Tips To Improve Your WordPress Website and Boost Conversions

If you want to run a thriving business on the internet, you should have a website that is appealing enough to grab the attention of users' within a couple of seconds. The best possible way to capture the attention is by improving the customer experience. Always remember that your website is your brand entity on the internet and to establish a strong presence of your business, you must ensure that your website is well-designed, loads faster, the navigation is smooth and the content is highly engaging.

When you choose WordPress as your website development platform, you can rest assured to deliver an unparalleled customer experience. Furthermore, WordPress is loaded with thousands of themes, plugins, and features that allow developers to create an intuitive, scalable, and fully-functional website. However, we still recommend you to inspect the functionality of your website periodically, because even a few seconds delay in the load time of your website can result in the following:

• 7% conversation loss

• 16% customer satisfaction decrease

• 11% fewer views on your pages

If you are new to the online business world, this comprehensive guide on the essentials of an impeccable custom WordPress design can help you learn a lot about improving the customer experience. Besides this, you can also go through the below-mentioned tips on improving the performance of your WordPress website.

1. Keep your WordPress website updated

Regularly posting fresh, unique and engaging content is the best way to keep your website updated. However, as far as WordPress versions are concerned, you can upgrade your website to WordPress 5.0 - the ultimate game changer. This fifth edition of WordPress was recently released on November 27, 2018. By upgrading your WordPress website to the latest version, you can steer clear of any potential vulnerabilities and malware that can impact the performance of your website.

2. Keep it Simple

You may have heard that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but, this thing doesn't hold true in the online world. If your website doesn't seem appealing to your visitors, they may leave it and won't come back again. It is important to note that what may seem appealing to you could potentially disengage your website visitors. So, it's considered wise to seek the help of an expert and hire WordPress theme developer from a reliable agency who can design such website that not only allures the visitors but also, helps them to engage with your website for long.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Boost Speed

By using a content delivery network (CDN), you can ensure that the speed of your website is at par with your competitors. Since there is no dearth of CDN service providers, you don't have enough excuses not to give it a try. A CDN allows you to deliver the static content of your website like images or CSS faster than your own web server. When you go for a CDN, your website will be distributed across various servers and your website visitors will get an instant response from the server that is nearest to them, thereby improving the speed of delivery of content. Though most of the CDNs are paid including Amazon S3, Media Temple, and Max CDN, there are some that are available for free as well including Jetpack and CloudFlare.

4. Install Only The Required Plugins

Undoubtedly, plugins are essential for improving the functionality of a website. But, you have to keep the fact in mind that too many plugins can pose a host of security issues, unnecessary crashes, and other technical issues, which can not only hamper the speed of your website but also leave a negative impact on the functionality of your website. We advise you to inspect all the plugins that you've installed on your website and deactivate the ones that are not adding any value or rendering the redundant functions.

5. Optimize Images and Widgets for Faster Loading of Your Website

Just like plugins, unnecessary widgets and images can hamper the speed of your website. As a website owner, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that the size of your webpage should be below 100 KB. The best possible way to optimize is to remove the unwanted widgets and compress the size of heavy images using the free tools or plugins available on the internet.

6. Never overlook the importance of search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is important to improve the presence of your website on the internet. Though it may seem like a piece of cake, in reality, it is not that much simple as it appears. SEO is a long-term exercise that involves technicalities like alt tags, keywords, schema, robot.txt, and many other boring tech things. If you don’t have sound knowledge of SEO, you can either use Yoast plugin or hire an experienced professional to improve your search rankings in the SERP.

Final Words