Design your way

Many individuals create their websites, perform various activities, and drive a steady flow of traffic to it.

But, in spite of doing all these activities, they find that they are unable to reach their conversion target.

One important factor, which often causes the low conversion rate, is site usability.

It is the key to keep visitors around your site. It determines the level of comfort and ease that visitors enjoy while browsing websites.

If you run a WordPress site and want to increase its usability, you can start with some important tips suggested below.

1. Make Your Website Look Appealing & Professional

Image source: Divan Raj

WordPress offers lots of themes and plugins, using which even non-technical persons and beginners can easily create WordPress sites without seeking any help from professional website designers.

However, sites created by non-technical persons may have several flaws such as usability issues, use of unreliable themes/plugins, unappealing layout, etc.

You should always keep in mind that when visitors land on sites, first of all, they look their design. If the site design is unattractive, they may leave it immediately.

Trends in web design keep changing from time-to-time and one has to comply with those changes sooner or later to create appealing sites. If you are not a web designer, then it is recommended that you should get your site reviewed by an expert website developer.

He/she can point on shortcomings in your site’s design and help you to eliminate those flaws easily. Once your website is up-to-date, it starts to attract visitors.

2. Provide Painless Navigation On Your Site

Image source: Ranjith Alingal

You must remember that websites are created for users, not for the bosses or company owners.

There is no meaning of creating professional and exciting websites if visitors face problems in navigation. Simple and clear navigation helps users to browse your site easily and navigate its pages without any problem.

In order to offer a simple and easy navigation on your site, you may use the following options:

• Add your logo on the site’s homepage,
• You must place the navigation system on the left, below the header or on the top,
• You should have consistent navigation all across the website and
• Add an HTML sitemap to your site. It will solve the navigation problem up to a great extent.

3. Make Your Site Responsive

Image source: Oykun Yilmaz

With the increasing popularity of different mobile devices, a large number of people are surfing the Internet on their cellphones and other Internet-enabled devices.

If your site is not responsive to mobile devices, visitors will not be able to view your site on small screens, which results in a sharp decline in the usability of your site.

So, you should make your site responsive as soon as possible. It will automatically adjust to the screen sizes of visitors and will offer them an optimal view of the site on their mobile devices. It will increase the usability of your site up to a great extent.

4. Publish Quality Content Regularly

People always look for new content that offers them some value.

If you run a website which is not updated frequently, naturally, there will be less traffic, user engagement, and conversion.

As your website acts as a mirror for your web-based business, you should keep it up-to-date with fresh content at all the times. Based on your specific needs, you should schedule the content publication on your site. It helps visitors to keep landing on your site regularly and engage with your offerings actively.

5. Remove Broken Links

Broken links are those links that direct visitors to non-existing web pages.

For example, you publish a post on your blog linking a useful article available on another website. Let’s suppose that after a couple of months, the website owner deleted that article or the site went down completely. In both of these two cases, the link available on your site will become dead.

Broken links create a bad impression in the eyes of visitors. On the other hand, Google doesn’t like websites that have too many broken links. Therefore, you must find and remove all broken links on your website using WordPress plugins. It makes your site relevant and user-friendly.

6. Make Your Site Super Fast

Fast websites are liked by users and search engines alike. Google thinks about user experience at first.

That is why it includes fast loading websites in its results so that users can easily browse different sites and get what they are looking for.

On the other hand, visitors also like fast websites. Slow loading websites frustrate them. So, Google may downgrade their ranking in its results considering them insignificant.

Therefore, you must take all possible measures to make your site faster. If your site loads fast, users prefer it quite often and its usability automatically increases dramatically.

7. Be Careful While Using Popups And Contact Forms

Popups and contact forms are widely used by SEO executives to increase the subscriber base and engage them on websites.

However, the excess use of these two can harm your site. Websites with lots of popups and contact forms are punished by Google with a low ranking in its SERP.

It would be better for you to use Popups carefully and create a modern subscription form.

8. Add Clear Call To Action Buttons

Image source: Divan Raj

It’s not sufficient to drive lots of traffic to your site.

You need to convert traffic into leads to increase your site’s usability and grow your web-based business.

For this, you need to add the clear and easily visible call to action buttons to your site.

Call to action buttons direct users to take various actions on your site such as reading a newly published content or the related post/subscribing newsletters, downloading E-products, etc. Based on your needs, attach CTA buttons to your website.

9. Security

Image source: Mitchell Fox

It is one of the main concerns why people hesitate to visit your website.

If your website has security loopholes, visitors will not browse it because of the fear of losing their digital assets. A website which is frequently attacked by hackers/cyber criminals and has serious downtime is not trusted by users.

So, you must take various steps to make your site safe for use. By doing so, you can easily win the trust of visitors and can witness a sharp boom in its usability.

10. Add A Live Chat Support

Image source: Intercom

If you provide services/products on your site, it is essential for you to add a live chat support to it. It will help your valued customers to get the required support in time and buy the desired products/services easily.

You must employ a well-trained person to communicate with website visitors. That person must talk to each and every visitor that lands on your site and try to generate the lead based on their requirements.

11. Maintain Site’s Decent Ranking On Search Engines

The usability of your site largely depends on its ranking on different search engines. If your site or its pages appear prominently in the SERPs of search engines with key terms, people visit it quite often and hang around it if they find the stuff they need. So, you should optimize your site very well and increase its ranking on different search engines.

Concluding Remarks

Just employ the above-mentioned steps and give visitors a pleasant browsing experience on your site. By doing so, you can improve its usability remarkably and can run a profitable web-based business. If you want higher ROI on your WordPress site, get the support offered by a well-recognized WordPress Development company.

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