Improving user experience (UX) on your WordPress website

The user end of the spectrum is arguably the most important area when it comes to web design. In my experience, I’ve seen many clients come to me struggling, trying to find reasons for why their website isn’t doing as well as they intended to.

Their misfortunes inspired me to write this article, as it seems many are not aware of the importance of a good User Experience (UX) on a website.

In this article I present my 5 tips on improving user experience on your WordPress website. Be prepared to make some radical changes to your website as a few minor tweaks don’t usually do the trick.

Here are the things you should focus:

Tip #1. Make your website responsive

Responsive websites are the new way to when it comes to designing one. Technologies have made it so that many industries that were previously based on regular PCs like shopping platforms are now moving more and more towards mobile environments – phones, tablets etc.

That is why it’s extremely important for any website owner to create a great and easy to navigate platform for all devices. Research indicates that the number of mobile users will only increase in the future.

So, you got to be prepared for the future and invest in a responsive version of your website – meaning it adapts itself to the platform a user in navigating with.

And interesting note comes from the SEO perspective as well. It seems that Google started penalizing websites that do not have adaptations for mobile. This makes it even more crucial to make a site responsive, otherwise you can forget about your rankings in the top 10.

Tip #2. Speed is everything when improving user experience

Though it may seem obvious to some, I could not emphasize the importance of a quick loading website more.

Just imagine – you’re looking around for some christmas shopping on an online website, just too realize that it takes a couple of minutes just to load the first page that you’re looking at.

We’ve all been there. Frustrating isn’t?

Well, the same will happen with your website visitors if you don’t optimize your website properly and they’ll find another retailer in a matter of seconds.

Since mobile usability is ever-increasing nowadays, speed has become one of the most important priorities for a website. People are accessing the internet through basically any device imaginable nowadays and they want to consume the content fast.

How can you approach this problem?

Well, first you need to measure your site speed obviously. Luckily, there’s a free tool made just for that. Google PageSpeed Insights helps to learn more about the main sections of a site and how it handles content loading. Just enter the URL and you’ll see all the advice you need.

Tip #3. Properly stuctured content and its sections

Another important factor for your website is its structure, particularly, how you structure your content. No matter how good your articles, posts or products are, no will bother reading if it looks like a complete mess.

Trust me, I had to learn this the hard way. I’d spend hours researching topics and writing content only to be left wondering and disappointed when I look and my conversion and bounce rate statistics.

Since structuring helped me in terms of improving user experience, I’m suggesting you do the same.

Here are the 4 main sections of your content I think you should worry about when structurizing:

Headings

First of all your headings should reflect your main keyword and what the customer is looking for. If you’re selling a product for example, be direct and get you message across with as few words as possible.

Typically, search engines give headings a lot of weight when determining what content is valuable. So, choosing the right headline is not only good for targeting, it follows an effective SEO methodology as well.

In terms of designing a formatting for your headlines, I think they should clearly stand out in size and color depending on the coloring scheme of your site.

Subheadings

These should pretty much follow the same framework. If you have a large article, separate different sections of the text with subheadlines to make it easier for readers to digest.

Don’t go too small, however, and confuse your readers with a separate subheadline after each sentence if there’s no need to. Just like headings, your subheadings should be direct and provide visitor with more details about that particular page.

On the design side of things, make your H2’s and H3’s unique and distinct from the main headlines. This will give additional clarity to your text.

Bulletpoints

Next, I want to talk about the usage of bullets in your content. Personally for me, this is a great way to get a simple description of my products or services out there, with a clear emphasis on the benefits and features for a person reading them.

Let’s be honest, there’s a very slim chance that people will read everything you wrote down in the text, so it’s best to summarize everything using bulletpoints. This way, they’ll get all the info they need while skimming.

You might also want to experiment with some interesting icons for your bullets in order to stand out more, all, of course, in accordance with your website theme and business approach. Using smiley faces or heart emojis might go well for a dating site, but not for a business that sells tech gadgets…

Tables

Finally, I have to mention the importance of having tables. They’re one of the best ways to structure and summarize information, especially if it’s highly specific when describing a product.

Let’s say someone’s looking for a phone to buy.

They’d expect to see statistics about its battery life, size, camera capabilities or its OS version, depending on what specs are their priority. Nobody will care to read if you just put everything in one description box.

A clear an appealing table will make everything easier to consume for site visitors.

Tip #4. Everyone appreciates appealing media

Apart from structuring your text with headlines, bullets, tables etc. I want to talk about the importance of other media in your articles. Videos, pictures and even audio files carry huge SEO value, but more importantly, attract attention from users.

Appeal is everything these days, as most people judge a business just by looking at its website. One mistake I’ve seen many businesses do on their sites, is the use of stock media, pictures in particular.
While stock photography is made to be good-looking and high quality, in my opinion, it fails to connect a business to the user.

Nobody wants to see the same generic picture of a guy smiling, using a computer, running a marathon and so on. People aren’t stupid, they’ll connect the dots and see that your company doesn’t care enough to individualize itself in the eyes of the consumer.

One study done on consumer behavior suggests the same thing. Spectrum Inc. find out that replacing the stock images of a truck and a group of people with the actual company photos of Harrington Movers increased the conversation rates of that transportation company.

My main point?

Be individual and invest time into forming your brand image. Trust me, people will care.

Tip #5. Make sure there are no errors when you’re done

Technical order is also a significant factors for improving user experience. While errors like 4xx, or 5xx might be tolerated in some sense by search engines, your visitors will not.

They expect to see working images and links to work in a way they’re intended to and take them to the place they want to go.

If you’ve come far in fixing you website’s content and adding some appealing visual, the last thing you want is to forget the technical side of things and frustrate a user with a visible flaw.

If you migrate certain content to other pages, or alter the websites structure completely, a good way to fix this would be to add redirects to your pages.

Now, instead of seeing that annoying error message “404 page not found” they’ll be automatically redirected to the page you want them to go to.

Summing it up

I discussed a few methods that helped me to improving user experience on my website.These tips take the website’s structure, content and technical correctness into consideration.

I guarantee that these changes will bring positive results to you, as they did for me. See you in the next one!