Irrespective of the time and money you pour into making an awesome WordPress website, it is of no use unless it appeals to your users. If your WordPress site is facing a high bounce rate, with visitors leaving your site within a few seconds, you are missing something. Either the readers are not finding your content appealing, or your website design does not impress them. Also, if you have adopted a complex, “not easy to follow” navigation pattern, your users may find it a waste of time and lose interest.
The success of your business goals of running a WordPress website are mostly dependent on how good a level of engagement you can garner and for how long you can maintain it. The soul of driving more visitors to your business is an engaging website. Your choice of using WordPress opens up many doors of opportunity to make your site alluring for your customers and become their favorite. Remember, loyal customers, are the bread and butter for the survival and growth of your brand.
Happy customers, who stick with you, correlate to your brand and contribute to your business goals substantially. Here are some tips on improving customer retention of your WordPress website.
Install the Right WordPress Plugins
You can easily add more features and extend the functionality of your website by installing the right WordPress plugins. You can easily install them from the admin section without getting into any involved programming. Here are some to consider:
- WP Subscribe helps you pull email subscribers to your site. With your email list, you don’t have to depend on external sources to generate traffic. You also get more options for interacting with your audience to enhance your business.
- Shareaholic provides social media sharing widgets and associated content blocks. Users would love connecting with you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and this will give your business a massive online reach.
- Testimonials Widget adds the testimonials feature to your site website. This encourages endorsement and increases credibility while establishing social proof and trust within your users.
- Yuzo offers many features to enhance your site’s functionality. It provided more than 50 design choices. Navigation is made easy by displaying related posts as a widget in the new articles. It is also one of the fastest WordPress plugins.
- Starbox makes it easy for you to include author biography with every post and page. This gives readers a good impression and adds to the genuineness of the content.
- Video Gallery allows you to embed multimedia content from channels like YouTube and Vimeo on your home page to impress your users with your products and services.
- WP Google Maps helps you create Google Maps to show your location clearly, enhanced with links, descriptions, and images.
Organize Your Content Well
- Make sure your content addresses these concerns:
- Must be impressive, so users love spending their time
- Is relevant and serves the reader’s requirements, along with the delightful presentation
- The design must look professional and decent
- The layout should be consistent across all pages
- Long posts must be broken into smaller sections to enhance readability and maximize user’s stay on content.
Use Keywords Effectively
No matter how well your content has been written, but if it does not figure prominently in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), your website is not getting much traffic. Make effective use of keywords you expect users to look for when searching for the matter you serve.
In case you are struggling to find the relevant keywords, use tools like Keyword Tool Planner, UberSuggest, Moz, and WordTracker to uncover associated keywords other websites in the same niche carry.
Provide Interlinking to Provide Better Suggestions
Insert links to associated posts on your WordPress website to inform the users of suggested related topics. It greatly helps your first-time visitors as they may not be familiar with the navigation style of your website – they can easily move to another undiscovered page on your site by following these links.
There are multiple ways of doing it – appropriate anchor text embedded inside the content, hyperlinks, and sidebars on the right or bottom of your posts.
Recapture Visitors with Google Ad Words Remarketing
Google Ad Words remarketing ads are banner ads that your previous visitors see since they have been tagged with a cookie. These ads will show on tons of other websites these potentials visits, so your brand sticks to the top of their minds for a long time after they’ve visited you.
Encourage Guest Blogging
A Guest post authored by professionals is smart of creating superior content. This kind of specialized writing offers your users a different perspective on a given subject, which kindles interesting, out of the box thinking and discussions.
Another advantage of guest blogging is getting access to a vast number of bloggers who come with their loyal followers – they can help spread the word about your WordPress website all over the internet.
Ease Social Media Sharing
The more your readers see your name in various places on the internet, the more they trust you. Social media provides you a wide range of communication platforms for better promotion of your business.
Make it easy for your visitors to share your content, such as videos, posts, images, presentations, etc. to increase your traffic and boost your brand. This greatly enhances user engagement with your business, as well.
Pay Attention to Mobile Traffic
You cut any unnecessary elements, so your website runs flawlessly. Eliminate superfluous graphics, ads, and sidebars – these may slow site loading. Also, please pay attention to CTAs (Call to actions), opt-in forms, and contact forms to make sure they work correctly on mobile devices.
Reduce Your Website’s Weight
Google places a lot of importance on its users, and hence page loading speed is a critical factor to decide your ranking. People visiting your website do not have the patience to wait for your pages to load. Irrespective of how well structured and superior your content is, user engagement is bound to take a hit if your site is slow. Keep your WordPress site light, so it loads quickly.
Check Analytics Data Frequently
Keep checking your WordPress website’s analytics data frequently to find any pitfalls which may be restricting your visitors from spending more time on your pages. This will give you detailed information on what your pages may be lacking and also on the ones that command good traffic. Keep a close eye on changes in analytics while you work on the improvement areas – this will help you achieve outstanding results quickly.
Add security features
Though we are mentioning this towards the bottom, consider security as the top thing for your WordPress website. Just one cyber-attack and you can potentially lose the reputation of your brand, along with tons of loyal customers.
Your visitors must feel secure when they spend time on your website and share information online with your business. The easiest way to do it is to add a RapidSSL Certificate on your WordPress site. Not only will it secure the data being exchanged between your website and the user’s browser by encrypting the communication channel, but it also provides visual cues to the users which assure them of their safety on your site. Another added advantage of using SSL/HTTPS is that it boosts your SEO ranking on search engines, which means getting more free organic traffic.
It takes a lot of effort to get new customers. Please do not waste time and energy you’ve spent on customer acquisition by losing them. Follow the tips outlined in this article to improve customer retention on your WordPress site. Repeat customers are vital to the success of your business – Keep them happy and turn them into your brand ambassadors.