5 Proven Practices to Increase User Engagement on Your WordPress Website

This year in March, WordPress will celebrate its 15th birthday and there is no debate in saying that WordPress has successfully emerged as one of the most influential and powerful web development platforms.

The online business community owes a big thanks to WordPress as it has given a layman an opportunity to have their own business website without requiring too much of money and coding knowledge.

The reasons to love WordPress are many. I made my first website on WordPress and honestly, it was an incredible experience and I absolutely loved it. The flexibility, the compatibility and ease of use is amazing.

Moreover, the free of cost availability and SEO friendliness are the premier reasons why WordPress is the preferred web development platform, especially for beginners are small businesses.

It is cost effective and 100% SEO friendly. This means that WordPress offers a higher chance of visibility on search engines compared to any other platform.

For any website to succeed, an effective implementation of navigation, visual aesthetics and CTAs to increase user engagement is the most critical factor. Building a fully functional website and getting visitors on the product pages does not always helps with the conversions.

The reason is that today costumers have more control over the buying process then marketers and business owners. This is where CTA’s come in action; they actually make user do what you want them to do.

Again, we have got to thank WordPress as it is an amazing platform. In WordPress, you have a lot of opportunities; which if optimized correctly, result in excellent user engagement and minimal bounce rates.

If you are struggling with bounce rates on your WordPress website, here are some of best practices to increase user engagement and take your sales to a whole new level.

Minimalistic Web Design

Minimalistic design is the most effective method to create a visually appealing website. It makes website easy to use and navigate. It is wise to remove unnecessary, less desirable and irrelevant content as it provides a higher chance of user engagement.

Some marketers in pursuit to achieve good rankings often put a lot of irrelevant content on the website which annoy users.

It is good to have a lot of content but everything on your website should be relevant and must have a certain purpose. Otherwise it will create a negative impact on your visitors.

Experts say that use of simple colors and textures result in positive and a memorable effect on users. A minimalist website design is always structured through a grid based system and a wire-frame. This makes website compatible and user friendly on all view ports alike.

Fanatic Navigation

I guess you have heard this quote,

“The foundation of all great websites is, and always will be, quality navigation”

Navigation is arguably the most important part of web design and plays an important role in user engagement. Without good navigation your WordPress website is like a jungle without a map and is likely to frustrate users. Here are some tips to improve navigation.

• Position filtered navigation correctly. Figure out the best position by yourself depending upon the type and nature if your website, it works differently on different sites.
• Provide relevant filters as they bring people closer to what they are looking for.
• Empower the users by enabling manual input and provide auto complete functionality.
• Introduce a “what’s new” category and always keep category names simple
• Include voice search option if possible.

Unleash the Power of CTA’s

Web Design Usability and User engagement go hand in hand. CTA’s are an integral part of usability and like I said earlier, they make users do what you want them to do.

70% of small business websites don’t have clear Call to Actions on their home page, which becomes a major reason of their failure.

Here is what you can do to improve CTA’s on your website,

• First of all make sure that all of your CTAs are clickable
• Placement of CTAs matter a lot. Make your CTA’s easy to find and navigate
• Use correct words and invoke emotions around your CTA’s
• Consider adding some special effects to your CTAs to grab user attention.

Optimize Pages Based On Search Demands

Some of the pages on your WordPress website might gain some more traffic than the others. In order to increase user engagement, you must keep a track record of the user behavior on your website and then tailor your SEO efforts accordingly.

The goal of optimization is always to take the user to the page relevant to the keywords he typed in the search engine. This increases user engagement and decreased bounced rates.

If you just somehow make him land on the website completely ignoring the query, he is probably going to leave your website in seconds, and the bounce rate will ultimately increase.

Design You Website From An Emotional Perspective

This may sound a bit unimportant but the fact is that emotions do play a significant role in user engagement. Without emotions your website is like a robot and nobody likes to interact with them.

We, humans, are pure emotional beings and want to be treated that way. The more we try to prove our logics and rationality; our emotions make a greater influence on our decisions.

Now creating emotions on a website can be a bit tricky and takes a lot of factors in consideration. Asingle misjudged maneuver can do more harm than good. The key is to do a lot more research about your target audience and find out more and more about their interests and behaviors.

Once you have done that; begin with a concept that appeals your target audience. If it’s a business website, your WordPress theme and corporate agenda must align with the goals of people you are targeting. Also try to bridge the communication in order to increase user trust and involvement.

A good way to show your human side is by adding a lot of useful and informative blogs on your website. By providing simple and common knowledge, you can certainly increase user engagement and get more traffic on your website.

Conclusion

There is a lot you can do to increase user engagement. However; it is clear that if your website is effective and able to generate responses in users such as trust, involvement, enjoyment or contentment, it will certainly get more traffic and increased user engagement.

So, it’s time for you to take a step further and include emotions and experiences in your WordPress website, not just functionality and aesthetics.