11 Practical ways to boost UX in WordPress

If you want any type of business to succeed in the 21st century, there’s one thing you can’t do without — a website with impeccable function and design. In this day and age, there are few business tools as essential as your web presence.

Regardless of your industry and the products that you’re offering, know that your website will do wonders in presenting your sales pitch to prospective leads. However, simply having a rudimentary website isn’t enough. What you need is a website that ensures the best possible user experience. That’s why we’re here with a couple of tips on how to boost UX in WordPress!

UX stands for the user experience and it is very important for your better SEO and better rankings of your website. Read more.

What are the UX Basics?

These days, the standards for all aspects of website design have been brought to something more than art — it’s precise down to a science. With that in mind, you need to carefully consider how you will work to boost UX in WordPress. The three key categories to consider are:

Design
Usability
Content

Improve your WordPress Design now

If you want to achieve high traffic on your website, your design needs to be impeccable. Many people without experience in coding and web programming resort to website builders and software for constructing sales funnels. However, that’s rarely the way towards a standout and unique website design. If you’re serious about the design of your WordPress website, hiring professionals like WP Full Care to maintain it is a good idea.

There’s absolutely no mistaking a website that was designed on a tight budget, and you never want your visitors to have that impression. And if you are aiming to boost UX in WordPress, your user is what it’s all about. You need to approach your design from their perspective and see what impression you’d have if it was someone else’s website and you were the user. This sort of curb appeal is important. Let’s face it, you’re more likely to hire someone for their services if they have a professional-looking website.

Your design needs to be crystal clear if you want to come across as professional. /alt: A screed depicting a website with minimalist design — Your design needs to be crystal clear if you want to come across as professional.

Improve your website usability

Your website needs to maintain proper levels of functionality and usability if you want to boost user experience in WordPress. However, functionality doesn’t just mean the website being technically functional; it’s not just about whether you’ve got the right hosting and load speeds. Instead, think about what sort of functions and interactions the website offers to your users. Ease of use is even more important than design, if you ask us.

You shouldn’t just clutter the website with dozens of WordPress plugins that you deem useful; they might be good, but they may clash with each other and make your website seem messier than it should be.

After all, it doesn’t matter what sort of visuals you have if your users can’t easily traverse the website and find what they’re looking for. Naturally, this does not mean you shouldn’t use plugins — they are one of the biggest advantages WordPress has over similar content management platforms. You just need to find a good balance between a variety of functions and a streamlined user experience.

Just imagine if your website was any other interface on a piece of hardware. If you unlock a phone and see a cluttered and messy operating system with many useless apps, you’re not likely to use it. It could have the best camera in the world and dozens of neat functions, if they’re not visible from all the fluff, that’s no good. And your website UX functions in the same way!

Producing original content means planning in advance! /alt: A team meeting about content production — Producing original content means planning in advance!

Create value with quality content

Content isn’t just a filler that’s supposed to make something out of the empty space on your page. In fact, many marketers and web design professionals stand by the fact that content is king. At the end of the day, it’s more than just words. The content of your website represents the spirit and voice of your enterprise. In 2020, this is likely to be the first and last encounter users have with your website and business. Fewer and fewer people want the hassle of talking to company representatives for anything — it’s all about direct messaging and online automatization.

With that in mind, the first impression you make with the copywriting on your landing page will be the most crucial one. And content isn’t just text — it could be a short video too, or a combination of both. The only important thing here is to be clear, precise, and have a great layout that people can easily navigate. You don’t want to have overlong blog posts and sales pages that bombard people with unnecessary information; keep it simple.

Having an easily navigable website takes a lot of thought! /alt: A man working on a scheme for website menus — Having an easily navigable website takes a lot of thought!

Refine and improve your homepage

As a final thought, we’ll take a look at what your homepage tells about your website. Many business owners without marketing savvy tend to underestimate the importance of a good homepage. They’re more interested in being clear about their pricing and features, and conveying the right message on those pages. However, the homepage of your website is the place where people will enter your virtual business environment.

You may want to just skip working on the homepage altogether, and focus on the meat of your sales pitch. But envision the website as your physical company headquarters. You wouldn’t expect clients to enter your office through the front door. Instead, you want to have a neat, visually captivating lobby — one that speaks volumes about the professionalism of your company. In the age of the Internet, your homepage is that lobby, so make sure you design it with care!

