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Ayan Sarkar
August 17, 2016

Table of content

Introduction:

Blogs are the latest craze on the internet. One can do so many things with this new medium of communication. Blogs can be of almost anything that a person wants- a journal, social view point, political piece, scrapbook of information, promotional content or literally anything that one can probably think of writing and sharing with others. According to a survey, there are more than 152 million blogs doing around the internet, which suggests that someone, somewhere in the world is creating a new blog every half a second.

Being a blogger, it becomes obligatory for you to put on more thoughts into what you want to say and how to say it. Playing with words is the essence of this profession.

  • Writing and publishing superior-quality contents
  • Indulging in social media promotion and building links through email outreach
  • Responding to feedbacks and comments that you receive from the readers

These three points sums the basic activities which you need to actively indulge in, in order to develop a loyal base of audience for your blogs.

But is it enough? Is your writing everything that lures your readers? Not Really! Although the title of your blog may attract the readers but it is the layout of the entire content what determines whether or not they will stay on the page.

A great user-experience is ideal for keeping your readers hooked to the blog.

It requires you to take your time in understanding the behavior of your user by digging into the analytics of your blog. It helps you to seamlessly craft an interactive design, great information architecture, appealing visual design and smooth usability- feature for your readers- which are the essential part of giving your readers’ great user-experience.

It is worth spending your time in improving the user-experience of your content website as according to a survey:

  • 38% of people stop using the website or reading the content if they find the layout to be uninviting.
  • 66% of people prefer to read a blog which is beautifully designed and is visually appealing.
  • Researchers have found that blog with visuals increases people’s willingness to read the content by 80%.

WordPress-Best Platform For Customized Blogs

WordPress serve as the best platform for generating customized blogs to bring in large number of visitors. If you inquest the background of the best blogs in the world, the one thing that you will find common in them is that they all started their journey with a generic WordPress premise. They gradually evolved as the best blogs by adopting customized designs and making brilliant use of the WordPress plug-ins.

A pro-blogger is well-equipped with all the knick-knacks that promise to fix most, if not all usability issue of their blogs in WordPress. If you desire to build a strong and loyal reader’s base with attractive layout of the content then you must know about the 13 WordPress plug-ins which ensures improving the usability of your blog.

1. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

In the beginning of the write-up, it was suggested that you check your website’s analytics to understand the visitor’s behavior. You must be wondering what help will the analytics be to you. It enables you to derive an insight about your website. The number of visitors, their demographics, their behavior, their navigation-everything becomes crystal clear to you through the analytics.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most powerful free tool available that gives you a detailed insight about the website. But logging in to the dashboard separately will be time consuming and hectic. Thus, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is the right plug-in which you can make the best use of.

You can improve your site’s visibility by tracking how and when the visitors visit your site, which post or page they liked the most and other such details.

Track visit, page views, bounce rates, average visit duration everything can be tracked down for boosting site’s performance. It renders advanced tracking and performance details of every single post and page of the site apart from giving handy charts about the performance of different traffic channels.

2. WP Smush.it

It has been regarded as the best image compression and optimization Plug-in for WordPress without losing the quality of the images. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x thus enabling the photographers need not worry about displaying crisp and eye-pleasing images.

As the name suggests, WP Smush.it, smushes the massive concealed information from your images and also contains smush option to process up to or more than 50 images simultaneously. It also gives you the liberty to set up automatic smush so that every image is resized and optimized as per the specifications at the time of upload.

It converts PNG to glossy JPEG and also preserves EXIF data for giving you brilliant assistance and support.

3. WP Live Chat Support

This is a fully-functional live-chat support plug-in that allows you to chat with your visitors or readers for free. It has been observed that the website which contains the live chat options is more likely to experience return customers than the website that doesn’t have the support. It is an ideal option for brilliant customer service and ensures the customers that they are being cared for and their queries or issues are not left unheard of.

Ideal for young entrepreneurs and small businesses, this plug-in give them the liberty to get rid of the third party connections and forget about the monthly payments. Understand the visitors of your website have become extremely easily with this efficient plug-in which promises to increase the conversion rates of your website by allowing you to communicate directly with the visitors.

It gives liberty to the users to drag the live chat anywhere around the page and consists of easy-to-use interface for both the admin and the visitors. The features like- color, animation, or sound- can be customized according to your own preferences and requirements. The free version consists of all range of necessary features that enhances overall experience of the users.

4. Contact Form 7

KoMarketing in their 2015 report found that 44% of their survey respondents left the vendor’s website as no contact information was available in it.

