How to Improve Blog User Experience

If you’re blogging for profit or if you’re planning to convert a hobby blog to a profitable WordPress blog sometime in the future, then you have to think of your readers at all times. You have to put yourself in your readers’ shoes and try to think about what the blog user experience would be like to use and read your blog.

Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash

Your Blog is Your Business

If you’re blogging for profit then understand that your blog is your business. It doesn’t matter what your blog niche is but once you have decided to make money from your blog, then you have to treat your blog as a business.

And all businesses have customers in order to make a profit. And in the content industry such as blogs, vlogs, etc, our readers and audience are our customers.

 

How to Improve Blog User Experience

In order to keep our customers happy, (e.g. our readers), then we have to make a conscious effort in improving our readers’ experience every time they visit our blogs.

Here are some simple ways to improve your blog user experience:

Write Helpful Content

We all have varying niches and we all have varying target markets. Once you have identified your target niche and target market, you have to understand what ‘useful content’ means to your audience.

If your aim is to entertain then you should produce entertaining content that will keep your audience from coming back. If your aim is to inform then ou you should write highly informative content to avoid disappointing your readers.

At the end of the day, the users of our blog visit our blogs for our content. As content producers or blog writers, our main goal should be to put the best content out there.

Make it Easy for Your Readers to Read Your Blog

Aside from your writing the best possible content for your target niche, you should also aim to make it easy for your readers to read your blog. What do I mean by this?

There are simple things that you can do on WordPress that could help you do this. Some of these are (but are not limited to):

Use Sub-headers

Using Sub-headers on your post will help make your content organize and easily digestible to any reader. This will also not just help your readers have an easy experience in reading your blog but it will also help improve your overall SEO.

Avoid Huge Text Blocks

This is one of my earliest mistakes when I was starting out. I use to write long paragraphs and to be honest, it was really a pain reading huge blocks of text.

I went back to all of my old posts and corrected this by adding images, using sub-headers, using quotes, tons of spacing, etc.

It would also help if you keep your paragraphs short and concise.

Choose an Easy to the Eye Color Palette

You can customize the colors in your blog regardless of the theme that you use by tweaking your HTML. All themes can be edited.

Choose colors that go well together and you can just Google color palettes online to see suggested color palettes for your blog.

Put a Date on Your Posts

This is very helpful especially if your blog is about information. This is one way of helping your readers know if the blog article that they’re reading is up to date.

Some people remove the dates on their posts but I don’t agree with this. Maybe it’s ok if you’re writing evergreen content only but if you’re writing about informational content, then you should put the date on your blog posts.

For example, with my blog, Thrifty Hustler, I write about personal finance articles including credit cards. We do know that credit card policies and promotions change from time to time.

If I don’t put a date on those posts, then a reader might accidentally think that it’s recent and might accidentally feel ‘misled’ by the post just because the post didn’t have a date on it.

Minimize Errors

English is considered our second language, but even though we use it at work and school, sometimes, I feel that I still struggle using it sometimes.

Luckily, there are now many free downloadable tools that can help you minimize and eliminate spelling and grammatical errors before you even click on the ‘Publish’ button. One of those free tools is called ‘Grammarly‘.

Install it on your browser and it will be a great help in producing error-free articles.

Photo by Tyler Franta on Unsplash

Speed Up Your Load Time

Speed is one of the metrics that Google considers when ranking a website. Why?

It’s because Page Load Speed affects user experience greatly.

Imagine Googling for a piece of information that you need and after clicking on the link, it takes a lot of time for it to load.

The ideal speed is 2 seconds which is very easy to hit when you’re fairly new. But once you accumulate a lot of articles, graphics, and images on your blog, then it will start to slow down.

Fortunately, there are many ways to speed up a website but the first thing to keep in mind is to only put something that has value on your blog.

If it doesn’t add value to you and your readers, then think twice before adding that plugin or widget, etc.

Interlink Your Articles

Interlinking your articles not only help improve your On-Page SEO but also helps your readers find relevant articles that might be helpful to them as well.

For example, I wrote about ‘Are Designer Bags Good Investments? – An Online Seller Point of View‘ and I linked my other articles that are relevant to this topic such as:

• How to Buy Authentic Designer Goods Really Cheap
• The Cost of Owning a Luxury Designer Bag
• How to Clean Mold from Leather Bags and Shoes
• How Do You Get Rid of Bag Odor

All of these articles provide value to the reader who is making online research before purchasing a designer bag.

Use a Responsive Template

People use a variety of gadgets to browse online. Some use desktops, laptops and some use phones and tablets. When choosing a WordPress Theme or Template, always go for a responsive one.

This will ensure that your website will not appear broken when browsed in various screen sizes.

Avoid Overwhelming Your Readers with Too Many Options

Sometimes, it’s too tempting to put whatever stuff that we could install on our WordPress blog.

However, before you add any link, button, pop-up, etc,  always ask yourself:

• Will adding this thing adds value to my readers/users?
• Is it overwhelming or confusing for a reader?
• If it’s really important to add, can you tweak the color, size, layout in order to make it less overwhelming?

Sometimes, when a person is bombarded by too many options, they just end up not doing anything at all. This is why most sales pages, are really simple and focus on just closing the sale all throughout the article.

Think of the Overall Flow

Try putting yourself in your reader’s shoes and navigate your website. And make an honest and objective observation about your experience and of course, make the needed changes as soon as possible.

Here are some of the questions that you need to ask yourself when doing this:

• Is it easy to find what your reader might be looking for?
• Are there any unnecessary widgets that your blog can do without?
• Is the overall blog design helpful or detrimental to the overall user experience?

This is one of the reasons why I always read other people’s blogs regardless of the niche. I’m always on the lookout for how to improve user experience by learning the best practices of the successful bloggers out there.

Are There Too Many Distracting Ads?

Balancing profitability and an awesome user experience is really difficult. Personally, I’m also guilty of this.

In order to minimize the display ads that will appear on my blog, I set my Ezoic setting to medium. This will minimize my earning but it will also minimize the ads that will be served on my blog.

Hopefully, I can find a better option in the future to serve fewer ads while still earning a decent income.

Get Feedback

You can also improve your blog’s user experience by getting feedback from your friends, family, readers, etc. Some bloggers even do online surveys in order to gather feedback and to find out their Areas of Improvements.

Personally, I ask close friends of mine to check my blog from time to time and to provide feedback on three things:

• Overall Design
• Content Usability
• Page Load Speed

 

Final Thoughts

The content industry is an ever-changing industry and one of the most competitive businesses out there. Technology changes so fast and user demand also change alongside it.

The only thing to keep up with this fast-paced environment and to succeed in blogging is to keep on improving.

Do you have anything to add? Feel free to leave a comment down below for your tips, recommendations, and suggestions.