How to Make a Website Easier to Use (With a Little Help From WordPress)
Have you ever visited a website and had trouble navigating or finding what you were looking for?
Maybe you were on a dating site and suddenly, all the profiles started running together or a news website and all the articles began to look the same.
Whatever the case may be, you’re bound to run into difficulties while browsing websites you’ve never been to or heard of, especially when they’re running on unfamiliar servers.
That’s why we’ve collected these 17 simple yet effective tips to make any website easier to use.
Create Mobile-First Versions
The first step to making your website easier to use is creating mobile-first versions of your site.
Designing for smaller screens comes with its perks. You can make text bigger and images larger without affecting the overall layout. Additionally, reducing the number of elements on a page makes it simpler for the user to scan or navigate.
You don’t need to cut off important parts of your website in order to fit perfectly on a mobile screen. Instead, you can create a smaller, more simplified version of your site that’s perfect for mobile users.
Use Common Sense
Even though it’s good practice to ensure all your web content is accessible to everyone, you should still avoid content that’s overly sensitive or inappropriate.
Keep in mind that not everyone has a clean mind or good morals so if you want your content to be appealing to the widest audience, avoid using words like ‘murder’, ‘rape’, or ‘sexually explicit content’.
Use Structural CSS
Each new website you build will have different content, but you can use the same basic layout for the navigation bar, header, and footer.
To make your website look more cohesive, you can add a style sheet that contains design templates for the above-listed elements. Then, you can update your style sheets as needed for different content.
CSS is the preferred method of adding design styles to your website. With CSS, you can change the color, aspect ratio, and even the layout of your site elements without needing to re-build the whole thing. Plus, if you work with a content management system like WordPress, you can easily make these changes without having to log in to your site’s dashboard. Just make sure you keep track of what changes you’ve made so you don’t end up with multiple versions of your site.
Be Careful With GIFs
GIFs are perfect for adding a quick splash of humor or excitement to your site. But, when used excessively, they can completely deroute a website’s design.
If you’re afraid that your visitors will be overloaded with too much content, you can create a special landing page with just the important content that they need to see. Then, you can use JavaScript to provide a short video that summarizes the key points of the page.
Make Sure Your Fonts Are Easy To Read
Even though this tip doesn’t directly pertain to website design, it’s still vital to ensure that your fonts are easy to read.
In today’s world, text comes in all different sizes, shapes, and colors. To ensure that your text is easy to read on any device, create a simple style sheet that applies to all your site’s fonts and follow the font-specific guidelines for each one.
Make Sure Your Language Is Easy To Follow
When translating a website, you must keep in mind that the language you use will affect your visitors. If you’re not sure how to say something in another language, you can use a translation tool like TRUiC.
If you’re worried that your language may not be easy to understand by your visitors, you can create a glossary of frequently used words or you can show them how to say the content in question in English.
If you use British English for your content, you’ll probably want to use British spellings for the words you use. If you’re not sure whether a particular word is British or American, look it up in a bilingual dictionary.
Minimalism Is Key
To make your website easier to use, you should keep it as simple as possible. Limit the amount of content, styles, and images on your site to those that are absolutely necessary. Using too many of these elements can make a website look more like a busy mess than an organized, functional resource.
Be Careful With Javascript
Javascript is perfect for adding interactive elements to your website. With just a few lines of code, you can make a simple form submit to a different page. You can even make a drop-down menu change the content on a different page.
However, too much Javascript can overload a visitor’s browser. To avoid this, you can create a special landing page with just the necessary content that will render the Javascript. Then, you can use JavaScript to populate the remaining parts of the page.
Create Custom CSS Classes
With CSS, you can make text bigger and images larger without needing to edit the source code of each one. If you have a unique font that you can’t upload to Google Fonts, you can create a custom CSS class that applies to all your site’s text.
If you use WordPress, you can create a style for your posts that applies to all the content in that particular section. Doing this allows you to change the look of all your content without needing to edit the main theme’s code. It’s also a good idea to create a separate style for the main heading of a post. This will ensure that your posts have a different look from your homepage and other pages on your site.
Use Platform Integrations
If you use WordPress as the basis of your website, you can easily set up integrations with popular platforms and tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Instagram lets you integrate a business’ account with your website. When a user clicks on an Instagram icon, they’re taken to an Instagram page that displays all the content that account owner Mark Zuckerburg personally curated.
This is a perfect example of how a business can use Instagram to improve its SEO and boost its customers’ experience on the platform. An Instagram account integrated with a website shows content from the account’s most recent posts at the top of a blog post. This feature makes it much easier for users to discover content when they’re searching on social media.
Make Sure Your Site’s URL Is Easy To Remember
If you’ve ever tried to type in a website’s URL only to discover that you’ve used a wrong one, you know how aggravating it can be. If you use HTTPS, adding ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ to the end of the URL can help make it easier to remember.
If you have a long URL that contains many words but is still difficult to recall, you can create a shortcut on your phone’s home screen that will take you to your site. If you want, you can even set up notifications so you can visit the site whenever you like.
Test The Tips You Learned
As you learn new techniques and become more experienced, you’ll discover that there are a lot of things you can do to make your website easier to use. As you start implementing these changes, keep testing to see how well they work and if you can find a way to improve even more.
With these 17 tips, you’ll be able to make your website more accessible to everyone and improve their experience while browsing the internet.