5 Amazing WordPress Plugins That Enhance User Experience
When designing a WordPress site or blog, you must focus on delivering enhanced user experience. Not doing so, can have a negative influence on your brand. However, using WordPress plugins, you can improve your website’s user experience. But, with tons of plugins available online, choosing the most appropriate one can be overwhelming and a daunting task (especially for beginners).
In this post, we’ll talk about 5 popular WordPress plugins that boost user experience.
Website navigation plays an important role in increasing its usability, and thereby enhances user experience. However, forcing your user to scroll up and down to browse the navigation menu can be frustrating. This is where a sticky menu comes in handy. Sticky (or fixed) navigation menu remains visible even user is scrolling a web page; in simple words it can be accessed by users from anywhere on the site, without making them continuously scroll the page.
If you want to add sticky navigation to your WordPress site, then WP sticky menu plugin best suit your needs. It is a responsive, flexible and easy-to-manage plugin. It can either be used as the menu at the top of a theme, or as an additional menu for presenting extra content to your visitors. It comes loaded with different styling options, animation effects, etc. This plugin is available for $17.
Apart from navigation, the second most important factor that helps in augmenting user experience is the page load time. In fact, often users are more concerned with the page loading speed rather than the bells and whistles we wish to add to the site. If your website loads slowly, it will have higher bounce rates (this means users won’t stay on your site longer). Also, a website page load time serves as a cornerstone in improving search engine rankings.
Luckily, there is a great plugin that helps to optimize your web page performance and page speed, which eventually improve user experience. W3 Total Cache is one of the most sought-after caching plugins that helps in improving page load times. It is free to use and helps boost your visitors’ experience by:
- Accelerating server performance,
- Curtailing the download times,
- Providing integration with CDN (Content Delivery Network (CDN).
You may want to optimize your site for search engines, but odds are that you might wonder what SEO has to do with user experience. Well, it is important if you want to get attention of users towards your site. Wondering how? As you may know, an SEO-friendly website helps in getting good search engine ranking. Higher ranking increases the chances of driving more traffic. In essence, SEO is about ensuring that the content of your site is optimized for search engines such Google; and better content will help in enhancing your reader’s experience.
One great plugin that helps in improving your website SEO is WordPress SEO by Yoast. It helps in writing better content, and push you in choosing a “focus” keyword for your articles. That’s not it! It even helps to remind you of enabling pretty permalinks, optimizes RSS feeds, help adds breadcrumbs for increasing usability and much more. It is free to download and use. But, you can upgrade the plugin to the premium version for more advanced features.
At some point of time, your users will like to get in touch with you seeking answers to any queries or any other website aspect. Providing instant answers to your users will help you improve their experience. Adding support for live chat on your site is a cost-effective way to stay connected with your existing and new users.
If you’re searching for a plugin to integrate chat functionality in your website for free, then WP Live Chat Support is exactly what you need. You can install and use this plugin, without having to make third party connections or monthly subscriptions for live chat. This plugin comes fully-loaded with great features which includes viewing missed live chats, desktop notifications for new live chat, etc. Simply install this plugin and start interacting with your website visitors. In case you need even more features than the ones offered by free version, you can upgrade WP Live Chat Support to its premium version.
Having a website mobile-friendly has become a necessity than just a passing trend. And so, if you still don’t have a mobile optimized site, it’s high time to create one. Not creating a mobile-friendly site will make a negative impact on the mobile users.
JetPack is a free to use plugin that comes with a lightweight “Mobile theme” that makes it easy for users to scan your website on their device quickly. You can even customize the theme according to your needs, if you’ve a little coding knowledge of PHP and CSS.
Let’s Wrap Up!
So, if you want to provide your website users with an enhanced experience, I’ll strongly recommend you to give a good thought to installing the above discussed WordPress plugins.
Author Signature: Addison Cohen is an application developer for Appsted Ltd, a mobile applications development services company which delivers most comprehensive mobile application solutions for different industry verticals. He loves sharing latest information on mobile technologies like iOS, Android development processes.
