How to Use WordPress Polls to Improve UX (Plugin Recommendation Included)

Ensuring your website has a seamless user experience should be a top priority for your development team and your marketing team. Having a good user experience means more website visitors and more conversions.

But how can you ensure that your website visitors get the best experience possible? Well, by asking them directly!

And the best way to do that is with a WordPress poll or survey.

In this article, we’re going to cover:

• why you should use WordPress polls to improve UX
• where to place them on your website
• essential questions to ask
• the tools you can use to create your own WordPress poll or survey.

Ready to dig in?

 

Why Use WordPress Polls to Improve Website User Experience

Checking in with your customers and website visitors to make sure they have a good experience accessing your website is always a good idea. You never know when issues arise that your development team simply might not catch the way a regular visitor would.

To combat this, you should consider putting together a user experience poll or survey whenever you update your website or app to ensure the usability works for all of your customers.

These user experience surveys can give you insights that a developer or someone on your team who accesses your website every day might not think about.

Plus, why wouldn’t you want to make sure your audience has the most seamless visit to your website possible? Happier website visitors lead to higher conversion rates and more revenue for your business.

 

Where to Place User Experience Polls

Where you choose to place your UX polls depends entirely on what questions you want to ask and what kind of feedback you’re hoping to receive.

We’re going to dive into five different locations that are prime for placing surveys and polls on your website and what kinds of feedback you’d be hoping to receive in each different area.

 

1. Homepage

This is a great place to share your UX poll to get an overall idea of how users enjoy your website. You can have these pop up in the corner of your website or consider using your live chat plugin to create a CTA for your survey.

Additional ideas include sharing your user experience survey in an announcement bar on your website, grabbing the attention of regular website visitors, and inviting them to check out your survey.

This is a great time to ask generic questions about how users access your website and if it’s easy to understand and navigate.

You always want to be specific in your survey questions, making it as easy as possible for your respondents to leave honest feedback.

This is how the folks at Hotjar use the feedback survey on their homepage:

 

2. Landing Pages

If you’ve been struggling to see conversions on your sales and landing pages, you might want to put together a user experience survey that gauges how your audience consumes your web pages and see if you can make changes that would better cater to them.

Ask questions that will help you understand if the copy on your landing page doesn’t make sense or if the process to sign up, schedule a demo, or any other features are too complicated.

You need to remember important UX design tips so that you’re ensuring your web pages are easy to navigate and help both you and your customers.

 

3. Pages With High Exit Rates

Your website’s Google Analytics can give you some great insights when it comes to analyzing customer behavior. Take a look at landing pages with high exit rates and consider adding a WordPress poll to those pages.

You can ask questions that will help understand why users are leaving your website from the pages so often and find out if there’s more information that your audience might be looking for that they can’t find.

See if you can create a better flow on those web pages to lead visitors to other pages and eventually get them to convert or turn into a new lead.

 

4. Cancelation Pages

Another great location for adding a user experience survey to your website would be on pages where your customers cancel subscriptions or unsubscribe from services. 

Finding out why they’re leaving and if there’s anything about your website or app that they would prefer can be a great form of customer service.

 

5. Success Pages

In a similar way, you can also use UX polls to see what you’re doing right. If there are certain pages that perform over others, put together a survey to see what they enjoyed about their experience on your website.

Once you have data from these various polls, be sure to analyze your responses, so you have some action items for your website developer to improve the overall experience for future website visitors and customers.

 

Questions to Ask in a Poll for UX

Ready to start designing your new survey? Here are 20 questions that you might want to consider incorporating.

Just keep in mind that you only need to choose about 5-8, maximum, of the most important questions. You don’t want to overwhelm your survey respondents and make them exit the poll before submitting their answers.

 

1. On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your experience with the website?

Offering a scale for your survey answers is a great way to get a straightforward reply from your audience. Make sure you let them know which one means worst experience (typically 1) and which one means the best experience (typically 5 or 10, depending on how large of a scale you want to offer).

You can choose if you want to have your audience answer on a smaller or larger scale, but keep in mind that larger scales give you a much larger variety of answers. And it’s hard to know if one person’s 6 is the same as another person’s 8.

Offering a 1-4 or 1-5 scale is better because there won’t be as much variance in your answer. You’ll be looking at something like this for your responses:

• 1 = Very Dissatisfied
• 2 = Dissatisfied
• 3 = Fair or Neutral
• 4 = Satisfied
• 5 = Very Satisfied

Anything larger than that can be confusing.

 

2. Did you encounter any problems while using the website?

This is a question that can help you to understand if your audience is struggling with any parts of your website that your team may not have caught. 

For this question, you have the option of leaving it open-ended, but this could cause users who haven’t had issues to think of something to insert simply because that appears to be the only suitable response to this question. 

Instead, use radio buttons with the options Yes or No, then include a field with the caption, “If yes, explain.” This way, you’ll only catch real answers from users having website issues. 

 

3. How could we improve your experience?

As a general rule, you want to avoid open-ended questions to ensure responses are as accurate as possible. 

So with a question like this, it’s going to be a good idea to give your audience specific actions that you’re actually looking to implement on the website. 

