This article will explain the value of user experience (UX) for your WordPress site and demonstrate how to conduct an audit to enhance it.
Let’s begin immediately!
Considering User Experience (And Why It’s Important for the Success of Your Site)
UX, to put it simply, has to do with how simple and pleasurable your website is for users to use. UX includes a wide range of features for your WordPress site, such as readability, navigation, and performance. These components are far from optional if you want to ensure the success of your website.
Users visit your website for a reason, whether it’s to read your blog, buy something, find out more about your company, or do something completely else. Users will quit your website and attempt to meet their demands elsewhere if they can’t figure out how to complete their tasks there.
Users are very drawn to the combination of usability and good content, which is essential to maintaining their interest and promoting conversions. You may improve your site’s conversion rate and decrease its bounce rate by putting user experience (UX) first.
How to Conduct a WordPress Site UX Audit
A UX audit mainly entails gathering data on how users currently interact with your website and what might be done to enhance it. The latter will be simpler the more meticulous you are with the former. The procedures listed below serve as a manual for gathering thorough data about the existing user experience (UX) of your website.
Step 1: Consider your site from the perspective of your users by getting inside their minds.
It’s crucial to remember that even if you could believe you’ve created a user-friendly website, your viewpoint might be slightly distorted. You built your website, after all, so you are familiar with all of its features. This is an edge you have over your users, who might run into obstacles you aren’t even aware of.
In order to conduct a good UX audit, one of the first and most crucial things you can do is to keep in mind that your users should be your primary focus. If you want to ensure that you’re offering the finest UX possible, you’ll need to be conscious of your own bias at every turn.
Of course, this might be challenging because it’s challenging to pretend to be a new visitor to your site while ignoring what you already know. A good place to start is by concentrating on the goal of your website and what visitors expect to get out of going there.
User personas might be a useful tool if you need support. They could even help you identify features that visitors to your site might find beneficial that are lacking. Understanding this may help you decide what to include in your UX audit’s conclusion.
Step 2: enlist the Help of Others to Get Outsiders’ Opinions
One of the best things you can do when performing a UX audit is to bring in outside help. No matter how objective you strive to be, you’ll never be able to compare to a true outside user when it comes to assessing the usability of your site.
Recruiting some of your peers – be they friends, family members, co-workers, or other people in your industry – to test out your site can provide valuable insight. Fresh sets of eyes are far more likely to see potential issues than you are after staring at your pages for hours on end.
If you have the budget for it, you could also look into hiring a UX professional to take look. They’ll be able to assess your site and point out what you need to fix, or in some cases, sort out any issues for you.
However, the best input you can get will be from your users themselves. Asking your site’s visitors to participate in surveys regarding UX can provide you with suggestions for improvements straight from the source.
While peers and professionals can certainly help steer you in the right direction, your users are the only ones who can tell you exactly what they need. Before you start making changes, ask your users for their input.
Step 3: Collect and evaluate user metrics to look for issue areas
Another important element to take into account while evaluating your site is data, which is objective. The opinions of people and your personal evaluation of your site’s user experience are both valuable, but analysing user analytics will make it evident where your site has issues.
The bounce rates of each of your pages, in particular, can be highly instructive. There probably is a navigational problem or another source of confusion on the page if people frequently access certain pages before abandoning them.
When examining user data, it’s also important to take note of prominent keywords and behaviour flows. Users will find their favourite pages more quickly if your most well-liked material is made more visible and easy to reach, such as by being added to the main menu or having links to popular posts or products placed prominently on your website.
Similarly, behavior flows can demonstrate how visitors navigate your website. This information can be used to identify common routes or dead ends. By having this knowledge, you can help users navigate common user routes more easily or help them avoid dead ends.
Step 4: Try out the navigation, operation and performance of your website as a user.
As a site owner, you presumably invest a lot of time in maintaining the back end of your website, including developing content, installing updates, trawling through comments, and other duties. The bulk of your users, however, never see the back end of your website.
Try accessing the front end of your website and using it as a visitor would to acquire a better understanding of your site from a user’s perspective. While doing this, pay close attention for any navigational or performance issues.
Try to make a purchase of a particular product, for instance, if you manage an online store. You might observe that it’s challenging to locate the item you’re looking for or that the product page lacks a quantity selection. Keep track of these delays so you can address them later.
In addition to navigation, pay attention to how long it takes each page to load. Users can become impatient with slow websites.
You can also check your site’s speed with a tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights:
A speed test’s results are very helpful. They can identify the particular causes of your site’s slowness, allowing you to focus on those issues after your audit.
Step 5: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
UX is very important to mobile users. A poor mobile UX, according to 49% of users, makes it less likely that they would interact with the site’s owner. If your site is not mobile-friendly, mobile users are five times more likely to leave it.
This means that both your conversion rate and a high-quality UX depend on having a responsive site. If you administer your site primarily on a desktop, you should test it out on a mobile device to check for any problems.
Similar to how you evaluated your site’s navigation and performance previously, you should also think about how long it takes for your pages to load and how simple it is to use a mobile device to navigate your site. Consider features specific to mobile usage as well, though.
The desktop layout of your website might not be the best choice for a mobile site, to start. While mobile devices are often thinner and benefit from a more vertical design, especially for forms and navigation menus, desktop sites display well in landscape format.
Make a note of any issues you encounter if you discover that it’s challenging to view your pages in their full or that you frequently need to scroll or zoom in order to examine particular elements of your mobile site. You should surely take care of them afterward.
Step 6: Analyse Your Results and Make improvements
By the time you’ve looked at your website from a variety of perspectives, solicited feedback on its usability, and compiled information on user behaviour, you ought to have a good idea of which aspects of it could use work. You are now prepared to begin making adjustments to improve your UX.
Ideally, the data you’ve acquired will give you clear guidance on how those adjustments should be implemented. Nevertheless, this won’t always be the case. If you’ve found an issue but don’t know how to solve it, think about these possible beginning points:
- Select a readable font and format your text for online reading.
- Make sure the menu is visible on all pages.
- Check to see if your page titles accurately describe the content of the page.
- For popular pages, create landing pages with Call to Action (CTA) buttons.
- Use similar articles or related merchandise to bring people to further material.
- Image optimisation
- Set up a content delivery network and enable caching (CDN).
- Ensure that the theme you’re using is mobile responsive.
Additionally, if you need to address multiple UX issues, resist the urge to tackle them all at once. Work down to improving the details after making changes that will have the most positive impact initially (such enhancing performance and mobile responsiveness) (adding buttons and modifying content).
Conclusion
You do not want to neglect the UX of your website. Lowering bounce rates and increasing conversions can be accomplished by making it easier for users to complete their tasks on your website. A UX audit is a clever technique to identify and address problems with your WordPress website.
When you’re prepared to conduct a UX audit, keep in mind to adhere to the following rules:
- Consider your website from the users’ point of view by getting inside their thoughts.
- Recruit others to offer outsiders’ opinions.
- Obtain and evaluate user metrics to look for any issues.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Try out the navigation and operation of your website as a user.
- Compile your findings, then suggest changes.
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