User Experience (UX) is one of the most decisive factors that determine your website’s success through increasing conversion rates. A website with a rich and pleasant UX can draw anyone’s attention and the visitors just love to navigate around your website. They can easily find what they want from your website and as a result, your website’s success becomes imminent. When it comes to enhancing the UX of your WordPress website, a UX audit comes into the picture.

Here we are going to discuss 6 important steps for an effective UX audit of your WordPress site. But before that, let’s go through a brief on user experience and its importance for ensuring your website’s success.

What is UX and Why it is important for your WordPress Website?

Simply put, UX deals with all the aspects that make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to go through your website. Key aspects like site performance, speed, navigation, readability, and the like can make or mar the UX of your WordPress site. In other words, if you want to lead your website toward success, you need to focus on these aspects and improving UX.

You need to keep in mind that every visitor has a reason to come to your website. It can be anything ranging from reading blogs to purchasing products. If they fail to accomplish their goals while visiting your website, chances are high that they will not return as they will look to fulfill their requirements in other websites.

In brief, UX involves the combination of ease of use and high readability to attract users and keep them engaged. A rich UX can drive more traffic toward your site and eventually encourages conversions. You need to focus on UX to increase the conversion rate and decrease the bounce rate.

Now, let’s jump in to perform a UX audit for your website.

Six Steps to Perform UX Audit of Your WordPress Website

Broadly speaking, a UX audit is about collecting information about the visitor’s activities on your website. It shows the problem areas and pinpoints what you can do to improve the user’s experience. A thorough understanding of user experience can help you make it better over the period. Here are key steps to collect proper information on your website’s user experience.

Step 1. Put yourself in the user’s shoes

Everyone wants to come up with a user-friendly website, but it is a herculean task and only some website owners can accomplish it. The reason is simple- it is difficult to observe your website from the user’s perspective. As a website creator or owner, you know its ins and outs, but your website’s visitors are yet to know them. As a result, they may come across some roadblocks while visiting and navigating through your website. You may not even realize such obstacles exist.

Therefore, the first and foremost step to conduct the right UX audit is to observe your site from the user’s side. The best possible UX can be provided by removing your bias from every stage of your website. But, this is tricky because even if you pretend to visit your website for the first time, you seldom forget the website’s insights and navigation approach. Here, you can keep the focus on your website’s objective and its usefulness to accomplish the user’s tasks.

You can utilize user personas to meet this objective. This tool can point out the missing features from the user’s perspective. You can find the right direction with the help of this tool and improve your website’s performance.

Step 2. Ask other people to get different opinions related to UX

This is one of the best things you can do to audit the UX of your WordPress website. The outsider’s opinions always matter when it comes to understanding how your website performs and whether it is capable of meeting the user’s expectations. You can get unbiased and reliable opinions about the usability of your website by asking other people.

You can ask your friends, relatives, colleagues, or any other people to test your website to get their valuable feedback. It is fairly possible that they can identify the issues, which you cannot find as an owner. What’s more, if your budget permits, it is great to hire UX professionals from a reputed web development company to get expert advice. They can easily find out the areas that require immediate attention to improve the UX significantly.

Some templates are also available for conducting a survey regarding UX. You can get your visitors’ inputs through such surveys. It is better to remember that visitors always remain the best source to get suggestions for improving your website’s performance.

Useful Read: Which UI Design Trends Will Remain In Focus In 2021

Step 3. Collect and assess metrics to identify pain points

The UX related data can be a useful factor as well. While auditing your website, you can rely on user metrics to find the pain points. For example, your website’s bounce rate indicates how much the users like your website on their first visit. If the visitors are going through certain pages and leave them immediately on a frequent basis, then you should work on improving navigational or content-related issues. A WordPress plugin MonsterInsights can help you collect information about user behavior.

You can also consider user metrics as popular keywords and behavior flow. You can certainly add the most popular content to the main menu and include links to favorite posts to help users find what they want quickly. Similarly, behavior flows to show how users move through the website. You can find navigational issues and the dead ends of your website by studying behavioral flows.

Step 4. Make sure that your website is responsive

As per a survey, 52% of respondents said that a poor UX on mobile devices can decrease the chances of their involvement with the website’s company. We live in a mobile-driven world and if your website fails to attract smartphone users than it cannot succeed. It means that having a responsive website is the need of the hour. Improved UX and a higher conversion rate depending on the responsiveness of your WordPress website. It is better to ensure your website’s performance on mobile devices.

Also, you should pay attention to the page load time (PLT) when it comes to mobile devices. Apart from other important features, it is beneficial to know how much time your website takes to load and how the users can go through your site on mobile devices.

The desktop layout of your website may not work properly for mobile devices. It is because the desktop layout is used to display well in landscape orientation, whereas the mobile devices have a narrow real estate with more focus on a vertical design. A lot of scrolling or zoom-ins are also considered as issues when it comes to mobile devices. Therefore, you need to work on resolving them.

Step 5. Test your website’s performance and navigation

You have put a lot of effort into addressing every web development aspect to ensure the seamless performance of your website. You have spent time writing or curating content, installing updates, and the like. However, all these activities are considered as back-end and your website’s visitors come to see the front-end of your site. Therefore, you also need to see your website from the front end to get an idea about how the users will consider your site. You should use the website as a visitor. In other words, you need to keep an eye on any navigational or UX-related problems.

Let’s take an example of an eCommerce website. If you run an eCommerce website, just become a visitor for a while and go through the purchasing process for a particular product. If you find it hard to get the item you have in mind while navigating through your website or if there are no filters, then you need to fix these issues on a priority basis. Google PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool to find the load speed of your page. It shows your website’s speed and you can work on improving it with the help of this tool’s findings.

Finally, it’s time to collect all the information about a UX audit and improve the performance of your website.

Step 6. Gather findings and improve your website

After examining your WordPress website from left, right, and center, asking people about it and collecting the user’s behavior-related data, you’re all set to improve your website. You can go through the list of points that need your attention after a proper UX audit. It will give you a clear direction about making changes. But then, every time it is not as easy as you think. If you have difficulties in resolving the issues, you can consider the following points.

• Go through how people read on the web article and select a font and format text accordingly
• Check whether the menu is accessible from every web page
• Check the page titles and make sure that they represent the page’s theme
• Create landing pages and compelling CTA (Call to Action) buttons for popular web pages
• You can also use related posts for providing additional information
• Optimize your images and content for SEO
• Enable caching and CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Use only a mobile-friendly theme for your website

Furthermore, if you are unable to make all the changes or improvements at once, just focus on the aspects with a significant impact initially. You can improve overall site performance and mobile-friendliness on a priority basis. Putting buttons and improving content for SEO come second and third respectively in the list.

Also Read: Top 20 Trends To Influence Web Development Domain In 2021

Concluding Lines

UX is something that you cannot avoid if you want to make your website successful. Whether you own a blog or a business website, the user experience always plays a crucial role in conveying your message and obtaining business goals. It is fair to mention that if you improve the visitor’s ability to accomplish their tasks or goals through your website, you can reduce the bounce rate and increase conversion rate. There, a UX audit becomes crucial to find and resolve issues related to user experience on your WordPress website.

Here are step-by-step points to perform a UX audit effectively for your business website.

• Put yourself in the user’s shoes and observe your website from their side
• Ask other people to get different opinions related to UX
• Collect and assess metrics to identify pain points
• Make sure that your website is responsive
• Test your website’s performance and navigation
• Gather findings and improve your website accordingly

If you want to audit your WordPress website for UX, just contact us at info@solwininfotech.com. Our experienced UI/UX designers will help you improve the UX of your site.