Regardless of what your site is about, you need to always look for means to build better user experience for your visitors. So they have the best experience possible and keep coming back to your site.
One of the basic ways to do so is by just creating quality content. If you provide the content that a user is interested in, you already have done half the job for building a good user experience website.
But, there are few more strategies that you can utilize to develop an even more, user-friendly website. And in this blog post, we will be sharing eight WordPress plugins to improve user experience in several ways.
Below we will divide the plugins by the features they add. We will also be listing free alternatives of plugin wherever possible.
Now let’s see few plugins that will improve user experience.
Improve User Experience with 8 Best WordPress Plugins
Add a Reading Progress Bar with WP Reading Progress
On the internet, people have a lot of things going on in mind. Hence when they come across a post, they are eager to know how long an article or piece of content is so that they get to know how much they need to spend in it.
A progress bar allows individuals to easily observe where they are in post and how much content is left for that page. Also read, How to Install a WordPress Plugin – Quick Guide For Beginners.
To make your website’s progress bar, you can the free WP Reading Progress plugin. It’s quite easy to use and you’ll also be able to customize your bar by:
- Picking a different color
- Moving the bar to the top or the bottom of the screen
- Only adding your progress bar to specific kinds of content
- Implementing or applying your progress bar to the whole page or only the content in the WordPress editor
Add Estimated Reading Time With Reading Time WP
Another Way to help an individual acknowledge how much time they require to invest in a post is to add estimated reading time number. For instance you can tell people that the post that will take nearly 8 mins to read, this might prompt them to save it for later if they are on a five-minute coffee break.
The easiest method to add approximate reading time is with the free Reading Time WP plugin. It will automatically add the approximate reading time at the top of your posts. If you need further control, you can make use of a shortcode to manually insert the reading time.
Additionally, you can also use the free Read Meter plugin, which adds both an approximated reading time and a reading progress bar. This way you can improve user experience.
Enhance WordPress Performance with WP Rocket (or other Performance Plugins)
One crucial aspect to improve the user experience of a WordPress site depends on loading speed. The slow loading site will negatively affect your website revenue.
To boost your website speed you can use a WordPress caching/performance plugin. As a basic requirement, you need to have page caching, but ideally, you should use a plugin that can help you implement other performance best practices, too. You can use the WP Rocket plugin that starts from $49, it makes WordPress caching easy.
Additionally, you can also read this blog on “Tips to Improve Landing Page Performance of WordPress Site” to boost page speed.
Add a Dark Mode Option With Blackout
A dark mode option will be good for website readers especially at night time. Seeing too much blue light at night can make it hard for people to sleep and strain their eyes, the reason why a lot of tools have a built-in dark mode.
With a plugin like the free Blackout plugin, you can bring the dark mode to the WordPress site and improve user experience for happy readers.
Add a Back to Top Button With WPFront Scroll Top
If you publish a huge article, it can be frustrating for visitors to manually scroll to the top of the site once the finish reading post. A back to top button will allow to easily jump back to the top with a single click.
You can use the free WPFront Scroll Top plugin to add back to the top button.
Add Image Preview / Lightbox
If your website contains quite interesting images, you can allow your visitors to zoom in to view more details of the image. With a Lightbox plugin, you can allow your visitors to observe the full resolution image when they click on it. Ultimately this plugin will improve user experience.
Identify Broken Links with Broken Link Checker
Broken links can not only be frustrating for site visitors but also damage the website’s SEO.
To identify and fix broken links on WordPress, you can utilize the free Broken Link Checker plugin. It will automatically discover all the broken links on your website site and gives you the luxury to resolve them from a single dashboard. Hence, you can improve user experience for your site
Improve WordPress Search with SearchWP
If your site visitors depend on your website’s search then you should rethink installing a WordPress plugin as the default search system isn’t quite strong.
You can install the SearchWP plugin that offers you several options for enhancing your website’s search functionality. It can additionally help you add Ajax live search, which displays live search suggestions as visitors start typing.
Improve User Experience of Your Site Now
Though you don’t need to change anything else, just speeding up your website speed will improve the user experience for your website. Additionally, you can check for Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared (2020)
You can also checkout our Managed WordPress Hosting Plans.