandatory navigation bar, a search box, a categories list, an archives page, and breadcrumbs.
WordPress has an inbuilt Custom Menus feature that allows you to introduce sidebars to your website. You should place the most popular articles or sections of your site on the sidebar to increase their visibility.
The archives page, on the other hand, enables visitors to access old posts quickly. It is especially useful when a user has an idea of when a post appeared on your site but does not know the exact date. Some of the options you can include for your archives page include browsing by category, date, and tag. Keep in mind that this only works if you categorize and tag your content accordingly.
The role of breadcrumbs is to tell users where they are on your website. To activate this feature, you must first install the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress site.
All of the features above aim to achieve ease of navigation. If your site is easy to navigate, people are likely to spend more time on it. Otherwise, it will have a high bounce rate.
Create an Engaging Homepage
In most cases, the homepage of a website attracts the majority of the traffic it generates. This also includes sites with viral posts. There are two reasons behind this; first, it is the primary entry point for the site, and most links from other sites link to it. Also, most people tend to click on the home button the first time they visit a website.
An engaging homepage is one of the guaranteed ways of improving user experience. The first way of doing this is by placing a conspicuous feature box that shows your offerings to the user. It can also double up as an opt-in form to convert leads into regular customers. As compared to a standard homepage that only shows popular and recent posts, a feature box provides a much better experience to the user.
Additionally, you can use a start here page. The objective of this is to list the standout features on your site. It also gives the user a guide on how to access such features. Similar to the feature box, the start here feature can serve as a tool for increasing engagement and directing users to landing pages where you can convert them into customers.
Fix Broken Links
When you are browsing the internet, you are likely to click a link when you come across one. This mostly applies when you are looking for further information on something.
If you have any links within your content, make sure they are working. Nobody wants to click a link that directs them to a blank page or returns the 404 error message. Besides giving a poor user experience, having many broken links on your site reduces web traffic and can significantly hurt your SEO ranking.
Create Attractive Content
Content that appears attractive not only grabs the attention of the visitor but also improves the user’s experience. That said, the attractiveness of content depends on its design, formatting, and typography.
Ideally, your content should have short sentences and paragraphs that make it easier to read. Different sections should have subheadings that make them easily identifiable. You should also use bold and italics to emphasize important parts of your content.
Remember, you can have fantastic content, but if you present it poorly, only a few people will read it and that will push all your efforts of improving user experience down the drain.
Conclusion
If you implement the tips mentioned above, you will significantly improve the user experience on your website, which normally helps improve SEO. That said, there are many other ways of ensuring that your site is more engaging.
Over the years, WordPress has had significant improvements. It currently has an abundance of features and tools that you can use to improve your site. Even better, the vast catalog of plugins means you can customize your website to do anything you want.
Moreover, several web hosting services now offer specialized WordPress hosting services. This means better servicing of your site, including performance and speed optimization, automatic updates, and regular back-ups.
On top of all these, it is vital to ensure that your WordPress site is responsive, as most people access the internet using mobile devices. Go ahead and apply all or some of these tips for improving user experience to give your site the muscle it requires to get ahead of the curve. Also, read our recent article on social media evolution to learn how you can use social networking platforms to get more leads.
