Key WordPress Web Design Principles To Stick To

While designing a website using WordPress is simple enough, there are some key things to keep in mind if you want your website to ascribe to industry best practices and stand up to world-class standards of excellence.

These basic WordPress web design principles are essential to ensure a positive experience for those visiting your website, which will ultimately reflect positively on your brand, leading to increased conversion rates and improved existing customer retention.

Accessible Layout

The way a website is laid out can impact not only its aesthetic appeal but also its accessibility. Generally speaking, symmetry means that it will look good on different devices, while ample use of negative space can make the site feel less cluttered and overwhelming for visitors.

It is also important to embrace contrasting colours to highlight key elements ‒ particularly things like calls to action. Supporting this is the appropriate choice of typography, which can speak volumes about your brand and either support or undermine the user experience. Easy-to-read fonts are almost always preferred.

Simple Menus

One of the quickest ways to undermine your website design is to have complicated and difficult-to-navigate menus. To enhance the user experience, menus should be as simple as possible, with as few items as possible to reduce clutter and complexity.

Users want to be able to navigate your website quickly, which means that everything they might want to find on your site should be easily discovered via your simple menus that group items together in logical ways. Importantly, this means making sure that your menu items are adequately descriptive so that users know what they can expect to find under each section.

Search Bars

Search bars have become a must-have on most websites ‒ unless your website is literally a single page. Allowing users the option to circumvent menu-surfing to find what they are looking for ‒ particularly if your website is large and filled with content ‒ can significantly enhance the user experience.

It is important that the search bar stands out so that users do not get frustrated looking for it. The key is to make your website as easy to use as possible by reducing the amount of work that users have to put in.

Optimise For Speed

Last but certainly not least, your WordPress website should be optimised for speed. This means reducing the size of the website’s assets without sacrificing visual fidelity. If the website takes too long to load ‒ more than two seconds ‒ your bounce rates will go up dramatically. If your website takes too long to load, you need to go back and find ways to optimise it further.

At Spin Design, we offer expert WordPress web design for our clients, delivering websites that are world-class. Contact us now for a quote!