If you have a website and are hoping to attract visitors, you need to seriously evaluate the site’s usability. This is not just important for the purposes of getting visitors to your site, but also keeping them engaged enough to stay. Visitors arriving at your site expect a significantly rich and smooth UX (user experience), and will easily abandon your site for a more pleasant alternative.

If you have a WordPress website, you’re in luck. WordPress has many customized extensions and plugins that will allow you to create a fantastic user experience for your visitors. Let’s talk about 7 distinct pieces of advice that will help boost your site’s usability.

Why Usability Of Your WordPress Site Is So Vital

A business’s website, regardless of how long it has been around, is one of the driving forces behind the business’s internet marketing. To maintain a reach on the global market, consistently optimal website performance is absolutely paramount. In order to be found and visited by users, as well as considered as the point of product or service purchase, the website needs to provide users with a top-notch web experience.

Web performance trump's most other factors of a website. Even if it's beautifully colored, arranged, and has a killer logo, without a consistent web performance, you will have a hard time retaining any visitors. To do so, you need to dig into the available plugins and extensions that WordPress offers you. You might be wondering how to make sure that the tools available provide you with what you need to achieve such perpetually optimal performance.

Some of the factors depend on how one measures performance. Some entrepreneurs conduct period measurements of incoming traffic, clicks, and correspondence via Q&A posts to decide how their website is performing. But these are simply not sufficient in terms of accurately measuring the efficacy of usability.

These website owners get too focused on digging through their website for flaws (minor and major ones), but in doing so, often forget to think about the people they are trying to make this website for and how their experience can be improved. This is an area that should never be ignored, nor should the error handling on your site. After all, any error can drive the standing of a business’s web presence down severely.

WordPress Website Usability Tips

Before we talk about some great tips to maintain maximum consistency, we should define what the term ‘consistency” actually means in this context. In this case, it refers to the setup, as well as the maintenance of your website’s conditions that assure a maximally easy and favorable user experience. An innovative UI (user interface) is always a positive marker for great design, but it is not the only factor worthy of consideration. Let’s address some others.

Branding Elements

All of the elements related to a company fall under the branding umbrella in terms of web design. These elements need to be established with a consistent connection across your entire web presence. For instance, the site’s URL should be consistent with the brand’s name, as well as its logo. These elements need to naturally flow in order to establish an intuitive connection to each other.

Let’s consider an e-commerce website. With details being a vital factor on a site that sells a variety of products, each product must be seamlessly implemented to appear as clearly defined elements that drive easy actions taken on them. When the implementation is logical and seamless, users begin to associate the quality of your website with the quality of your offerings. Similarly, flaws in the web presence begin to quickly reflect the views and confidence that a prospective customer may have in the company’s products.

Because small details are what drive high-quality customer service, attention and maintenance of these details are essential to preserving the most consistent performance for the website, and by virtue of that, the brand itself.

HD Images

HD images can be used through the WordPress CMS platform, but only so long as they are applicable and relevant to the given business model, as any images, no matter their quality, that do not fit in, will only detract from positive usability. In other words, while HD images are great, they are not worth using if they cannot illustrate a connection to the business and the brand.

Interactivity

Let’s back up to why a business creates a WordPress site in the first place. As websites are drivers of marketing traffic, the goal is to reach out to a worldwide audience. Since the whole point is to attract an audience, the website must be all about engaging this audience. Consider that of the 1 billion active websites, about 20% of self-hosted sites are powered by WordPress. Therefore, in order to attract and engage an audience, your website must offer a significantly interactive experience.

Think of an interactive experience as talking to a person rather than talking to them. If they are a part of the conversation, then they are more likely to participate and contribute their input. Similarly, in a web environment, the more consistently engaging experience will draw visitors to perform desired actions like clicking, scrolling, hovering, and interacting with your site. The more they interact, the greater the likelihood of generating a lead that may convert visitors into customers, which in turn, helps to grow business. Because interactivity is so vital, it is one of WordPress’s central premises.

Clear Content

One of the pivotal aspects to focus on during any WordPress development process is the consistency of clarity. Visitors who come to a website, regardless of its nature, are looking for some type of value. Their time is most valuable to them, so wasting it is not advantageous. Therefore, how the website is set up, how it flows, and how it delivers its messaging must be consistently clear.

This means easy, intuitive navigation, topped with relevant headers and applicable imagery. The last thing you want is for your content to be murky and vague. This is a real pain point for visitors who will not put up with it. Conversely, if the WordPress site has a clear tone and an easy-to-follow flow, it will continue to receive a lot of global attention.

Intuitive Navigation

Another important factor is consistent navigation. Moving around the website is something that should be similar no matter the page that the user lands on. Different pages should not have different methods of leaving or moving around them. This will only create confusion by users and lead to frustration. Therefore, keeping how a user ports from one page to another, or from one element to another, must be consistent.

It is also to consider market trends, as well as what visitors expect to see and experience. The simpler and more clear the navigation, the more likely visitors are to use them. It is a general rule that when developers try to get “clever” with aspects like navigation, is when prospective customers feel more frustrated and choose to bail on their visit.

Connection Building

There is no usability without a consistent connection to the visitors. Your website is there for a target audience, so it should be designed with them in mind. Many brands set up personas for just this reason, to know exactly what the needs of the desired visitors are. That way they can structure the site and pack it with content that will engage specifically their intended audience.

The material on your website must be written eloquently, yet simply, in order to appeal to your visitors. Making the website shine through in its personality, and knowing who your visitors are creates a rich environment for everyone involved, leading to positive usability experiences for the users and conversions for the business owner.

UX/UI Design

A website simply will not succeed if it cannot highly perform in terms of UI (user interface) and UX (user experience), which is why these are two of the highest priorities for any WordPress site. When buttons are placed on the website, for instance, they should be clearly marked, easily distinct, and clickable with the expected action following every click. When UX and UI are consistent and precise, the conversion rate increases.

Optimal UX and UI eliminate the distractions and help to guide the visitor on their journey through the website, which ends with them becoming a paying client. In the end result, the business is helped out by provisioning the user in a simple, clear, and consistent manner in which to complete the necessary actions.

Conclusion

The above seven factors may seem like common sense, but it is important to remember that they must all be in place in order to secure the most consistent experience for the website’s visiting user. If you want to learn more about website design, check out the best web design agencies.