Contact Information is one of the key and essential components which establishes trust and credibility of the website or the blog among the visitors and readers.

With the Contact Form 7 plug-in of WordPress, you can create or manage multiple contact forms easily. It is one of the most popular free plug-ins of WordPress with over 1million active installations. There is no need for extra coding with this plug-in, as it allows easy customization of the form and the mail contents. It supports Akismet filtering for spam, CAPTCHA and Ajax- powered submitting.

Contact details are one of the most essential information that people want to see on a website or a blog page. So don’t miss out on this, or else there are high chances that you might be losing huge traffic.

5.WordPress SEO

Everybody would have heard a thing or two about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You know that it is important for your website to be SEO-friendly. WordPress is extremely well-coded and is filled with brilliant features because of which it is considered as the best platform for SEO. The WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in is the most comprehensive range of SEO solutions which are available for WordPress.

It covers the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization and brings large and large number of traffic and visitor to the website. User-experience and SEO are closely attached with each other. With the help of this plug-in that will help you to write content with focused keyword in their mind. This ensures that you are likely to writer more specific and ideal content that is unique in nature and is extremely focused.

Better SEO ranking enhances the overall visibility and share-ability of the content. Easy-to-use and top-notch quality plug-in ensures that visibility of the content is high on the search engine.

6. WPtouch Mobile Plugin

It is estimated that by 2017 the number of mobile phone users throughout the world will reach 4.77 billion. Over 9.9 to 10 hours are spent on an average by the mobile users for internet surfing and searching. People want everything on their mobile now and so if your site is not optimized for the small screen, there are high chances for it being discarded by the potential visitors and readers.

Understanding that optimizing your website is your necessity, this WPtouch Mobile Plug-in is developed to make your WordPress mobile-friendly. In case your website is not designed to be responsive or you are not ready to invest in redesigning the website, then this plug-in will come in handy for you.

This plug-in is on the top list of Google’s suggestion for WordPress mobile solutions which even allows you to get the liberty of converting your website into a mobile app that enables a wonderful mobile experience to the consumers or the visitors. It does not require you to type any code for customizing the fonts, color and other features for making the website mobile-friendly.

7. What Would Seth Godin Do

Consumers expect a wonderful experience and they would love it when companies or website remember them. In the modern days, companies have spoilt the consumers by giving them compelling online experience.

They ensure offering relevant and timely messages for giving a personalized experience to the customers. The web world is evolving drastically. The websites that couldn’t realize it yet, treats their potential customers as well as returning customers alike, without addressing them individually. As a result of which the customers or the visitors do not feel attached or attracted to it.

Seth Godin, an ubiquitous internet marketing guru advocates the use of What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in, which is based on his thought of reducing the work at first to nothing. It distinguishes between new and returning visitors to the website and displays customized welcome messages to the visitors through the brilliant use of cookies.

The location, placement and lifespan of the customized message can be selected as per your choice and the message can be configured by navigating to WWSGD options in settings. Such personalized messages impress the visitors and welcomes them to your loyal customers or readers base.

8. W3 Total Cache

This is the only WordPress Performance Optimization framework which is designed to improve the user experience and speed of the page. This is the age of speed and life is always on a fast-track now. Thus, people are left with no extra time and patience to wait even for few extra seconds for your website to load completely. If it doesn’t open within 3 to 4 seconds they will close the site and switch to your rivals.

KISSmetrics have found that even 1-second decrease in the loading time results in the loss of 7% conversions for an e-commerce website.

W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most comprehensive performance optimization plug-in for a WordPress website. It allows the website to load faster. It allows you to easily set up page and browser caching that compresses pages for smooth and quick loading. It ensures improving the user-experience of the website by increasing the performance of the server and reducing the download time.

This plug-in ensures integration with the Content Delivery Networks which furthers leads in the decrease of the page loading time. Although this is a comprehensive plug-in, it is critical to configure and might take up to 30 minutes of time while setting up for the first time. But, once it is set up it reduces the site loading time significantly.

9. P3 Profiler

Plugin Performance Profiler is an essential plug-in that creates a profile of the plug-ins that you use in your WordPress website and measures their impact on the loading time of the site.

In general people prefer to use more and more number of plug-ins in their WordPress website as it adds various features and functionalities to the website, but the other side of the coin is that it also affects the loading time of the website and in worst cases might also be the reason for the crash of the site.

According to a research report, the beginners on WordPress use 53 plug-in in order to make sure they deliver quality user-experience to their visitors. This can impact on the performance of the website and might increase its loading time.

