Speed we live in, there is always little time to do anything, and users’ browsing on the Internet is subject to that fact as well. Most visitors leave a site within the first ten seconds if they do not like it. Therefore, winning the admiration of visitors, drawing their attention during those few seconds, and getting them to stay and browse your site is not an easy matter. You have to provide them with a unique user experience.
If you run a website through the distinguished WordPress platform and are looking to get more visitors and gain their admiration for your website, this article will be a good help for you to achieve that goal. In this article, we will go through a unique journey about the most prominent strategies and tools that you can use to improve the user experience of WordPress.
What is the concept of user experience (UX)?
Many website owners are unaware of this concept, even though it is one of the main pillars of the success of any website. The term user experience refers to the extent of interaction that the visitor shows towards the contents of the site, whether towards the written, pictorial or audio content. This interaction mainly consists of the visitor remaining on your site and continuing to browse its sections and interact with them through comments or external posts.
The quality of the user experience is directly related to the site’s ranking in search engines ( SEO ); Providing a good user experience means extensive external interaction and sharing of the site’s pages, and a decreased bounce rate. It is the rate of visitors who leave your site immediately after entering it, and it has a negative impact on the site’s SEO.
Elements related to user experience
There are many elements that affect user experience, and you should focus on these elements in any action you develop on your site. We can summarize these elements into 7 basic criteria:Usefulness criterion : It includes the value of the content and its connection to the page titles, in addition to the availability of visual (videos – pictures – tables and graphs) and audio (audio recordings) illustrative means.
- Ease criterion : It refers to the ease of browsing the site, and includes the presence of easy, simplified, and detailed menus, in addition to the site being free of many distractions, which may be advertisements, suggestions, or large amounts of pop-up windows.
- Credibility standard: Visitors and customers always need tangible proof to build trust in your site. This proof may be testimonials from other visitors or customers in the form of comments, or it may be in the form of real pictures of the team working on your site, or even local or international certificates that the site has obtained, in addition to Obtain an SSL certificate for your site and provide a high level of security for users.
- Desirability criterion : This criterion is relative and refers to the popularity of your site or the tendency of visitors or customers to the brand that you adopt through the site. For example, let us assume that we are making a comparison between BMW and Toyota. Of course, both companies are world-famous, but if you conduct a simple statistic You will see that some customers tend to buy BMW cars, this is known as the desire effect, even though both companies are leaders in their field.
- Comprehensiveness standard : It indicates that the site can be easily used and browsed by all users, including people who suffer from health problems or medical disabilities, such as blind patients. You must make your site a comprehensive stop for all visitors and provide the ability to browse for everyone without exceptions.
- Value standard : Here you must provide the visitor with real, direct value for your site once he visits it. For example, if you own a site for medical articles, you will be able to add real value to your site by clarifying that the site is accredited and trusted by many other entities and sites, such as saying in Your home page, “Teb Web site, the first medical destination for everyone.”
- Compatibility standard : What is meant is the compatibility of your site with all types of devices, from tablets to computers to smartphones, and operating systems including Windows, Mac, Android, iOS systems, and others. You must conduct a comprehensive experiment with the design and appearance of the site on all devices and ensure that the unique experience that computer users get is also obtained by users of other devices.
The importance of providing a distinctive user experience on your site
You may be wondering, do I really need to give so much attention to user experience? What benefits will I gain from investing time and effort in providing a distinctive user experience? Well, of course, the answer is yes, and the benefits you will reap from this are summarized in the following points:
- Increasing the number of visits to your site . When your site loads quickly, has a simple and clear interactive interface, and has valuable content, it will gain the visitor’s attention and interest and give him a unique browsing experience to tell his friends about.
- Reducing the bounce rate , by drawing the visitor’s attention as long as possible to the site content, and this, as we mentioned, will reflect positively on improving the SEO of your WordPress site .
- Indirect benefits , which are summarized in increasing the rate of external links directed to your site through visitors sharing the site’s pages on social media or on their own sites, in addition to increasing the chances of clicks on the advertisements that you place on your site, which may be your primary source of profits.
Strategies to improve user experience
It does not require all that planning and a huge investment of effort and time in order to provide a unique user experience on your site, so do not worry. All you have to do is take care of some of the finer details, and below we will provide you with a comprehensive guide to improving the user experience of WordPress in simple steps.
Make the website design simple and unique
Most website owners fall into the trap of complexity and think that inserting elements and features attracts the visitor’s attention. In fact, what happens is exactly the opposite. When the visitor lands on your site and is surprised by a menu here, a pop-up window from there, an animated image or video to the right, other suggestions to the left, and barely any ads. When it ends, he will inevitably get a headache and may forget the reason for his visit to the site, and he will quickly get out of that maze.
So what you need to do is literally prioritize your visitor, in other words what is the primary reason for their visit to a page on your site and what content they want to see first. Will the content of the article be the visitor’s goal, or is he looking for a list of specific products and others? It depends, of course, on the type of site you run via WordPress. There are many, many simple and practical templates and designs, both free and paid, and you can read more in “ The Best WordPress Templates ” if you want to know more. On the best free templates to improve the user experience of WordPress.
Read also: How do you choose the best WordPress template for you? 8 practical steps
Make browsing simple and fun
Visitors love simple and organized sites. Take good care of dividing your site into specific parts so that it is easy for the visitor to view and access the information he needs. Make sure to customize the header and footer of your site, and if you want more details, you can see how to customize the footer and customize the header on WordPress sites.
