When you want to publish content of the highest quality, there’s one aspect that you should focus on the most – the user experience.
If you were to think of a website as a house, then you wouldn’t be wrong. When people visit a house, one of the first things they notice is the color of the walls. The second thing they notice is whether the house is tidy or not.
Quite similarly, when people visit your website, they quickly take notice of the website’s design and functionality.
If the layout is pleasing to the eye and if everything performs smoothly, then you’ll be sure that they’ll stick around longer.
Actually, a study conducted by Adobe showed that 38% of users will stop interacting with a website if they find it unattractive. Furthermore, 66% of users will spend more time on a page if they happen to find it beautifully-designed.
Now that we’ve established just how important the user experience is, it’s time to do something about it. Grab a proverbial paintbrush and hammer, because it’s time to overhaul your website.
Here are our 5 tips:
1. Paint It Pretty
Why do people visit websites? Well, it’s pretty obvious, the primary reason why they visit the website is the content. It is the most important part of a website and, as a content creator, you would want to present it in the most eye-catching way.
First things first, you would want your theme to match your website’s purpose. You’re free to choose whatever color palette you want, as long as it matches the aesthetic.
For example, you wouldn’t have your tech website be all pink, as people generally expect more neutral colors in this case.
The artistic aspect is important, but what’s equally important is the layout. Many designers believe that the website’s layout should be unique. However, it’s the opposite, as the layout should be simple and intuitive, so as to give visitors a sense of familiarity.
If you were to go on a popular website, you’d see that most of them follow the same pattern – a non-intrusive color scheme along with a predictive website layout.
2. Keep It Clean
Your aim should always be to minimize the resources spent in order to maximize the wow-factor. In other words, you have to keep things simple!
For that, you would have to do some maintenance. You should focus on removing content that doesn’t have a place on your pages, as well as unnecessary pictures, videos or plugins.
As you might have expected, what happens backstage is also important. What you need to do is keep your dashboard clean.
Make sure that WordPress core is always up to date and don’t keep comments or posts pending just to leave them there. Delete them and keep your website clean at all times.
The benefits of a clean website are seen and felt by the user. A clean website loads faster, it performs better, and it doesn’t look cluttered.
3. Maintain Security
It might surprise you, but hacking happens quite often. WordPress websites share the same architecture, so once one of them gets hacked, many others can soon follow.
Once hackers get a hold of your website, they can make a real mess that can take quite a long time to undo. What you want to do is make your website harder to hack, and if that were to happen, you’d have to have a way to easily mitigate the damage.
Here are a few tips that you can use:
- Don’t use the “admin” user to create content. The default admin user should be left for administrative purposes. What you want to do is create a new user with which you’ll post the content.
- You need a strong password. Have a strong password that would deter even the most determined brute force cracks. Have a password of 8 or more characters and make sure to diversify it. Remember that “password” and “12345678” are not strong passwords.
- Install some security plugins, such as the All In One WP Security & Firewall.
- Make a back-up for your website. This doesn’t help in terms of security, but it can minimize the damage if you are hacked.
4. The Need for Speed
You may have noticed that people almost never explicitly say that they want a website to load fast, what they actually want is a website that isn’t slow. What a user simply wants is to navigate around your pages without having to wait.
There is no surprise here, your website should be top notch in terms of speed and performance.
As we have mentioned earlier, maintenance is an important aspect of optimizing your website to have faster load times.
When all of that is out of the way, you can do even more by optimizing the size of the content you are using.
For example, try to reduce the size of your uploaded photos. Use editing software to crop them or to scale them down. You wouldn’t want to fill up your entire memory with just a few pictures.
5. Improve Your Website’s SEO
Having a dashing website is amazing, but it’d be such a shame if not many users get to see it. In order to get your website into the public’s eye, you will have to play around with the notion of search engine optimization.
It is the process of making your website visible on Search Engines like Google by employing a slew of strategies.
SEO is a world of its own, but if you get the basics right, you can see your website’s online presence starting to grow over time.
And that is why you should focus on it. Once your content is SEO-friendly, you will notice that it will begin to bring organic traffic to your site.
WordPress Done Right
The truth is that any website can have a rocky start, but if you apply the advice from this article, you’ll quickly see improvements.
With the right amount of work put into it, you will see your website become a content powerhouse.
Give these tips a try and let me know how it went for you in the comments.