It’s always advisable that you must be aware of the effect of each plug-in that you have installed on your website and hence the use of P3 Profiler becomes apt and important.

It allows you to identify resource- intensive plug-ins so that you can give a thought over the continuation of their further usage. It is extremely friendly for you to identify the troublesome plug-ins and narrow down anything that serves the reason of slow performance of your website.

You can store the history of the performance of the website with the current performance that clearly describes how you performed over the period.

10. CrazyEgg Heatmap Tracking

CrazyEgg Heatmap Tracking is one of the most excellent heatmap tools that are available in the market. This is a free and easy-to-use plug-in on WordPress website which makes it convenient for you to gather useful data about the behavior of your audience, popular pages and a lot more.

It works by showing the area with more activity as hotter than the area with lesser activities. It enables you to understand the interaction of the visitors with your website and its layout and develop their experience by improving the site’s friendliness.

Cursor, scroll and confetti heatmaps are some of the powerful features which are offered by this plug-in for making your easier and convenient. It enables you to analyze how your visitors behave differently and get a solution to bring traffic to the page or posts which are showing less activity from user’s end.

11. Subscribe To Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plug-in of WordPress that enables your readers to sign-up for receiving the e-mail notifications for the subsequent entries. Building community in and around your blog is a great idea for promotion. Invite your readers to get notification via e-mail when someone adds a comment to the blog.

It is the best option available for you to keep your readers attach with the conversation, this tailor-made approach for that allows your readers to stay in the virtual discussion, that doesn’t costs you anything. This is an important aspect of user-experience that keeps your readers to your blog for a subsequently long period of time.

This plug-in is an improved version of follow-up designed for the readers so that they do not miss out on the important discussion that is revolving around the blog. There is significantly large number of people sitting in various virtual platforms who ideally loves to comment on the blogs that interests them positively or negatively, and try to make a well-to-do discussion platform through which they can connect with people from all around the globe.

This plug-in is a life-saver for them all. However, it not only benefits the readers but is certainly extremely important for you too as it ensures that people spent quite a lot of time, than usual, on your blog.

12. Broken Link Checker

Owing a big blog? Or planning to do so? Then you might have faced this issue or should be prepared for facing it. A broken link is created when a webpage crosses its average lifespan of 100 days and the website gives a 404 error instead of showing the page.

Will you like it if you get redirected to such a page when you are on all into reading the topic and are ready to garner extra information about it? Your question will obviously be a big NO. Your visitors are exactly like you. They get disappointed when they are redirected to a broken external link.

The Broken Link Checker plug-in analyzes and monitors your website, posts, comments and other content for the broken links. It detects the links that are no longer working and missing images. With its highly configurable features, it manually updates each post and notifies you either through dashboard or via email.

13. Better Click To Tweet

This plug-in function efficiently by easily creating tweetable contents for the readers, and thus enhances the interaction process. This is helpful tool which allows you to tweet the short-coded content and then bounce back to the article.

It ensures enhancing your reach and lowering down the bounce rate apart from keeping your tweets ready to post. The Better Click to Tweet plug-in includes the feature of correct character count, dealing with non-roman characters easily, and translation-ready and makes use of official short-coded API for ensuring security.

These readily available boxes or pre-filled messages make your article appealing and entices the readers to tweet the post without much headache. It is extremely customizable and is equipped with the feature that allows the SEO-conscious bloggers or individuals to make the links nofollow.

Conclusion

Establishing a unique and stellar user-experience for your readers and visitors ensure that your blog or your site have a continuous flow of traffic. It also guarantees you of a loyal base of customers. WordPress is considered as one of the most powerful and engaging CMS with excellent features and mind-blowing SEO functionalities that ensure quality visitors for the website.

Although there are several other features and brilliant plug-ins of WordPress that are available in the market but this plug-in you can make your content-related or business website easily shareable and compatible with the social networking platforms. With the help of these features, you can automatically optimize your website on a frequent basis so that the entire site can run smoothly while attracting a large number of loyal visitors for you.

Thus, you can improve the experience of your visitors brilliantly through the use of these 13 brilliant plug-in of this CMS.

Ayan Sarkar

Ayan Sarkar is one of the youngest entrepreneurs of India. Possessing the talent of creative designing and development, Ayan is also interested in innovative technologies and believes in compiling them together to build unique digital solutions. He has worked as a consultant for various companies and has proved to be a value-added asset for each of them. With years of experience in web development, product managing and building domains for customers, he currently holds the position of the CTO in Webskitters Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.