When your website is the only touch-point between you and your customer, the user experience can make or break the situation.
It is imperative, therefore, that a good-looking and more intuitive website leaves a lasting impression and thus helps you increase your user base.
WordPress today, is the biggest website creating and managing platform, and it offers a vast amount of plugins to customize your website however you want. But in the clutter of these popular plugins, we would like to divert your attention towards some of the highly useful plugins that will not only make your website memorable but will also build the trust of the user towards your brand.
10 WordPress Plugins to Enhance Your User Experience
Here are the ten WordPress plugins that enhance the user experience by leaps and bounds:
1. Magic Embeds
Magic Embeds is a plugin that helps you embed any content from your Facebook newsfeed to your website only by copying the URL into the editor, by using shortcodes or the embed box. Some of its key features are:
- Embed profiles, videos, photos, posts, and more from Facebook onto your WordPress website.
- Replace WordPress comments with Facebook comments on certain post types.
- Can use shortcode to invoke Facebook’s features such as like and share.
- Can utilize the plugin’s Custom Embeds or use Social Plugins, created by Facebook developers.
The above features allow you to connect your website to Facebook, one of the most widely used social media platforms. Some of the notable benefits of using this plugin are:
- Creates a wholesome user experience by allowing users to utilize Facebook’s and the website’s features simultaneously.
- Bridges the gap between the website and Facebook, making social media marketing easier.
- Allows users to comment and share using their Facebook logins, so sharing content becomes easier and more efficient.
- The addition of Facebook posts and features liven up the website and provide a familiar setting for users.
2. Content Upgrade
You can also improve the user experience with a plugin like Content Upgrade. It helps you add respective links in your post that instigate the user to download content/guides/e-books in return for their email address. So, now you have email IDs of prospective customers, and you know what kind of product would interest them. Some of its key features are:
- Shows download buttons on posts and pages, allowing users to download the content via a link sent to their email address.
- Allows website admins to collect customer emails and separate them based on interest.
- Using MailGet account, staff can send emails to different lists and customize them accordingly.
These features make collecting leads easy as users willingly provide their email address to download the content. For businesses, this plugin can have various benefits:
- Create lists of potential leads and separate them by interests, thus making it easier to initiate a conversation and close the deal.
- Users willingly provide their contact information in return for good content, and thus, trust is built.
- The pro version allows admins to add unlimited content upgrades throughout the website and entice users.
3. ProProfs Live Chat
Losing customers is easy, especially with growing competition and the need to get instant proactive support.
So, in case you’d like to avoid losing such customers, then add live chat to WordPress website. And, one plugin that provides you the complete support suite is ProProfs Chat.
ProProfs Live Chat solves this problem by allowing support operators to become more proactive, resolve customer queries immediately, and ultimately keep your customers delighted. Key features are inclusive of:
- Visitor monitoring to help support operators to see what products or services a customer views on the site
- Chat greetings to enable operators to send proactive messages that lead customers down the sales funnel
- Canned responses to reduce response time and avoid any typos during an ongoing chat
- Multiple chat support to help the team manage the queue
- Chat routing to help visitors and customer reach the right department and receive a timely response for their problems
- 50+ Integration options to help organizations provide seamless help to customers via complete support suite
- 100+ settings options to customize the support experience
ProProfs Chat supports a wide array of other features that can boost not only support staff but also sales and HR personnel. The tool is among the best when it comes to WordPress live chat plugin, and users are bound to see a host of benefits.
- Allows for proactive interaction between staff and users, making it easier to answer questions or lead customers down the sales funnel.
- Support and sales staff can monitor real-time customer info and activity, and they can use it to their advantage to generate and close more leads.
- Since the tool can anticipate customer response, staff can prepare and quickly answer, thus reducing chat dropouts.
- Staff can also block visitors from untrusted sources for security reasons using the tool.
- The ability to handle multiple chats at once and transfer chats between departments increases staff productivity.
4. W3 Total Cache
The W3 Total Cache plugin prevents repeated downloading of the redundant data of your website on the customer’s gadget. It significantly reduces the loading time of your pages and provides a smoother and more improved user experience. Some key features are:
- The only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress
- Integration of a transparent Content Delivery Network (CDN) management system for faster loading times
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
- Extension framework for customization or extensibility e.g., New Relic, Cloudflare, WPML and more
The plugin vastly cuts down on users’ frustrations with a slow website and improves SEO and user experience significantly. Some benefits are:
- The vast improvement in overall site performance, which consequently boosts search engine result page rankings.
- Pages load and can be interacted with more quickly, leading users to visit more pages and spend more time on your site.
- Improve server performance to sustain high traffic for long periods.
- Helps to save on bandwidth via Minify and HTTP compression.
5. GA Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an extensively preferred tool for online business owners and marketers to segment customer data and derives valuable insights for your website. To make this tool more correlative to your website, GA Google Analytics incorporates the tool on your WordPress dashboard.
- Is fast and lightweight but is very competent
- Includes tracking code on all WordPress web pages
- Easy to customize the tracking code
- Provides different tracking options like universal analytics, global site tag, and Legacy.
- Supports features such as display advertising, enhanced link attribution, and force SSL.
It helps you in measuring the real-time traffic, amount of time spent by the user, and much more substantial information. You can then optimize your website or specific pages with the relevant insights. Benefits of using this plugin are:
- Helps users understand their customers better and deliver better products and improve marketing strategies.