Make sure titles are relevant and that title links lead to the correct content. It is necessary to choose special colors for your site that serve as a characteristic of the brand or symbol (logo) that you have chosen for the site. These colors must be allocated to all parts of the site, from menus to content elements, etc. This enhances the visitor’s browsing process and leaves a distinctive impression of your site in his mind. .
Don’t forget to put a search box as it will make the search process much easier for the visitor. For a change, you can also add some animation when moving between pages of the site or when clicking or selecting menus, but keep in mind that this may slow down the speed of loading pages.
Finally, keep your use of ads in moderation. Do not exceed the limit and fill the site with ads, as users are generally averse to ads. Of course, you have to make sure that the ads do not offend modesty or promote matters that are socially, morally, or religiously unacceptable.
Leave room for interaction
Users love to interact with the content they see while browsing, and many of them would love to share the content with their friends and acquaintances on social media. Of course, this will reflect positively on your site, directly through external links leading to your site and increasing the number of visits, and indirectly by stimulating interaction and discussions through comments.
Therefore, make sure that your site includes the ability to share and comment on the content, and that the sharing icons are clear. Most users are accustomed to seeing share icons and comment box in specific places on the page; They are usually after the end of the article, so there is no need to change the locations of these icons.
Make sure the site looks good on all devices
It is necessary to customize your site so that it is “suitable” for all types of users, and by “suitable” here we mean that all site page elements work and appear efficiently on all types of devices and in compatibility with various operating systems.
Through the Google Analytics tool, you can survey the types of devices, browsers, and operating systems that visitors use to browse your site. There are also many tools that enable you to test your site on different types of devices and browsers. Here is a list of the most prominent of these tools:
- Browsershots : It is a free, open source program that allows you to test your site on many types of browsers according to different operating systems. All you have to do is copy your site link and put it in the search box in the tool’s sites, then choose the browser or device you want to test your site on.
The main drawback of this tool is that it does not offer the option to experience the site on Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer browsers, nor does it provide the option to view the site on smartphone devices.
- CrossBrowserTesting : A powerful tool for testing a website’s appearance and compatibility with various devices. This program is paid, but the company provides a free version for 100 minutes to try the tool on any website you want and according to any option you want.
- BrowserStack : It is very similar to its predecessor. A distinctive tool that includes wide options. You need to purchase the program to use it permanently, or you can download the free version and try it for 30 minutes.
Take good care of the home page
The home page is the main interface of your site, and it is where most visitors who end up on your site will return to during their online browsing tour. The home page is also the target of most external links on other sites leading to your site, in addition to that most visitors who end up on one of the sections of your site via landing pages will be curious to visit the site’s home page.
So you should take good care of this page in particular. Try to focus on the home page on the leader and the scientific or practical value that your site provides to visitors, and not be limited only to the latest topics published on the site.
Try to explain on the home page the features that your site offers. For example, you can put an icon or the phrase “Get to know us” or “Our goals” that leads to a page in which you explain the idea of the site and the goal it seeks to achieve.
Clean your site from 404 error pages
One of the bad experiences that you do not want to provide to your site visitors is that the page appears as a “404 error.” This error appears when the link that the visitor clicked is invalid or does not lead to an existing page. Of course, you do not want your visitor to feel frustrated, do you?
Make sure to search for all broken pages on your site and remove them or renew the links that point to them. There are many tools and methods that enable you to achieve this, the most prominent of which is updating permalinks and checking the .htaccess file, and you can also use some external tools such as the Dead Link Checker tool .
You can dive into more details by reading “ Solving the problem: Page not found – 404 Error, ” which is a simple guide through which you can address this problem with ease.
Take care of the site loading speed
Website loading speed is an important influence on your site’s SEO. The first step will be to measure the loading speed of your site’s pages. For this, you will need an external tool, and among the most prominent tools for measuring website loading speed are: isitwp, gtmetrix, and Page Speed.
There are many strategies and tools that will help you increase the loading speed of your site. Below is a simple list of the most prominent of these methods:
- Adopting CDN services
- Customize temporary storage files, through some free add-ons such as the Wp Super Cache add-on or the W3 Total Cache add-on .
- Adding AMP, which is one of the great additions and tools to speed up your site pages for visitors in general and smartphone users in particular. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP Accelerated Mobile Page, is a wonderful addition that provides you with a significant increase in the speed of loading your site’s pages. It relies mainly on showing and loading important content to the visitor first. You can see more details by reading “ An explanation of AMP to accelerate your site’s pages .”
- Reducing image sizes on website pages
- Determine the maximum number of comments within one page
- Adjust add-ons running in the background of the site that may cause an increase in page loading time
You can learn more distinctive and simple methods and strategies by reading the article “ The Most Important Procedures for Increasing the Speed of Your WordPress Site ,” which is a comprehensive and simplified guide to everything you need to know.
Edit and review content well
Ensuring that the content is free of errors, whether scientific or grammatical, is very important. Never underestimate the audit process as it serves as a standard of trust and efficiency.
Imagine yourself reading an article, for example, and discovering a large number of grammatical or linguistic errors. What is the first thing that might come to your mind? How can you trust scientific content if errors in linguistic content are everywhere? Although checking scientific content requires double effort compared to linguistic content.
If it is necessary to appoint a specialized linguistic and scientific auditor, do not hesitate to do so, as you may lose the scientific value of your site if errors are repeated in the content you review.
In the end, improving the user experience of WordPress is one of the basic pillars of the success of any website. Do not hesitate at all to invest enough effort, time, and even money to develop your site so that it provides a unique and distinctive experience for your site. The competition is fierce, and you must stand out and develop your site well in order to succeed in attracting visitors’ attention to you and gaining their trust and admiration
