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User experience (UX) standards and best practices for WordPress sites are changing rapidly. Over the past few years, users have become more tech-savvy. If your website features a poor UX, users won’t stay for over a few seconds. A few seconds is hardly long enough for anyone to sell or offer their service.
To retain user attention for a long time, you must prioritize an excellent user experience that enables them to navigate your site with minimal friction. This post details UX mistakes that cause visitors to leave your WordPress site and increase your bounce rate.
UX Mistakes (Detailed pointers)
1. Annoying Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are trigger-based windows that appear when visitors browse your website. They can be triggered when users click certain buttons after a set time or scroll to a specific area on a page. Pop-ups guide users into taking action or informing visitors about important information. For instance, a pop-up might ask website visitors for consent to track cookies.
However, many websites have poorly designed pop-ups that “hijack” and interrupt a user session. This creates a highly frustrating user experience and increases the bounce rate. Your website’s visitors may abandon the site if pop-ups block crucial content or keep appearing too frequently.
To overcome these annoying pop-ups, integrate them with the website’s design instead of interrupting the user experience flow as an add-on element. Consider implementing the UX best practices below to get rid of annoying pop-ups.
- Short messages: Keep your pop-up message short to dissuade visitors from clicking away even without reading.
- Simplify the design: Design pop-ups using WordPress fonts, colors, and themes. The minor interruption will naturally feel like an extension of your site’s experience.
- Strategize timing: To minimize disruptive expertise, display the pop-ups when the visitor is least likely to be interrupted. This is ideal after the visitor has been on the site for a specific period, after clicking a button, or when scrolling to a particular area on the page.
- Holistic approach: You can avoid designing an isolated pop-up; instead, create it in the context of other pop-ups that site visitors might see. Ensure that user experience is not blocked by one pop-up after another; this creates a negative experience and impacts your overall conversion rate.
2. Auto-playing Video and Music
Interactive content, such as music and videos, can make your WordPress site more engaging. However, if it is poorly done, it may have an adverse effect. Autoplaying video and audio can distract and confuse users. Instead of seamlessly interacting with the content on your website, users will start figuring out how to stop the audio and/or video. This can result in visitors spending minimal time on your site or clicking and abandoning it.
Autoplaying content creates issues with accessibility. The screen reader’s voice overlaps with your website’s audio track for users who use screen readers. This creates a confusing and jarring user experience. Additionally, it can impact SEO, as audio and video take more time to load. Slow load times will also affect your website’s SEO ranking. To fix this, your users should have control over when to play audio and video. Visitors should also be able to play, pause, and rewind the video and audio on your site.
3. Slow Page Loading Time
A website with a slow loading time immediately frustrates users. Visitors will abandon the site if the load time is over three seconds. Users expect pages to load quickly and instantaneously. Google’s Core Web Vitals framework allows you to check how fast your website is; it checks three metrics to measure your site’s page load speed, visual stability, and fix UX mistakes and user responsiveness issues.
You can determine which parts of the page load experience need to be optimized using the above metrics. Some best practices to consider when optimizing your website’s loading time include:
- Optimizing images: Unoptimized images reduce page load times significantly since the servers must transfer more data to web browsers. Images need to be compressed before you upload them. You may also add a caching plugin that reduces server requests. You can use a fast-loading WordPress theme such as the Blocksy theme, which is known for its fast performance.
- Reduce HTTP requests: The more you add HTTP requests to your website, the more you increase load time. You must remove unnecessary requests by auditing JavaScript libraries, third-party requests, and CSS styles for redundancy.
- Choose reliable web hosting: A reliable provider will host your site on high-performance servers, which are optimized for uptime, speed, security, and scale.
4. Confusing Navigation
One of the more frustrating user experience design mistakes is confusing or messy navigation. Most e-commerce sites use complicated menus with too many drop-downs, categories, and subcategories. This makes it difficult for users to find what they are looking for without wasting time. As a site owner, you can fix this issue by utilizing an easy-to-use and understand menu section that helps visitors find what they want effortlessly with just a few clicks.
5. Hidden Contact Information
Website visitors must easily find contact information such as phone numbers, emails, and company addresses. Users who can’t find this information get frustrated and their trust in your brand is minimized. You can build trust with web visitors by displaying the company contact details so users can see them easily.
6. Lack of Feedback After Completing an Action
Website visitors expect to get precise feedback after taking specific actions. A simple confirmation message or a loading icon can prevent users from confusion while they browse. Please keep it simple by telling your users what happens when interacting with your site.
7. Unclickable Objects and Buttons
If users click buttons or links on your site and nothing happens, they get annoyed and leave immediately. Instead of misleading users into thinking they can interact with your site, remove non-clickable links and buttons.
Endnote
Ultimately, the difference between your website’s failure and success will depend on the users’ experience. Successful brands constantly improve user experience, optimize key touchpoints, and fix ux mistakes. The impact of these improvements might seem small, but when done over an extended period, the results are top-level conversion rates.