Now anyone can design their own blog in a jiffy, thanks to this magical CMS, which also makes it easier for you even when you don’t have the slightest idea about SEO, coding, etc.
We could say that WordPress is a great solution for those who want to have a website but are not computer nerds.
Having a basic website and one that meets all your objectives is a long way.
How to know if a WordPress design is good?
In this section, we will touch on the points that make a WordPress website good. It is important to know what makes a good website before you Design and create a WordPress Website. A good website is something that fulfills your goal without compromising on the speed and user experience
# 1 Conversions
Let’s start with the concept of conversions. What do you mean by conversion? Let me explain: if a user enters the website and fulfills the goal for which the website was created, it means that the user is converted.
Your goals can be collecting your email so you can send updates to your subscribers. I recommend using a best free smtp relay service to send free emails so that it doesn’t cost a dime.
Your conversion can be pitching your subscribers to buy a product in case of an e-commerce website, requesting a quote for the services that you offer, etc. Or you can also automate emails with the free email autoresponders.
The conversion can vary for each one of you.
So how to check if your website is any good? Simple! If your WordPress website generates a high conversion rate, then you know that your design is good and it is working.
# 2 The user experience
We all know that conversions don’t go the way you want. To give you an idea, a conversion rate of 5% is usually considered a success, although obviously, it all depends on the type of business. In Saas a conversion rate of 2.5% is good.
Suppose now you have a content downloading website for a few months, you are publishing content and promoting it, but not getting any conversions. A possibility can be that your user experience is not good.
Google has long insisted that you do everything with the user in mind and not their spiders. Make your website easy for your users.
Your web design in WordPress is one of the main points responsible for your users’ experience. This concept is so important that there are specialized web design companies that are dedicated to this relatively new concept, also known as UX.
When you choose a WordPress theme, make sure that it does not hinder the user’s transit through your website. One way to do it is by browsing through the theme of your choice. Another way is to run the template through Google’s mobile optimization test.
Another way can be that you install a plugin like Sumo that records sessions for you and generates heat maps. It’s something that Hotjar also does, one of the best applications to analyze the behavior of your users when they enter your website.
Take a sample of people browsing, see how they behave, and make the pertinent decisions: make this button bigger to make it look better, decrease the size of the menu, eliminating the sidebar … The information collected by these tools is gold.
They have a paid version, but also a free trial. In Hotjar, for example, you can sign up and for two weeks you will have unlimited access to everything the tool offers.
If you want extra information about what Google considers to be unusable, you can also use Google Search Console, in its Search Traffic / Mobile Usability section.
# 3 Web positioning
A WordPress design should also think about SEO and be, as they say, SEO-friendly.
This means that internally it would be convenient to respect things like the hierarchy of the headers, the page loading speed, the hreflang tags when they are multi-language sites… And again it is essential that it should be responsive.
Your website must be responsive (adaptable to other devices) because Google has already declared actively and passively that sites not adapted to mobile phones are going to be penalized. All this started a couple of years ago and google has made Mobile-first indexing a priority.
The fact that it is SEO-friendly does not assure you of a good SEO on-page, but it does ensure that you are not wrong. To optimize the SEO of your site well, you will have to use plugins again. In WordPress, you have a few available, of which the best known are Rankmath SEO and SEO by Yoast. It is also important to use SEO-friendly themes like Multifox.
We include SEO as a function because conversions are the last step, but these are hardly going to happen if your site does not appear in Google.
For that, having a good server and a fast-loading landing page, that makes your website load fast is also very important.
You may prefer to refer traffic from Facebook Ads or from Google Ads but in the end you will not stop investing money and over time it can become quite an annoying expense, especially if you realize that having done the SEO at the beginning, your website would now be positioned for “free”, that is, accessible to users from all over the world from Google.
Use your design to differentiate yourself from the competition
The downside of having a website accessible to everyone is that someone is going to look like you.
Why would you want to be different from others?