- Gives access to unique insights which only Google can provide.
- The tool is very reliable for getting valuable insights into your site
- The tool is designed for smooth operation by users
- Allows users to share reports, thus improving collaboration easily
6. Yoast SEO
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin helps you create content specific and unique to the keyword at hand. It enables you to create focused content around the selected keyword, so your page, in turn, ranks higher during SEO. Some key features are:
- Optimize for the relevant keyword in the free version, while the pro version allows optimization for multiple keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, and all word forms of those.
- Analyze the readability of the copy you wrote and calculate the Flesch Reading Ease score.
- Avoid confusing Google with duplicate content by setting canonical URLs.
- Make sure that Google, Pinterest, and other platforms all know exactly what your page is about, by adding schema.org data the right way.
- Keeps an eye out and warns admins of outdated pages.
Yoast SEO is the most used WordPress SEO plugin as it allows users to create quality content and get high search result rankings. Using this tool provides users with the following benefits:
- Create better content that is structured around the relevant keyword (s).
- Allows users to determine which pages will be shown on Google and which will not.
- Allows for integration with Facebook OpenGraph so you can link SEO and social media.
- The plug-in is overall very helpful and customizable, allowing users to capitalize their wide range of features.
7. Broken Link Checker
Broken links are the universal problem of every website owner. The damage done by broken links is substantial. Your website’s SEO rankings also get affected. Most of all, many users are lost, and it’s difficult to retrieve them after a wasted experience. The Broken Link Checker plugin by offering the following features:
- Automatically checks your entire website for broken links in your pages, posts, custom forms, etc. at intervals specified by you.
- The plugin notifies you about broken links through mail or a dashboard notification.
- Also checks to see if redirected links are proper
- Allows for settings which prevent search engine bots from following broken links
While broken links might not seem like a big deal, frustrated viewers and potential customers are turned off by them. Any WordPress site can benefit significantly from this plugin in the following ways:
- Get a detailed report on all the links, along with their working status. This allows admins to repair broken links and update outdated ones.
- Beneficial when cleaning out a WordPress site
- Users have an easier time on the site as all the links are working, making it more likely that they spend more time on the site
- Allows admins to ensure that all redirected links are working
8. What Would Seth Godin Do
Taking its name from the legendary modern marketer, Seth Godin, this plugin does its work according to Godin’s ideology. Seth Godin widely emphasized on creating a personalized digital experience for users. This plugin enables you to have two clear messages: one for a new user and the other for a returning user. You can customize the message as per the suitable tone on this plugin itself.
- The plugin allows admins to have a welcome post for new users atop every blog post. The message for new users automatically disappears after five visits.
- A message for returning users can also be displayed across blog posts.
- The plugin uses cookies to determine when to use which post
- Users can customize the messages, location, and lifespan
Providing users with much-needed context to every blog post is a great way to build a connection with them. Some of the plugin’s benefits are:
- Build an instant connect with users
- Have a message with a link to the desired RSS feed atop every blog post
- Custom messages for returning users also helps with making them comfortable
- Using these messages, admins can encourage permanent subscription
9. WPtouch
Is your site mobile-friendly? Are you considering specializing it for mobile? If not, you’ll be shocked to know that 79% of the phone users will visit another site if they are not happy with your mobile interface. WPtouch is a simple yet powerful plugin that customizes and optimizes your website for mobile devices. Some of its key features are:
- The plugin provides a simple and elegant theme for your mobile site, which passes the Google Mobile Test
- Improves site loading speed
- You can choose to change or keep the fonts, colors, sections, and menus for the best experience.
- Setting necessary features for your mobile site is available in the free version. Whereas, the pro version can help you in having a dedicated admin panel and many more extravagant themes.
A mobile-friendly site is a must for any business these days, and WPtouch is recommended for this purpose as it is much more useful for site owners:
- Improves site interface and provides a smooth user experience
- A mobile-friendly website boosts SEO rankings and search result rankings
- Admins do not need to know any code to provide users with the best mobile version of their site
- Pro version allows the inclusion of several extensions that add advertising options, caching and more to further improve the user interface
10. Elementor Page Builder
Individual users, who are not well-versed in coding, find it challenging to implement well-designed layouts on their web pages. Elementor Page Builder is an apt plugin for content creators who are seeking better design solutions than the templates provided by WordPress. Some of its key features are:
- You can manage and alter the page layout through simple controls and create responsive web columns
- The site will adapt to mobile devices perfectly without any glitches in the layout
- Easy to use interface that makes customization a breeze for admins, by simply dragging and dropping
- Works with standard WordPress widgets
- Also works with any WordPress theme
Page Builder is perfect for inexperienced site owners, who still want to present the best version of their site to visitors. The plugin has a lot of benefits:
- Admins do not need to learn any code to work with this plugin
- Allows for complete flexibility and supports live editing, so adjusting your page is quick and easy
- Is a completely free tool, so it is accessible even for those just starting out
- Any errors can be rectified easily through a history browser, that allows users to roll back changes.
Final Thoughts
As you probably know by now, these WordPress plugins are the ones, using which, you can truly take your website to the next level. Different WordPress plugins are used for various functionalities. And it is through these or a combination of these that a website can genuinely become customer-centric. So, stop with the waiting and get started with the website of your dreams, now.