Blog

A website is the best medium to communicate with users from all over the world. For this reason, it is essential for it to be designed in such a way that attracts and engages users on the site. This is when a website can reach its users effectively.
The website that attracts more customers, implements the concept of interaction with people; this is in terms of attractive offers, polls and contests.

Adding polls to your website has a lot of advantages. Not only you will have the ability to interact with your users, but also you will also have the chance to get to know them better. Polls and survey are attractive in terms of increasing user engagement on your website and for this reason, you can offer better content that meets their interests.

However having a successful website depends on establishing trust with your visitors; adding social proof and testimonials to your website will help you increase your credibility with your visitors, which in turn encourage both endorsement and acceptance.

In this article I will show you how to optimize your WordPress website these most useful tools and WordPress plugins which will help you to:

• Create an attractive sign-up optin to collect emails of valuable customers that are interested in your products.
• Create polls on your website to increase social engagement.
• Adding testimonials to increase credibility.
• Enhance your web design to motivate your visitors to stay longer on your website.
• Optimize your website with social media tools
• And much more…

1. CREATE AN ATTRACTIVE SIGN UP OPT-IN:

All marketers try to think of ways to quickly grow and expand the list of their newsletters and start a conversation with new subscribers. A well-placed and attractive sign-up optin form, matching the page content and displayed to the recipient at the right time, can be an effective call to action that will start adding addresses to your mailing list immediately.

Feature Box is an easy to use and customization WordPress plugin that allows you to add striking opt-in forms to the top of your blog.

Plugmatter is super-easy to set up and it gives you several templates to work with. It integrates with all the major email service providers like Aweber, MailChimp, and GetResponse. Once you activate the plugin it bring in the feature box options in the WordPress admin dashboard offering you the possibility to create the template for your site. You also have split testing option.

If you want to do A/B split testing, or to add custom feature boxes on more than just the home page of your site then you have to try it.

Here’s an example of it live:

Some of the highlighted features:

• A number of easily customizable themes
• Intuitive interface to edit themes
• Ability to assign different Feature Boxes to different pages or other post types
• Ability to serve returning visitors with different Feature Boxes or turn them off altogether
• Option to upload your own custom designs with HTML/CSS

2. ADD SOCIAL POLLS TO YOUR WEBSITE:

With the OpinionStage plugin you will have the ability to add social polls to your WordPress site. It enhances user engagement while driving additional traffic to and from social networks.

This plugin will let you discover people’s opinions, improve engagement on your site, drive traffic from social networks and finally research results using social and demographic filters.

3. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA BUTTONS:

Your choice of social media plugins for your WordPress website will depend on which social platforms you actively use, what kind of content you offer on your site, and the best look and placement of social tools that complements your website design. From simple to richly featured.

Shareaholic is a versatile free WordPress plugin that offers social media sharing buttons and related content blocks. You can customize your sharing buttons individually placing them above and below your content on posts, pages, your home page, and categories (i.e. eight unique areas). You also have the possibility to choose from four themes and from seven headlines.

Shareaholic is also another related posts content plugin. You can increases the pageviews, engagement and time on site by highlighting relevant content that may not otherwise be discovered from across your site.

Some of the highlighted features:

• Share counters for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc
• Official support for Google’s URL shortener
• Localized in 15+ languages
• Related Content support for post keywords specified in “All in One SEO Pack”, “WordPress SEO by Yoast”, etc plugins
• and Much More.

4. ADD RELATED POSTS TO YOUR WEBSITE:

Yuzo is a plugin with a minimalist design and features that allow you to insert related posts directly into new articles, with 50+ different design options and option structures.

The plugin enables you to display related posts as a widget. There are so many style options available that Yuzo will cater even to the most complex designs out there.

Some of the highlighted features:

• The fastest: Yuzo is considered one of the faster and less load on the PC
• Minimalist: It has a minimalist design with interesting effects.
• Counter: Check the amounts of visits to your post have by Yuzo.
• Thumbnail size.
• Height & Width image.
• Background Color.

5. ADD TESTIMONIALS TO YOUR WEBSITE:

With some WordPress plugins like testimonials widget, you will be able to add testimonials that it will help to establish trust and social proof with your visitors: this way you will increase credibility which in turn encourages endorsement.

Testimonials Widget is one of the most popular testimonial plugins, and when you look at all the included features, it’s easy to see why.

Each testimonial that includes quote, reviews, text, image or video will be randomly shown on your website. The plugin also supports reviews schema for rich snippets.

A few other great features that set this plugin apart:

• Choose from carousel, fade, or slide transitions
• Filter by category, tag, or post ID
• Responsive slideshows

6. TRANSLATE YOUR WEBSITE TO MANY LANGUAGES:

 

This plugin uses Google Translate automatic service to translate your web page with Google power. With over 58 available languages your site will be available to more than 98% of internet users.

