Are you checking your website for good user experience? If you’re here with us reading this article there’s a good chance you’ve audited your website and the diagnosis isn’t great: Your UX could do with an upgrade. Good UX is the make and break for a website and if your business is exclusively run online, bad UX could severely hurt your business. So what does good UX look like and how can you optimise your user experience on your WordPress site?
Platform
You might not think that your website platform of choice will have much of an impact on your user experience but actually it does. It’s the same way that your choice of email marketing tool can affect all aspects of your email marketing. Website design is the same and this is because every platform is different in terms of how you pull the website design together, how you conduct admin on the backend and the actual outcome of the website. Some platforms are more restrictive in design while others are more intuitive. WordPress is one of the best platforms for user experience because it’s not strict and gives you plenty of options to create a better and more cohesive user experience across your website.
Easy Navigation
All websites should take a website visitor a few clicks to get to their destination, anything more than that and your site might be seen as tricky to navigate.
Consistent Design
Does your website have a consistent theme? Or do you switch and change fonts and colour schemes? Since your website is an extension of your brand, it should only include your brand fonts and colours. Keeping it consistent, keeps it clean and visitors engaged with your website.
Does not require extensive resources
If your website requires extra resources such as flash it may be off-putting. A website should be easy to view without having to use exterior resources.
Attractive But Functional
While it’s a great idea to design a website that looks great, it also needs to function properly and serve its purpose as a website. The key to a successful website is striking a balance between these two aspects.
Responsive
Finally, most of the world uses mobile and tablet devices to browse the web so it stands to reason that your website should be device responsive and allow visitors to view your website across multiple devices.
Tips to Improve the UX of your WordPress website
Design
Organise Your Menus
A badly designed menu usually indicates that website visitors will find it tough to navigate it. WordPress websites allow you to install different types of menus and you should only choose a menu that will properly service your website best. For example, if you have a small menu, a hamburger menu that cascades from the icon onto the screen will give you space as you won’t need to dedicate much space to navigation. If you have a larger menu, you might decide to go for a fixed header menu that scrolls as the user does so that they can easily navigate to different pages. A good menu will guide your website visitors through their journey on your website so a well designed and organised menu will better serve a visitor.
Call to Actions
Call to actions aren’t just part of a design feature, they are also highly functional. It’s those little buttons that tell website visitors what to do next which makes them very important. If you rely on your website for new customers or clients, a call to action but is imperative. A potential client has read through your website and they are ready to engage but there’s nothing telling them what to do next in their buyer journey. They go to a competitor’s site and go through the same process except this time, there is a “Book a Free Consultation” or even more simply “Contact Us” button at the end. Not only does it mean you potentially lose out on business but it also renders your content up until that point irrelevant. Call to actions tell your web visitor what to do next on their journey without them having to scour your website for the contact page and can make all the difference between you picking up business and losing to a competitor.
Social Sharing
Web visitors expect to be able to easily share content from your website to their social media channels and the good news is that this is a win for you. By allowing visitors to share your content to their social channels this increases your opportunities for more clicks/viewers/buyers etc. The even better news is that it doesn’t take much to add this function, it’s a simple change in your page settings and your website visitors can share away.
Use of Space
When designing a website it’s easy to fall into the trap of leaving negative space empty. This space can be used to convey important information about your business or a product/service.
On the other hand, you should also be cautious about overuse of space. Sidebars and sliders are great for compacting information and content but cluttering up those spaces can make it difficult for website visitors to decipher all the information in an easy and digestible way. If you’re going to use sidebars and sliders, make sure you include only the most necessary content. If they don’t have a purpose, they don’t belong in that space.
Contact Forms
Are your website visitors able to contact you easily? It’s the norm to have a dedicated contact page on your site but it’s now also standard practice to have a contact form in your footer or at the end of your most active pages (e.g. individual service pages or product pages). This allows visitors to get in touch with you as soon as they get to the bottom of the page rather than navigating to a separate page to contact you.
Live Chat Support
Live chat isn’t a website essential (yet) but it certainly does give you some extra UX points if you have one. This gives your website visitors the option to contact you in real-time with their queries without having to wait the usual response time. If you do decide to install a live chat feature into your website make sure yourself or someone within your business has the capacity to monitor the live chat. Having a live chat but not responding to messages will only detract those extra UX points you were hoping to add so it’s a good idea to ensure someone can actually respond to messages before you install this feature.
Maintenance
Speed
Slow loading pages are the death of websites. Website visitors won’t stay on a website that loads slow – fact. Without visitors even making it to your homepage, this is probably one of the worst ways to damage your UX. But it’s not all doom and gloom improving your website speed isn’t that hard and usually it’s a simple fix.
You can improve your website speed in the following ways:
- Make sure your images aren’t too big, if they are resize them
- Large videos should be compressed
- Leverage browser caching – this allows browsers to load your pages without every bit of backend information such as JavaScript
- Minimise the number of redirects on your website.
Broken Link Checker
Like speed, broken links are a downer on the UX front. Whether a website visitor is browsing through your website or looking for a specific page, if they land on a broken link, it can be frustrating for the website visitor if they can’t get the information they need. Worse still, if the broken link happens to be a product or service page, you could lose out on business. Broken links are however, more common in websites that have a large volume of pages such as blogs but identifying these troublesome pages isn’t too difficult. WordPress have a broken link checker plug-in saving you the hassle of going through all of your pages to check for broken links. The checker scans your site and brings up a list of your pages with broken links. Once these pages have been identified you can choose to fix the links or delete the pages. Easy and absolutely necessary.
Read the Numbers
Analytics is your best buddy. This is the tool that gives you all the data you need to check how your website visitors are interacting with your website. The most common way of doing this is through a heatmap. Heatmaps show you where website visitors are spending most of their time on your website and these numbers can help you identify where visitors are getting stuck. Once you have this information you can think about why there might be issues and how you can go about solving them.
Keep it simple
In the end, the best website are those that manage to combine great looking aesthetics with high quality functionality. The easiest way to achieve this is to make sure you cover the basics: Have you got a contact form? Can you website visitors navigate your menus? Do the pages load quick enough? Once you have the basics in place then you can work on achieving an attractive design. And once you’ve got all of that in place, it’s a good idea to occasionally audit your site to ensure it’s running smoothly because good UX isn’t a one off job.
Giving your business a website that will support your growth starts when your visitors can properly use your website. So if you’ve been putting off checking whether your website ticks all the UX boxes, now’s the time to get stuck into it.
