What do you need to change to make your site better for users?

User satisfaction is a key determinant of site traffic. If visitors do not have a great experience, they will probably avoid making any future visits. The quality of content, relevance of information and ease of transition within your website are key aspects of a great user experience. The biggest challenge for site owners even those who have great content, is ensuring good user experience by providing quick loading pages that are designed for easy navigation.

Research suggests that the speed of your site is the first thing users w ill consider when looking for information on the internet, without even knowing it. Most people will close sites that do not load within a few seconds, which means that slow loading pages will be likely to get fewer hits.

Optimizing your site will help improve its efficiency, which could be draw in more users. If users have a great experience on your site, they are more likely to visit your site again. They may also influence new traffic, which could boost your site’s rating.

These are a few things you may consider when looking to improve user experience for your site. You should carry out a test of your speed before taking up these measures for an accurate assessment of any change.

Picking the right layout

Your homepage is central to your site. As the first page that most users will visit, it could be influential towards attracting and keeping an audience. You can improve user experience by making the homepage easy to navigate, as well as lightweight.

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Your WordPress site offers a number of themes and frameworks that may be used to create a custom site. Your choice of theme could affect site load speed, which may in turn influence user satisfaction. If you choose a theme which has too many features, your site could load slower, which may cause you to lose traffic. The best themes available for smooth transition within the site are minimalist, since they are very lightweight.

Your homepage’s design could also influence load speed. If your content is displayed in full, it could make your homepage very bulky. Sites which display all the comments made for every post might also be susceptible to slower loading times. You can increase site load speed by breaking down your comments into different pages, as well as using excerpts instead of displaying full articles.

With a simple and segmented layout, users will be able to navigate the site smoothly. It will also load quicker.   

Optimizing your images

When crafting your site’s content, you will be tempted to use images. Research suggests that people are more likely to be drawn towards audiovisual content than plain text. It can be a great tool to draw in curious clients. It can also affect the speed of your site, which may negatively influence user satisfaction.

When choosing images for your site, remember to optimize them for use on the internet. Images taken by a camera, or downloaded from the internet can be optimized by WordPress plugins that are designed for this function, as well as a number of online tools. You should not upload any videos, as they can be much larger than images. If you are interested in attaching videos to your articles, you should embed links to free video hosting sites such as YouTube.

You can reduce the size of images used by using LazyLoad. It prevents your site from displaying images that are not within the scope of displayed content. LazyLoad helps to reduce the page size without affecting user experience.

Updating your site, theme and plugins

Your open source WordPress code is updated regularly. In order to ensure a smoothly running site, you need to maintain regular updates. It will protect you from any possible security breaches, as well as improve site function.
You should also update your themes and plugins whenever the updates are available. This will prevent any lags, and ensure that these aspects of your site run well. You may also need to manage the themes and plugins used on your WordPress site. For optimal function and improved customer satisfaction, you could do away with all unused or disabled plugins and themes. You may also need to remove any plugins with overlapping functions to reduce the size of your code. This will improve your site’s interface, as well as make the it better and quicker for users.

Image Source: Pixabay

Secure your web hosting

The wrong hosting option can affect your site in different ways. If you share hosting with a number of other sites, any negative ranking for a site within the network will result in a similarly negative ranking for your own site. This could affect your site’s credibility, which may influence credibility and traffic.
Wrong hosting options will also affect speeds. If your site makes use of shared hosting, it could experience lags and crashes due to an increase of traffic to itself, or to other sites within the same web hosting plan. If users are forced to experience delays, they will be less likely to visit your site. Users will also tend to shy away from future visits, which will affect your site’s traffic.

Make the site mobile friendly

More people are accessing the internet on their mobile devices. If your site is not optimized for the mobile platform, you could lose a large potential audience. You need to consider the plugins and themes used, to ensure that they do not add features that affect your site’s mobile display.

Choosing the right plugins and theme or framework will help reduce your site’s baggage. It will load faster, and will be better displayed on mobile.

Final thought

If you are interested in improving your site speed but are not able to handle the technical optimization tasks, you may consider hiring WPfixs for unrivalled optimization services. The service provider guarantees diligence and comprehensive analysis when optimizing your site’s speed. The team will ensure that all aspects are optimized and functional, preventing any potential instances of low customer satisfaction.