When you’re creating a website, there are a million ways to customize it. You consider how best to convey your value or communicate what makes your brand different from the competition. You weigh what visual and written content is most effective.
The last piece of the puzzle is how your visitors experience your website, known as the user experience (UX). There are many elements that make up a good user experience design, from the layout and appearance of your pages, to how your website is structured logically.
It often takes a lot of experimentation and iteration to perfect your website’s UX design.
Thankfully, what makes each of those elements of user experience good is still a bit more straightforward than capturing just the right essence of your business.
Plus, there are hundreds of incredibly simple plugins out there that can help beginners optimize their WordPress UX in just a few minutes, often for free.
Let’s take a look at some of the top plugins we recommend:
User Experience Plugin WordPress
Final Thoughts: 9 WordPress UX Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Performance
User Experience Plugin WordPress
- Yoast
- WPTouch
- W3 Total Cache
- LiveChat
- Everest Forms
- Smush Pro
- UXWizz
- Search WP
- Broken Link Checker
These nine are some of the best WordPress UX plugins in the market. Let’s look at them in more detail.
1. Yoast
There’s a long list of technical SEO best practices that can become tedious to keep track of and implement.
The Yoast WordPress plugin makes that a lot simpler by analyzing each piece of content you upload to your website in real-time and providing suggestions for word usage and readability. On the technical side, Yoast provides site-wide auditing functionality.
Features:
- Real-time SEO content optimization suggestions
- Set a target keyword
- Keyword density
- Content length
- Meta description and slug optimization
- Internal linking tools
- Redirect manager
- Automatically adds structured data to improve rankings
- Social media share previews
Best WordPress UX plugin for: SEO Optimization.
Price: Free with limited features. The paid version starts at $89/year.
2. WPTouch
Mobile browsers account for about half of all web traffic, so it’s important to make sure your web design is just as attractive and usable on a phone as it is on a laptop.
WPTouch Pro is an advanced WP plugin that gives your website a beautiful mobile theme right out of the box with little tweaking, unlike other plugins with more involved manual options.
WPTouch Pro’s themes help your website perform faster, improving user experience and increasing your mobile search rankings.
Features:
- Eight mobile themes to choose from
- Custom mobile device targeting
- Set mobile-specific landing pages, headers, and more
- Keep the same URL as your desktop website
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Responsive mobile themes.
Price: Plans start at $79/year.
3. W3 Total Cache
Users give your website just a few seconds of hang-time before they may get frustrated. For Google, experts recommend keeping your page load time under 2 seconds for rankings.
W3 Total Cache speeds up your website by caching frequently visited pages and static media so it loads faster for your visitors. It also uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which offloads some strain to your servers, further speeding up your website’s performance.
Features:
- Caching of various pages and objects
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Performance insights through cache statistics
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
- Lazy Load to prioritize only on-screen images
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Increasing website speed.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plan costs $99/year.
4. LiveChat
If you sell products through your WordPress online store, the customer experience doesn’t stop at static webpages and description boxes. Interacting with your potential customers through chat to answer their questions, guide their choices and get feedback is an invaluable feature.
Thanks to a plugin like LiveChat, you don’t need specialized CSS code to make that possible. The plugin gives the ability to chat with customers, create support tickets, send automated responses to common questions and analyze chat data.
Features:
- Automatic visitor messages
- Send pre-written responses to common questions
- Send files
- Collect support tickets
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Live chat support.
Price: Plans start at $16/user/month when billed annually.
5. Everest Forms
Whether you’re creating an e-commerce website or a personal blog, there’s a good chance you’ll want your users to be able to input information in a form field.
With Everest Forms, you can quickly build email capture forms, surveys, payment collection forms — all in a satisfying end user experience.
Features:
- Drag and drop builder
- Form templates
- Dashboard for form entries
- Customize forms with designer add-on
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Creating interactive forms.
Price: Plans start at $69/year.
6. Smush Pro
When your website takes too long to load, the images can often be the culprit since they are much larger than text or other elements. However, always using small-file images can mean sacrificing quality for speed.
Smush Pro automatically compresses all the images so that they load faster and improve your website’s user interface. Smush does this without losing image quality by only removing unused data.
Features:
- Image compression
- Automatic image resizing
- Lazy Load to prioritize only on-screen images
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Best WordPress UX plugin for: SEO Optimization
Price: Plans start at $60/year.
7. UXWizz
The user experience of your website is not complete without research on how your target audience actually uses your website. You may expect them to interact with your homepage and blogs a certain way, but there’s no way to know unless you collect data.
The recently renamed UXWizz gives you insights into where your users spend their time on your website by tracking mouse movements and clicks. The insight allows you to see which UX design elements like buttons and fields are grabbing their attention and which essential features are getting lost in the mix.
The plugin also enables A/B testing, so you can try out the most effective words, UI designs, fonts, typography and more.
Features:
- Mouse tracking data with heatmaps
- Visitor demographic data
- Charts for visitor data
- Track events for each session
- Create A/B tests
Best WordPress UX plugin for: User data collection.
Price: One-time payment of $99.
8. Search WP
Often, the fastest way to find a specific page on a website is to search for it. Give your users the ability to quickly navigate to where they’re going with a search bar.
Although WordPress does come with a default search bar, it is not ideal and often misses important content on your website.
Search WP is a simple and powerful plugin that adds tons of features to WordPress’s default search bar, including customizable search result definitions, document searching and search data.
Features:
- PDF and text document indexing
- Automatic WordPress theme integration
- Search custom fields, product descriptions, and more
- Search statistics
- Customizable algorithm
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Search fields.
Price: Plans start at $199/year.
9. Broken Link Checker
When a link on your page is broken, it can be a frustrating experience for your users.
Broken links are a common occurrence as there are many causes. When a page’s address changes, the page gets removed or a redirect breaks, it can lead to a poorer user experience.
Avoid the tedious task of checking links by hand with an automatic Broken Link Checker. This useful plugin indexes each link on your website and methodically checks each one. Then, you can update or remove broken links from the dashboard without having to edit each page individually.
Features:
- Checks internal and external links
- Finds missing images
- Link editing directly in the plugin
Best WordPress UX plugin for: Identifying broken links.
Price: Free.
Final Thoughts: 9 WordPress UX Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Performance
No matter your website’s goal, it’s important to consider your user’s needs and interests. That includes how they will interact with your website and how easy it is for them to accomplish tasks on your website.
Thanks to these plugins that optimize speed, usability and customer service, you can improve your WordPress website’s user experience, gain more traffic, rank higher in search engine results and get more conversions.
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