Initiating your WordPress blog or a website is indeed an exquisite experience. But what do you seek when you start up your website; thriving themes and plugins? Yeah! It is nicer as it offers more functionality to your website. But, that’s not all what it takes for a website to flourish and gain increased network traffic.
The world of WordPress is not only limited to the front-end but also focuses on the back-end equally.
To make your website more functional, you will need to keep a track on how much traffic is coming to your website. To fulfill this, we all know, Google Analytics is the right tool. It will help you identify the amount of visitors, classified in accordance to their sex, age group and interests. You will know which links are most clicked and how much traffic is currently available on your website.
However, in order to increase the user experience, you will have to observe how many visitors are leaving your website satisfied. Content plays a vital role, the authenticity of information and whether the content is providing the right knowledge to individuals well enough or not. But, content is only a part of the bigger picture.
Much more is needed to create a website, a success. There is SEO, Social Media marketing, Community engagements, Digital marketing, ready support 24/7, Web designs and much more all that can be controlled from the back-end.
Today, I am going to discuss a few tips that one can use to increase the UX of their website and a few plugins that can help them add functionality. So, let’s begin.
Oh, before we move ahead, all the information that I am going to share with you is in reference to variable resources. So, save yourself the hassle of in depth research, as I have crafted this article to fulfill your purpose. However if you want to still acknowledge, the source links are all present here.
https://wp-types.com/2015/06/8-ways-to-improve-the-user-experience-of-your-wordpress-admin/
https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-admin-toolbar/
https://www.wpexplorer.com/improving-wordpress-user-experience/
https://usabilitygeek.com/wordpress-user-experience-plugins/
Divide Content Using Custom Post Types
Since, your website is all about content, then optimizing and organizing your content should be your top most concern. All thanks to custom post types, you can now avoid the hassles of being biased to the categories and tags feature in WordPress.
Custom Post Types allows you to categorize your data in a much orderly fashion if your website is dealing with variable data.
Custom Post types helps you categorize content and make navigation easy. It will enable you to add more than one category level for your posts.
Access Limitations
One of the good things about WordPress is that it is quite user-friendly. The more complex is the back-end, the more difficult it will be for an administrator to navigate around. Assuming that you are a WordPress developer and you created a website for your client. Your client is a business owner who is not as familiarized with WordPress as you are.
In such cases, it is better to utilize the limited access option in WordPress. This will create the back end of your website more interactive. You can see fewer menu items side by side providing the liberty of downloading desired plugins and themes. All you have to do is give the admin rights as an Editor to your respective client.
Screen Options Adjustment
At the back-end you can easily find the Screen option which is located on the top right of your screen. Irrespective of the account you have on your WordPress dashboard, Screen options are available for everyone. Majorly, it all depends on the amount of active plugins integrated to your WordPress.
While, you have the access to all these options, you can result in bogging up the back-end. Henceforth, it is a good practice if you can Adjust your screen options to sophistication. Although, certain screen options such as Activity and Quick Editor can be helpful, though, most other blocks are consuming nothing more than space. It can easily confuse you or your respective client.
As it is a common perception, that business owners more likely have the desire to learn how the website is constructed, they are more interested in knowing that their website works.
- Removing all the elements from the main Dashboard screen that aren’t important to the client such as WordPress News, Quick Draft, as well as most plugin-related blocks.
- In the Posts and Pages sections, remove columns like Author and Comments.
- On the individual Post and Page editing screens, remove Revisions, Send Trackbacks, Custom Fields, Slug, and Author.
Admin bar Customization
The most easiest way to access the back-end of your website is through navigating to your dashboard from the front-end. You can customize your admin bar by removing redundant items such as new posts, media or pages, comments and updates or anything else that is related. Omit the attributes that are not usable for your clients and make the website more user-friendly and sophisticated.
You can further learn more about customization of your admin bar through the following link:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/take-control-wordpress-admin-bar/
Cut down Page Load Time
Page load time plays a vital role to increase the UX of your website. If your website takes longer time to load the content for users, chances are that you might lose credible amount of network traffic. Page load time strongly depends on your hosting provider so it is necessary that you get a good hosting service for your website. You can easily find good hosting platforms for your website on the Internet
Here is a list of hosting providers that can come in handy,
- Amazon Web Services. Highly scalable, complete cloud platform.
- Microsoft Azure. IaaS and PaaS computing for development, deployment, and management.
- Google Cloud Platform. Developer products and cloud technologies hosted by Google.
- IBM Cloud.
- Rackspace.
- VMware.
- Red Hat.
- Oracle Cloud.
Download Essential Plugins
Although, you can apply a number of techniques to increase the UX of your WordPress website; however, to add more flexibility, WordPress strongly relies on plugins. Here are some of the plugins that can help you increase the UX of your website in no time. They should be an essential part of your WordPress website if you don’t want your network traffic to go down the drain.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO allows you to write content in your WordPress Post Editor with a focused keyword in mind. This means that you are likely to write specific content that is more focused and unique. Such content is also likely to be easier to understand resulting in increasing not only the indexing but also the user experience effectively.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache can profoundly improve the user experience of your WordPress website by cutting down page load time through caching. In addition to this, this specific plugin provides easy Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDN allows you to store images on another network, ultimately decreasing the load time on your server.
Broken Link Checker
Established or not established, Broken Links is a plugin that can help you increase your user experience by identifying the broken links on your website. The Broken Link Checker is a must have plugin that should be available in your WordPress at all costs as it helps improve the experience for both, users as well as crawlers. It is simple to use and very convenient too since it reduces link maintenance time.
WP Touch
As we can all see, today, smartphones and gadgets have become quite common among individuals. Henceforth, in order to make a user friendly mobile version of your website, WPTouch is the most commendable solution. Complete with AJAX, WP Touch does just that, enabling you to create a simple, yet elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress site.
With that we conclude our article, hope you had a good time reading it. Our aim is to educate individuals as much as we can about WordPress.