Some of the highlighted features are mouse over effect, analytics, the option to translate the page on the fly and finally the option to open translated page in a new window.

7. ORGANIZE EVENTS ON YOUR WEBSITE:

Events Manager for WordPress is an excellent event registration plugin.

It has almost all of the features you’ll need to organize events via your WordPress site.
Features include:

• Recurring events
• Calendars
• Google map integration
• Booking management and more

8. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE WITH PINTEREST PINBOARD:

Pinterest Pinboard Widget displays all your latest pins in a widget. It provides an easy way to integrate Pinterest content into your WordPress site. From a blog growth strategy perspective, it’s really useful to convince readers to follow you on Pinterest using a sneak peek at your pin boards.

9. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE WITH A RECENT POST SLIDER:

Responsive Recent WordPress Post Slider is a WordPress posts content slider plugin with touch for mobile devices and responsive. WordPress Recent Post Slider displays your recent posts using 4 designs with a beautiful slider.

A multipurpose responsive WordPress posts slider plugin powered with four built-in design templates, lots of easy customizable options. Displaying unlimited number of WordPress posts slider in a single page or post with different sets of options like category, limit and navigation type.

Some of the highlighted features:

Total Posts Per Slider
• Posts Per Slide
• Slider Speed
• Image Size
• Category to display

10. ADD A BEAUTIFUL POPULAR WIDGET TO YOUR WEBSITE:

Popular widget is an awesome plugin which is overlooked by many bloggers. It offers some solid sorting options to the users. This plugin comes with a handy list of features to customize the way you want to display your popular posts.

You can choose the factors like most commented, recent comments, tags or recent posts. As a result, these factors make it an awesome yet totally free plugin to display posts on widgets.

11. POINT OUT INTERESTING CONTENT WITH ZEMANTA :

Including related posts is a great way to keep visitors on your site by pointing out more interesting content to them. Zemanta, a plugin that provides related posts not only from your own site but also from other sites. This means that if you’re a part of the Zemanta service then other blogs will also link to yours. Zemanta claims that this can boost external traffic referrals.

12. IMPROVE YOUR RANKINGS WITH GOOGLE MAPS:

This plugin will help you create a custom Google Map with high quality markers containing descriptions, images, links and locations. You can also add your customized Google Map to your WordPress posts and pages quickly and easily with the supplied shortcode.

Some of the highlighted features:

• Google Maps Streetview supported.
• WP Google Maps uses the latest Google Maps API (V3)
• Create as many map markers as you need by simply typing in the address.
• Edit your markers with the click of a button.
• Define your own width, height and zoom level for your Google Map.

13. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE WITH A VIDEO GALLERY:

Video Gallery plugin was designed to show your videos from Youtube and Vimeo in a fantastic way.

Some of the highlighted features are: Video Gallery Youtube, Vimeo Posts, Gallery URL, Lightbox Options of video gallery plugin that allows users to change colors, font size, effects, make customizations and a lot of other  changes with 7 good-looking views.

14. ADD AN AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY BOX IN YOUR WEBSITE:

Starbox lets you add an author biography to each post and page. You can place your bio on the top or bottom of your page.

If you’re doing tech stuff on your site or want to know what Starbox’s inner workings are all about – here are some features:

• Displaying Rich Snippets on Google Search Results Page
• Links to the social media profiles of your authors: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc…
• Works on blog posts, on pages, or both!

15. CREATE AN ATTRACTIVE OPTIN BOX:

If you want to drive repeat visitors and customers to your website or blog this plugin is what you are searching for. Having an email list makes you less and less dependent on external sources of traffic, and gives you more options to interact with your blog’s audience.

WP Subscribe is a good plugin you need, to get the perfect subscription forms for your website. The primary aim of this plugin is to bring more and more email subscribers to your blog or website.

Conclusion:

An effective website provides visitors with relevant content, easy access to information, and a clear path to engagement. In fact, it is not a good sign if people look at several pages on your website and fail to take any meaningful action.

Let’s take a salesperson in the brick and mortar store that comes to you and asks that how he or she can help you, as an example .The store clerk actually wants to help you, so that you don’t walk away without buying the item you’re looking for.

Remember, that even though a visitor that comes to your site and he or she might not be ready to make a purchase now, they might want to buy your products or services in the future. So what should you do?

You should encourage your visitors to take action; tell your readers to request information, subscribe, register, set up an appointment or check out another page on your website. You can also offer some sort of digital information product that has value for free, in exchange for their e-mail address.

Author Bio:
Chawki Trabelsi is a Web Developer and Designer writes for webhostingplanguide.com which provides updated information about web hosting companies in the USA. He loves writing about graphic design, web design, tutorials, jQuery, technologies and everything about latest innovations. Follow him on Twitter.