10 Brilliant WordPress Plugins that Improve Website Usability!
There are 3 regular activities that every Blogger tends to follow:
- Write and Publish Top-notch Articles
- Social Media Marketing and link building
- Reply to the comments and email received from your viewers
Don’t you feel that you’re forgetting something very crucial for the well-being of your blog? Think harder.. I’m sure you’re forgetting something called “User Experience” in your daily rut. Make an effort to understand what your users like and dislike in your website.. A content website has to be good.. it has to keep improving it’s UX all the time!
Must Read: Improving UX using skeleton screens
You’re definitely lost if you think otherwise.
- Around 70% of marketers lack a consistent content marketing strategy.
- 3 Most important things to make content impactful : Relevant Target Audience (58%); Engaging and Compelling Storytelling (57%); Triggers a Response/Action (54%)
- Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images
These statistics should give you something to ponder upon… How did the best blogs get to the positions they currently are in? They must have started with the simplest of the WordPress themes… then, how did they manage such leaps and bounds of progress? They all improved their credibility by redesigning their website with WordPress plugins that improve website usability.
In this article, I want to help you all to improve the user experience of your WordPress website by giving you a list of WordPress plugins that improve website usability. I can’t say that all your usability issues will be solved but I can definitely say that the most common usability issues will be fixed!
List of WordPress Plugins that improve Website Usability:
1. Akismet
Do you think a spammy comments on your website will please your visitors? It’s the last thing that your visitors expect when they first land on your website. That’s damn annoying, isn’t it?
Any popular site user gets 85% spam comments. To fight all the dirty tactics used by the world towards spamming, you should install Akismet. It’s by far the best spam protection plugin. It’s one of the most used WordPress Plugins. It doesn’t require any efforts from your end and kills spammy comments and helps you catch hold of them under your blog’s “Comments” section. This plugin comes pre-installed with WordPress.
This plugin makes life simpler for you. You won’t need to worry about the negative impact of spammy comments on your website. It will be taken care of, and none of your users will have to face the impact on spams!
2. Contact Form 7
According to a recent survey, there are around 51% respondents say that contact information is a vital information which is missing is most of the company websites on the web.
Contact Form 7 is one of the most used FREE WordPress plugins that improve website usability with more than 1+ million active installations. This plugin lets the user create contact forms without a hitch. These contact forms are easily customizable along with CAPTCHA and Akismet comment spamming filters.
To get more professional forms, you can also use WPForms.
3. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics is by far the most appropriate tool for website owners to analyze their user behavior and have a closer look at their site visitors. But can you imagine the time wasted in separately logging into the Google Analytics dashboard and analyzing data?
How amazing will this be: An overview of your key stats right on top of your WordPress dashboard!
It’s the most impactful WordPress plugins that improve website usability. It automatically inserts the latest Google Analytics tracking code in your pages. Apart from the regular Google Analytics report, you can also get in-depth page reports and detailed post reports allow further segmentation of your data. This can provide performance details for each page or post from your website.
4. W3 Total Cache
In this digital world, the attention span of human beings is decreasing so much so that the average time for which a video is watched is just 2.7 minutes. Users spend only a mere 4.4 seconds on the content of more than 100 words. Just imagine!
Considering all this, every website should have a least loading time so that the attention of their users is not lost. WP3 Cache is one of the most effective WordPress plugins that improve website usability by increasing server performance, provides content delivery network integration (CDN) integration, reduces the download times tremendously too.
It is one of the most complicated plugins and takes a good 30 minutes to install but once that’s done it cuts off a sizable amount of seconds from your website’s loading time.
In case you’re looking for alternatives to the W3 Total Cache, you can start using a dedicated hosting provider instead of the cheap shared hosting.
5. WP Smush.it
One of the most important issues that every WordPress user faces is the size of the included images. Trimming the large images becomes crucial because 39% of the people will quit a website if it took too long to load pictures or didn’t load.
For all the image smushing, WordPress has its amazing WP Smush.it. It helps in reducing image file sizes, improving performance and also boosting SEO. Resize and optimize images by setting the width and height. The servers do all the hard work to deliver amazingly compressed images without any compromising on the quality. If you’re unable to find the reason of your slow site, you might want to consider installing this plugin. WP Smush smushes all the information in your image and cuts down all the unwanted data to get you a perfect website.
6. Live Chat Support
It is often observed that the most efficient way to offer customer satisfaction is Live Chat.
63% of people feel that they can rely on a site with customer chat more than the one that doesn’t. It is considered to be a much reliable form of customer service than the others.
WP Live Chat Support is the most cost effective Live Chat Plugin. This is one of those WordPress plugins that improve website usability and requires no third party connections, no need to pay for the monthly subscription to understand your visitors better. Improve your conversion rates by having a plugin which lets you be in constant touch with all your users (especially the troubled ones). It’s an ideal plugin for small businesses!
7. Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)
Social Media Marketing is on a roll, and every website should have social media icons for the users to promote your offerings.
This plugin lets you add icons for Email, RSS Feed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Youtube and over 200 other social media platforms and also add custom icons of your choice. You have the option to pick from over 16 different designs, and you can also give several actions to each social media. You can also animate your social media icons and make your icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’. Ask people to subscribe via Email, display a pop-up to follow/like your page via social media.
8. Yoast SEO
Your content should be optimized enough to land on the first page of the SERPs which requires a list of Dos and Don’ts.
You can write enhanced content and have a fully optimized WordPress site with this Yoast SEO plugin. It takes care of the technical optimization and helps you write better. Yoast SEO makes sure you select a focus keyword when you write your articles and also makes sure this keyword is used everywhere. This Plugin forces you to use the focus keyword in your meta description, headings, sub-headings et al. Also, the minimum number of words required for a blog are also checked. The snippet view gives you a fair idea of how your post will look like in the search results. Not only your rankings but your click through rates are also bound to increase for organic searches.
9. WPtouch Mobile Plugin
The accountability of Mobile devices is on the rise.. mobile browsing has increased by almost 15% from last year.
WPtouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that will add straightforward and elegant mobile friendly theme for your Mobile visitors. It is a Google recommended plugin, and it enables your WordPress site to be mobile compliant and also enables this mobile-friendly version to pass the Google mobile test. All this in just a few clicks!
10. Broken Link Checker
Broken links – this is one issue every marketer/blogger with a big blog faces. On an average, a web page lives a good life for 100 days; it’s natural for it to throw 404 errors to all its referring links.
It’s natural that the users will get irritated on running into these kinds of errors. They would’ve expected to learn something more, and the error would just give them a wrong impression about your website.
How cool can a plugin be which regularly checks the links on your site? Not only that, but it also sends you an Email in case the links are found broken. It goes through all your pages, posts, custom fields and you can also select a monitoring period for these links. You can then receive the status of the broken links through your dashboard or Email.
Please comment about your favorite WordPress plugins that improve website usability.
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Thank you for sharing this information. I am designing my new blog now and will definitely add these!
I’m glad I could help!
My top must have plugins on site are Yoast SEO, WP Rocket or Super Cache, Easy Social Share Buttons, Image Recycle and WP Security.
Hi Kasa,
Thank you for sharing your favorites.