Well, it occurs to me that no matter how great a value proposition you have, if you have a new brand, it will cost you a lot to get conversions.
It is important that when someone sees your post, before reading it, they should recognize your brand.
It is also important that when someone comes to your website from a link, it recognizes it instantly. If you leave a mark with your design, you will achieve it comparatively easily. There are times that the difference between a client staying with a professional or moving to another, is as minimal as some slight changes in the design.
The role of web design in branding
When we start a business, be it personal or professional, it is important to give our brand a personality, which is known as branding.
Branding, in turn, is made up of two elements: visual and verbal identity.
The verbal is the tone, the message, the way of expressing yourself, the channel, the register that you use… And for that, nothing is better than copywriting.
In this article, we are focusing more on visual identity, which is made up of web design and graphic design.
Web design is the foundation on which all graphic design deployment rests. The structure of the page, the distribution of the elements, the size… All this is part of the branding and is something that is defined when designing a website.
Fortunately, WordPress is capable of being customized in many ways.
- There are also many visual editor plugins that you can load into your theme such as Elementor or Thrive, and Content Builder, among others. Last but not least, there exist pre-built themes that are tailored to a specific niche and do not require extensive design from the user.
- If you have a designed theme, you can use CSS to edit sizes, colors, spaces, indentations, jumps, etc. at will.
- If you have a basic theme in which you need to start designing: my favorite is DIVI because its visual editor is very simple and intuitive, but there are many more themes such as Generate Press, or Astra, etc. There are also many visual editor plugins that you can load into your theme such as Spectra, Elementor or Thrive Content Builder, among others.
As WordPress users, we are so spoiled with the best page builders every created. Literally, no other page builder that I have used outside of WordPress comes close to what we have available to use – says Harry Johns White, Marketing Specialist at NBAblast
Kubio is a WordPress website builder that is based on Gutenber and helps you build custom websites without you having to know how to code. With over 170+ Ready-made sections you can edit your WordPress site in minutes and you can also create awesome web pages that will capture your users attention.
If you are a great designer but not a programmer, you can either go for Divi or Astra. If you are not good at designing or programming, go to the first one. You can find themes on portals such as Elegant Themes, Template Monster, CPO Themes or Theme Forest, among others.
Tips to make your WordPress design a success
Let’s finish the article with these basic tips so that if you are starting in the world of entrepreneurship, you can set up a website without things that could hinder its functions:
Since time immemorial, the footer tends to be overloaded. It is good because H4 and H5 links are added and SEO is enhanced, but when it comes to conversions it is not something especially suitable, since it misleads users a lot.
Leave the footer with the basics: legal notices links to social networks, the logo … and a little more.
The sidebar is usually located in blog posts. Depending on the type of blog and its purpose, its use could be justified, but if you are looking for conversions, there are other methods and better places to get it.
The sidebar on many occasions is put to fill the gap since we are afraid that the design is too simple. In WordPress it is very easy to edit, so we tend to add things like the latest comments, the links to the latest posts, promotions, subscriptions to our newsletter, etc.
Be careful: if we want them to reach the end of the post, as a general rule, you will have to remove the sidebar. It is too distracting, and its use is only justified when its content really adds value to the reading.
#Don’t use too many colors
Surely when you enter a multi-coloured page sometimes you want to run away. It seems that there is chaos everywhere. Zero consistency. Just pick three or four colors and go for it. Everyone likes Simplicity.
#Use a structural block system
If you are not a great design expert, I recommend that when you choose a professional landing page template or design you do it with blocks.
When viewing the website on smaller devices such as tablets and mobiles, it is very easy to assemble it and there are usually no errors.
There are times when we make complicated designs and when we get it to be perfect for your desktop, we see that the responsive design is not the ideal one and we have to redo it. Try to avoid it by using blocks and voila.
Let’s start designing in WordPress!
It’s a fascinating world, I’m not going to fool you. If you want to start in the world of web design, go to WordPress.org to fiddle or to start with your professional website or with an inclination to make money online.