Make the content format easy to read

Having quality content is important for the best possible user experience of your website. However, sometimes people do judge a book by its cover. In other words, the presentation of the content is as important as the substance.

Enriching your website with multimedia content is a crucial part of proper design. That being said, the presentation of textual content is as valuable as your graphic design. The text found on your website isn’t just meant to inform visitors — it’s supposed to engage them as well, particularly when we’re talking about marketing purposes. You need to pay attention to the formatting of your text, which includes typography and design settings.

Plain text can be made to seem more interesting and varied, improving retention times for all website users who visit. Choosing the right font and header is important for captivating the attention of your users.

Besides that, we recommend structuring your content so that it’s ‘easy on the eyes’. This isn’t just a matter of visual design but something that will require coordination with your writers. The text should contain short paragraphs, while also avoiding needlessly lengthy sentences. That sort of UX improvement is a ranking factor for SEO as well, which most marketers will appreciate.

There shouldn’t be large blocks of content without division into subheadings. The headers themselves must be succinct and descriptive of the content below. Also, try to find crucial passages in each paragraph and bold them. Images within the text make it more skimmable, as well as additional graphic elements such as graphs, tables, different types of lists, etc.

Optimize your website speed

If you want users to be satisfied with your website, there’s one crucial metric that you need to improve — the speed of your website. Studies show that improving the optimization of landing pages significantly increases the conversion rates in product funnels. To put it simply, if people feel like your website isn’t sluggish, the chances of them spending money on your services or products is higher. The engagement levels on slow websites are much lower, regardless of other factors we’ve outlined above like quality of content.

With that in mind, we’ll tackle some of the things you can do to boost UX in WordPress if you want your website’s speed to be at its best:

Choose the right theme

Picking the right theme for your WordPress website is important in many aspects. More specifically, a theme that’s not bloated and doesn’t have a complicated framework is crucial for the speed of your website. Fortunately, finding one isn’t difficult, as WordPress offers a wide range of minimalistic themes for all types of websites.

A graphic image of a storefront website theme — Picking the most fitting WordPress theme will positively impact your speed and UX quality!

Remove inactive plugins

As we’ve mentioned, WordPress definitely boasts some must-have plugins for various additional features not found in vanilla WordPress. That being said, you must constantly keep up with the number of different plugins you install on your website.

A large number of plugins in simultaneous use is bound to slow your website down — and you’re probably not using all of them in practice. Check for unused plugins and delete them, as well as any inactive widgets. Leave plugins that you’re sure are essential for the user experience and technical stability of your website.

Optimize your images easily

Lastly, we’ve got the single biggest way you can affect how quickly your website loads — image optimization. Many business owners who manage their own websites don’t realize what an impact the images they use have on the stability and speed of the site.

Using high-resolution images brings a lot of visual appeal to the website, but higher resolutions and uncompressed formats will take a heavy toll on the website’s speed. This is sure to hurt your efforts to boost UX in WordPress more than any good it does. As a result, users will perceive your website as unusable, and your conversion rates will suffer.

You’d do better to reduce the size of all images on your website by compressing them enough to ensure adequate website speeds. There are plenty of software solutions for this, though if you want to make the least compromise in terms of quality, Photoshop will be the best option.

Make your web design predictabel to the end user

Many web designers make the mistake of obsessing over visual style at the expense of usability. In reality, visitors appreciate functionality more than visuals. Sure, a website with a unique and original style could win a design award, but that’s not what you’re after here. If you want to boost UX in WordPress, predictability is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s absolutely encouraged.

Users have grown accustomed to the way most websites are designed on the Internet. Specific elements, like a feature menu in the header of a page, is where people expect to find the elements they’re looking for. If the elements are placed elsewhere, users might not be able to find them, resulting in frustration, and subsequently, leaving the website.

An image depicting nine different page layouts — Users expect to see a familiar website layout.

The general blog layout of a header, sidebar, footer, and content in between isn’t anything bad. There are other ways to achieve visual excellence without compromising usability. Focus on having a consistent and interesting color scheme and a clear font.

You don’t want website navigation to be difficult for anyone. Website visitors want predictability in terms of navigational elements as well. You want to have a navigation bar for quick access to all major areas of the website, and a search box. The latter could also be placed in the sidebar, but its presence is essential. Also, the sidebar should contain a list of page categories for the user. Don’t forget a sitemap in the footer as well.