Your website is an essential part of the overall marketing strategy, no matter what kind of business you are running. This is why it’s critical that the site can perform specific functions. One of the capabilities that a website needs to have is to engage the visitors and make them interact with the brand or the site, leading to improved conversion rates.
If your site has no engagement, it’s dead. What’s great about WordPress websites is that they have an advantage when it comes to improving the engagement on your site. This is because WordPress has a lot of useful plugins and add-ons that can help you improve your site with ease.
Here is what you need to do to engage your visitors and make your website more successful.
Design for user experience
Quality user experience leads to frequent engagement. It’s impossible for a site to engage visitors in the intended way without providing them the right experience. However, it’s often unclear what that experience includes and how to build a better one.
Simply put, you need to focus on providing great content on your site, make your site usable, and use the proper design features.
A site that looks great can be navigated through easily, and has relevant, helpful content than you have nothing to worry about. This might sound easy to achieve, but it takes a lot of hard work to get to the stage where all three essential user experience aspects of your site are optimized.
Quality content
All of the content that your site offers has to be accessible to visitors and easy to find. At the same time, it needs to be as simple as possible and easy to digest while offering real value to your visitors. Bear in mind that people who read content on a website have different expectations and they don’t want to invest a lot of time in reading large chunks of information.
Simply put, if a website visitor lands on a page where there’s tons of written copy in a big piece, the chances are that the person will look for smaller chunks of information that are easier to understand and digest. In general, you should avoid writing large copies on your website pages, even if you are trying to sell products directly.
If you want to deliver in-depth knowledge and information to those that are interested, maybe it’s a good idea to start a blog on your website and refer them there if they want to read more about a particular subject.
Website speed
One of the essentials for great user experience and increased engagement is to ensure that your site runs smoothly. Modern consumers don’t have a lot of time and they will quickly lose their attention if a site keeps loading for half a minute.
They know that they can quickly look for another similar site that doesn’t force them to wait and will lose interest in an instance.
Not only do visitors want a site that loads fast but Google also ranks fast sites better. Luckily, there are many WordPress plugins that you can use to monitor the speed of your site and determine when it’s working slowly and why. On top of that, there are many plugins that can help you improve the speed of your site as well.
Make it easy to comment
When your site has the required speed, content, and navigation people will start exploring it and reading the available information. This will make them want to share their opinion, criticize, and discuss what they’ve read. You need to ensure that they can do this easily without any issues.
Allow everyone to leave comments, don’t include CAPTCHAs and don’t limit comments to those that signed up to your site.
However, it’s not only about the form of commenting. You need to provide clear navigation to your visitor. You can implement custom menus so that people can find content more easily.
Additionally, there are many WordPress plugins that allow you to improve your commenting. They also allow visitors to post comments easily while helping you respond to every comment.
Social proofing
One of the best ways to engage people and give meaning to their perspective is with social proofing. There are many ways that you can give social proof to your website visitors and make them more open to engaging with your business. The first thing you can do is include data-driven case studies that focus on services or products that you provided to your previous and current customers.
Testimonials are simple recommendations which allow customers to leave their thoughts about your business. By adding a review page, you will give customers an objective way to evaluate your products, services, and the whole business. Another way to show people social proof is to extract positive comments about your business from social media and display them on your site.
Contests attract attention
Contests can not only drive more people to your site but they can drastically increase engagement. They have a great power to spark emotions or inspire competition. Contests make visitors want to prove themselves – contests make them anticipate something and create a sense of urgency in their minds. At the same time, people will want to get their rewards for winning a contest.
If you link these contests to social media as well, you’ll be able to boost a lot of traffic and engagement on your site. If you don’t think that this is possible, look at these real-world Facebook giveaways and how they performed. Contests usually require social mentions or comments so they can be very valuable. Luckily, WordPress offers many plugins for creating social contests.
By ensuring that these things are in order, you’ll be able to boost the engagement on your WordPress site in no time. Make sure that you find the right add-ons and plugins to get the job done correctly.
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Marco Mijatovic is a blogger and one of the guys behind FirstSiteGuide. Make sure to check out his other work, including in-depth guides and posts that can help you run, start, and grow your online presence.
