Every web usability enthusiasts is seeking ways to improve his website, whether it’s a blog or a e-commerce business. WordPress offers several plugins that might be useful for increasing user experience. We took a closer look at them and chose 4 that we found especially interesting:
Loading website is a must, if you don’t want to frustrate your users. Research prove that slow page load affects website abandonment rate. W3 Total Cache is a WordPress Performance Optimization Framework designed to improve page speed, server performance and download time. Download this plugin
Big blogging scenario it is very good to provide users with posts that he would find both relevant and interesting. Yet another related posts plugin (YARPP) provides the system which not only gives a list of posts related to the current entry, but it also shows related posts in feeds with customized display options and a complete templating system which gives you advanced control on the results displayed. Download this plugin
Most of the time users do not come to a specific page directly from the homepage, but it is our job to give users proper navigation path, so that they can look for other relevant content on the site. This affects both user satisfaction as well as the overall user experience. Breadcrumb trail navigation shows the visitor their path to the current location. This is a fairly popular plugin whose strength lies in the administrative interface which makes options of settings very easy, also with keeping a play-along donut for the theme-developers and advanced users. Download this plugin
Are you a writer who loves to pen-down long blogposts and several illustrative images on your post, but at the same time is concerned about usability, as users have to go all the way back scrolling up? If so, you can leave this headache to Smooth scroll up plugin. You can customize the text, tab type and the positioning of the scroll up link on your website. A simple, but brilliant way to enhance your user experience level. Download this plugin
I hope you enjoyed the selection of WordPress plugins described in this blog post. Do you use them? Do you know any others that help improve user experience on your website or blog? Let me know in the comments!
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
