11 Brilliant WordPress Plugins That’ll Improve Your Blog’s Usability
As a blogger, you must be regularly conducting the following 3 activities:
- Writing and publishing top-quality content,
- Promoting it on social media and building links through email outreach,
- Responding to comments and emails you receive from your readers.
But in between these regular aspects you’re supposed to pursue, you forget a key component of building a loyal audience…
Ensuring a great user experience for your readers.
This requires digging into your analytics and understanding user behavior to make their path seamless on your blog.
Do you think that for a content website it doesn’t make sense to invest time and resources in improving the UX?
Then you’re delusional.
- 38% of people will stop interacting with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.
- If given 15 minutes to read content, than 66% of people will read something beautifully designed over something plain.
If you research the background of the best blogs in the world, you’ll find that all of them might have started with a generic WordPress theme. But eventually the blogs adopted customized designs that served their visitors well and amplified their brand.
Let me share an example. After 4 years of launching his blog Social Triggers, Derek spent $25,400 on it to redesign it.
Why?
Because people outside of his community (even those that knew him personally) thought that Social Triggers was a scam. So he got it redesigned ensuring that it contains certain credibility triggers that build trust.
In this article, I want to help you improve the user experience of your WordPress based blog’s audience. You’ll definitely not need to splurge 25k dollars on it because of the incredible functionalities offered by WordPress plugins.
I don’t promise to fix every usability issue, but you’ll surely fix the most common problems.
Want to improve your blog’s usability? Then you need these 11 WordPress plugins.
In their 2015 report, KoMarketing found 44% of the survey respondents stating that they left a vendor’s website because of “No Contact Information/Phone Number.”
Contact information is one of the key components to establish trust and credibility of your brand. It’s such a basic aspect, yet 51% of respondents said that contact information was missing from most company websites.
On WordPress, Contact Form 7 is the one of the most popular FREE plugins with 1 million+ active installs. It makes creating contact forms a breeze with easy customizations, Akismet spam filtering and CAPTCHA.
The modern consumer is spoilt. Companies have created compelling online experiences for their visitors that offer relevant and timely messages (based on their past browsing history and behavior).
A basic version of offering a customized experience to your visitors is treating them differently.
What Would Seth Godin Do plugin displays a custom welcome message to your new website visitors vs. returning visitors (by leveraging cookies).
You can configure the message by navigating to Settings >> WWSGD. And choose its location, placement and lifespan (let the message disappear after a few visits).
3. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most powerful free analytics tool for marketers to derive insights on their website visitors and decode their behavior.
But logging into the dashboard separately every day can eat your time.
How about getting an overview of the key stats on your website right on your WordPress dashboard?
That’s what this plugin can do for you.
It shows simple GA reports with your website’s number of users, bounce rates, organic searches, pages per session and the like.
You can even understand your website traffic behavior in real time.
It also gives handy charts to clearly understand how your different traffic channels are performing.
And it also offers event tracking and performance details of every post/page on your website.
The human attention span is now lesser than that of a goldfish. Hence slow loading websites have become incredibly frustrating for the users. They no longer wait around for the complete website to load.
KISSmetrics found that even a 1-second decrease in loading time can be equivalent to a 7% loss in conversions for an eCommerce website.
W3 Total Cache is a brilliant plugin for eliminating re-downloading of redundant data on the user’s’ browser. It can create static caches for each page so that it is dynamically loaded on each page load.
This significantly decreases page load time for the user by saving server resources. The plugin even integrates with Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to further decrease the page load time.
The W3 Total cache plugin is a bit complex to configure and takes up to 30 minutes for setting up the first time. But once set, you might have shaved off significant number of seconds from your website’s loading time.
An alternative to W3 Total Cache is moving from cheap shared hosting to a dedicated hosting provider.
5. WP Smush.it
One of the major components of optimizing your website is trimming down the heavy images. In an Adobe survey, 39% of people said that they would stop engaging with a website if the images didn’t load or took too long to load.
As the name of the plugin suggests, it smushes the bulky hidden information from your images. This results in reduction of size without affecting the image’s quality.
It also has a bulk smush option to process up to 50 images from your media library simultaneously.
You can also set up automatic smush so that every image is resized and optimized as per your specifications when it’s uploaded.
Do you know that mobile devices now account for almost 2 out of every 3 minutes of online time spent?
Moreover, mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon the website if it isn’toptimized for the smaller screen.
If you’ve a big blog, then you might deal with this issue everyday…
Broken links.
The average lifespan of a webpage is 100 days – so, it’s inevitable for a website to give 404 errors to its referring links.
Obviously such broken links equate to a bad user experience for your readers. After getting excited to read extra information on an external link, they get disappointed.
I’ve already shown you how to craftuser-friendly 404 pages for your website visitors.
Data about your audience is useful for driving insights about their behavior, referring sources, popular pages and more.
But a better way to visualize how visitors view your website is…
Heatmaps.
They show areas with more activity as hotter than areas with lesser activity. With an actual understanding of how your visitors interact with your site and design, you can improve their experience.
Let me introduce to one of the most popular heatmap tools in the market that I’ve co-founded: CrazyEgg. The free plugin makes its functioning on WordPress websites easy and convenient.
If you can involve your visitors inside the content, then it will lower your bounce rate, up your engagement numbers and increase your reach.
Creating small clickable click-to-tweet snippets inside your content is a great way to enhance interaction.
And the Better Click to Tweet plugin allows you to use a simple shortcode for making a highlighted text tweetable (without leaving your website).
One of the most effective ways to offer customer satisfaction is live chat.
63% of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as compared to one that doesn’t. It triumphs over other forms of customer service and support including phone and email.
11. P3 Profiler
Plugins are great to add features and extra functionalities to a WordPress website. But with every installation, you’re sending extra HTTP requests and database queries. They might slow your website performance and in worst cases, even crash your website.
WPBeginner revealed that they use 53 plugins. There’s no hard and fast rule though because the impact of a plugin on website performance depends on its coding.
Conclusion
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS with powerful SEO functionalities. But as a small business owner, you might need a few plugins to ensure a stellar user experience for your visitors.
I mentioned 11 such plugins that will allow you to improve the experience for your prospects, save your time and improve your bottom line.
Are there any other usability plugins that you use on your WordPress website? Let me know in the comments below.
Source Here : http://neilpatel.com/2016/07/24/11-brilliant-wordpress-plugins-thatll-improve-your-blogs-usability
