5 Secrets to a User-Friendly WordPress Site in 2017

1. 5 Secrets to a User-Friendly WordPress Site in 2017

2. WordPress has achieved one of the most historically unique changes of all CMS platforms in the world. Evolving from a blogging platform to that of website development is truly a remarkable feat for WordPress. As of today, WordPress powers over 28% of the world’s websites. The websites that are the most effective in communication are those that are user-friendly. This kind of website works for either blogging or business purposes. In this article, I will share with my readers 5 secrets to build a user-friendly WordPress website.

3. An Easy Noting Function It is of the utmost importance that you understand how crucial user engagement really is. Therefore, you must do everything you can to make your website as user-friendly as you have to. To do that, you must consider using the following: • Comment Widget: This is a widget that is designed to enable your visitors to comment on your website. I suggest using WP Advanced Comment. • Comment Preview: With this feature, now users can see what their comments would look like before they post them. You can use Live Content Preview for this. • CAPTCHA: This feature is used especially to deal with spam. The only downside of it is that it will disrupt user-engagement. If you don’t want that, then this feature is not for you. • Subscription to Comments: Add an option to encourage users to subscribe to your blog’s comment updates.

4. Easy Navigation Another important aspect of a user-friendly website is to ensure that it’s navigation is kept simple and to the point. Ensure that none of your users are confused or rather, get lost while moving between your website’s pages. For that, I suggest you use breadcrumbs or even an ‘Up’ button. These features depend on the kind of theme that you use for your WordPress website. If the theme you have selected for your website didn’t provide you with effective navigation, then you can use WordPress navigation plugins to take care of that. I suggest using navigation plugins such as WP-PageNavi, Breadcrumb NavXT or WP Post Navigation.

5. Social Media Integration Adding social media share buttons to your WordPress website can further user interaction on it. Be sure to use popular social media share plugins such as Ultimate Sharing and MashShare. The share buttons in these plugins will be visible on your posts to your users, enabling them to easily share your content on various social media channels. As such, it will increase organic web traffic and visits to your website.

6. Contact Form A contact form is a great solution to maintaining strong communications between website owners and users. Although there are various contact form plugins that you can use for your website, the one that I recommend is Contact Form 7. Be sure to add a contact form especially in the Contact Us page. Doing this will convince users that you care about them and are willing to address their queries anytime.

7. Article Navigation Apart from website navigation, article navigation is just as important. Consider the following requirements for this: • Record List:This shows related posts to the present post that your users view. You can use plugins such as Contextual Related Posts, Simple Tags or Related Posts Thumbnails. • Website Map: With this, users can get an overview of all the pages on your website. For this, I recommend Google XML Sitemaps. • Encourage User Subscription: Doing this will ensure that users will come back to visit your site continuously. After subscribing to your newsletter, users will receive a notification the next time you publish a new blog post. You can use Official MailerLite Sign Up Forms for this.

8. Conclusion Making a user-friendly WordPress website ensures greater visibility, user-interaction and engagement as well, if and when you consider the above 5 mentioned secrets. If there are other secrets that I have missed out on, don’t hesitate to inform me in the comments below.

9. For more, you can visit WordPress Tutorials.