Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has been the most powerful website builder and CMS across the internet. In fact, WordPress powers more than a third of the web!
What makes it so popular is its versatility and the ability to customize your WordPress site according to your needs. WordPress powers various businesses right from small websites to the world’s biggest businesses, such as Sony Music and Forbes.
User-friendliness is one of the most essential elements of any successful website. And thankfully, WordPress CMS has hundreds of plugins and configuration options to make your website user-friendly.
But, as a beginner, such a massive variety of options may seem daunting. So, where do you begin?
How do you build a user-friendly WordPress website? Let’s find out!
1. Intuitive Navigation
Navigation around a website is easily one of the most crucial aspects of user experience. But what do you mean by intuitive navigation? Intuitive navigation means that navigating to any page or information on your website shouldn’t seem like a difficult task to your user. Your user should be able to intuitively navigate between different parts of your site with ease.
WordPress provides you with several options to enable intuitive navigation on your site:
- Divide your website content into categories and tags using WordPress settings. Add links to these categories from your navigation header so that your users find it easier to navigate to any category they are looking for.
- Use Breadcrumbs as they can help your users better navigate your site and its structure. Breadcrumbs can be enabled using WordPress plugins such as Breadcrumb NavXT and Yoast SEO.
- Use WordPress plugins such as WP-PageNavi or WP Page Numbers for offering easier page navigations to your users.
2. Easy-to-Find Contact Details and Forms
Ease of contact seems like one of the most obvious aspects of your website. But unfortunately, many site owners miss out on this point, and contacting them seems like a hectic task.
- Ensure that your contact details are readily available on your website, and the user doesn’t have to search and navigate through multiple pages to find your contact details. Provide all your necessary contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers in your footer and on a separate “Contact Us” page.
- You can add a contact form on your WordPress site using plugins such as Contact Form 7 or Contact From by WP Forms. Using these plugins, you can create a customized contact form and add it to your homepage and your contact page.
3. Web Accessibility
One in every five people in America has some kind of disability, making it difficult for them to access your WordPress site without aids and supporting devices. People with visual impairments, hearing impairments, mental disabilities, and older adults fall into this category.
For helping out people with disabilities, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was passed in 1990 according to which all the websites across the internet should be easily accessible for people with any kind of disabilities.
Web accessibility compliance has been a massive part of user-friendliness ever since. Thousands of ADA non-compliance lawsuits have been filed on companies that do not adhere to ADA web accessibility standards.
So how do you ensure that your website maintains ADA compliance levels for such disabled people? An AI-powered web accessibility solution can save your day! Such an automated software scans your website for all kinds of web accessibility issues and fixes them automatically.
By adhering to web accessibility, you can make your WordPress site user friendly to a large population of disabled people, plus you can also save your business from expensive lawsuits!
4. Social Media Integration / Share
Social media integration is another essential feature of any user-friendly WordPress website today.
- Include social media share buttons on all your web pages so that users can easily share your content on social media. You can use WordPress plugins such as Social Media Share Buttons for adding social media share buttons.
- Include links to all your social media handles from your footer or header. You can enable this by navigating to Appearance > Customize > Header & Navigation > Header Elements > Show Social Icons on your WordPress Dashboard.
- You can go a step further and use Better Click to Tweet WordPress plugin for integrating the “Click to Tweet” feature within your content. This way, users can tweet any of your quotes by the click of a button.
5. Enable Comments
Enabling engagement on your WordPress website can massively contribute to the user-friendliness of your website. You can improve the engagement and get a better understanding of your audiences’ pain points by enabling comments on your WordPress.
This way, your audience can easily ask questions and add their viewpoints on your content, contributing positively towards your WordPress website’s user-friendliness.
6. Mobile-Friendly Design
Did you know that more than 50% of websites are viewed on mobile devices? Hence making your WordPress site mobile-friendly is something that you shouldn’t miss out on at any cost.
- Ensure that your fonts are neither too small nor too large for viewing on mobile devices.
- Add images and videos to your WordPress site only in the formats that are supported by Google.
- Always use the mobile preview feature on the WordPress site to see how your webpage looks in a mobile device before hitting the publish button.
- Ensure that your WordPress theme supports responsive design. A responsive design ensures that your website contents get resized based on any screen size, small or large.
- Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check if your WordPress site is mobile-friendly.
7. Use an SEO Plugin
A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) WordPress plugin will help you configure your WordPress pages’ SEO titles and meta descriptions.
These customized SEO titles and meta descriptions show up on Google’s search results, and this makes it easier for your users to get a gist of what it is that you are talking about on your website.
WordPress has many SEO plugins, the popular ones being Yoast SEO and the Rank Math WordPress SEO Plugin that have options to configure titles, descriptions, and many more SEO-related options that will add to your WordPress site’s user-friendliness.
8. Increase page speed
Website speed is a crucial factor contributing to user experience as stats show that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds.
Your WordPress site’s speed can vary based on many factors. Here are a few ways in which you can increase your WordPress site speed:
- Use a browser caching WordPress plugin such as W3 Total Cache, which can considerably speed up your site. If you want to take caching and speed load to the max, you should use a content delivery network (CDN).
- Optimize your images before uploading them on your site. You can do this using free tools such as TinyJPG that will reduce your image file size.
- Enable lazy loading using plugins such as a3 Lazy Load. This will again speed up your web page load speed.
- Minify your JS and CSS code using plugins such as W3 Total Cache.
9. Make your Content More Readable
Readability massively contributes to your WordPress website’s user experience. Most of the consumers today are skimmers, and hence you should present your content so that it is easily skimmable.
- Break down your content into small paragraphs with each para having not more than 3 to 5 sentences.
- Break up walls of text using relevant images and videos.
- Follow proper pages structure by using heading tags, bullet points, and other numbered lists.
Conclusion
Almost 89% of consumers are likely to switch to your competitors after a bad experience with your website! And hence it is super-important to enable user-friendly features on your WordPress website right from the start.
Ignoring user-friendliness can lead to significant negative experiences for your business. So start adding making your WordPress site user-friendly with the above tips.