Here are a few examples:

• Make the navigation easier to use
• Add more sign up buttons to the page
• Make it easier to contact you

In the end, you can also include options like “Nothing, my experience was perfect” or “Other (please specify)” to get additional information. 

 

4. How easy is our website to use?

This is another great question that can use a scale of 1-5. In this case, your scale would be something like this:

• 1 = Very Difficult
• 2 = Difficult
• 3 = Neutral / Neither Easy Nor Difficult
• 4 = Easy
• 5 = Very Easy

 

5. Did you like the design of the website?

This is an easy yes or no question. If you want more specific feedback, you can include a field that says something like, “If no, what could we do to improve?”

Keep in mind that the more open-ended questions you ask, the fewer respondents you’re likely to bring in. Keep your poll short and sweet to increase the number of people who are willing to complete it. 

You can also ask this when you went through a redesign.

 

6. How did the website make you feel?

This is another great option for using a scale of 1-5. In this case, try using various smiley faces as the poll response options. Bringing in unique answer options will make your survey more fun and engaging for your website visitors. 

 

7. How was the experience with the website on your smartphone?

If you want to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, create a survey that only appears to users who are accessing it via their smartphone or tablet. Use a scale for this question, or reframe it as a yes/no question by asking, “Did you have a good experience with the website on your smartphone?”

 

8. Do you think you had to click too many times to get to what you were looking for?

If you’re hoping to find out how your navigation and page canonicalization works for your audience, this is a great question to ask. 

Oftentimes, if a user has to access too many different pages to convert, they’re going to end up leaving your website instead. Asking a question like this in your UX poll is a good way to determine if this is an issue on your website or not. 

Use a simple yes/no response for this. 

 

9. Did you find this page helpful or meaningful?

You don’t want pointless pages on your website, and you definitely don’t want them to be a part of your customer journey or funnel. 

If you’re noticing a page has an extremely low conversion rate, consider asking your visitors if the page is actually helpful or provides meaningful or valuable information. 

Use a simple yes/no response for this. 

 

10. On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the clarity of the content?

This is a great question to ask on your blog’s user experience poll. You want to make sure that people are getting value out of the content you’re publishing. Otherwise, your content marketing strategy is all for naught.

 

11. Do you think this content could have been shared in a different format?

Here, we have another question that could help you determine whether people enjoy their experience on your blog. If someone thinks your blog post could instead be a video, ebook, podcast, or another content type, you want to make sure you provide.

 

12. On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your purchase experience?

Include questions like this on your success pages. If you land a new customer, you want to make sure their purchase experience was as optimal as possible. Besides, you might have room for improvement that could result in even more conversions in the future.

 

13. How could we improve your purchase experience?

This is another ideal question to ensure the checkout process is as streamlined and smooth as possible. Some customers don’t mind a bit of hassle if they’re sold on buying from your company. Others will leave the checkout page, costing you a sale.

Making sure that your business’s purchase experience is easy and uncomplicated is the key to increasing conversions and ensuring your customers don’t run to your competitors.

You can offer specifics for your customers to choose from, or you can keep this as an open field.

 

14. Do you think the website took too long to load?

Long load time is yet another reason many website visitors might hit that big red X and leave your website. In your UX survey, be sure to ask if anyone suffered long wait times when trying to navigate between different pages on your website.

This can be a simple “Yes” or “No” question in your poll.

 

15. What do you like most about the website?

Here, you can pick between offering preset options for your customers to choose from or simply leaving an open text field for custom responses.

Some options to include might be “I liked the live chat option” or “The website design is visually appealing.”

Asking a question like this is helpful for understanding the good parts of your website that you definitely don’t want to change, especially if other answers are letting you know there are some improvements you could make.

 

Tools to Create Your Own WordPress Poll

Ready to start creating your own WordPress poll or survey? You can easily do so with one of the following survey tools. Just always make sure to keep your website’s security in mind when shopping around for plugins.

If you do not know how to install a WordPress plugin, you can find out in this tutorial:

1. Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is one of the most popular WordPress plugins used to create forms, surveys, polls, and more. It’s a completely free app that you simply upload to your WordPress website in order to create forms right inside your website.

The plugin even offers a variety of form templates that make it easy to kickstart your survey.

It’s an easy-to-use plugin for basic forms and is likely one of the more popular survey tools you’ll hear about.

 

2. Typeform

Typeform is a survey tool whose main mission seems to be to help people create beautiful forms and surveys. They also try to make surveys fun for the respondents, which can improve your completion rate.

Typeform also offers its own set of survey templates, including this customer feedback template that showcases some unique ways your customers can rate your store, website, or business.

Typeform was not built especially for WordPress, like gravity forms, but they have developed their own plugin so that you can easily embed their forms in WordPress. Here‘s the tutorial on how to work with Typeform inside WordPress.

 

3. Hotjar

Hotjar started as a tool for heatmaps and recordings. It ended up being one of the most popular tools out there. They then developed the survey tool, which came pretty naturally, considering that heatmaps, recordings, and surveys help with UX.

Hotjar has multiple survey templates to start with.

Same as Typeform, Hotjar was not built for WordPress, but they ended up having their own plugin that lets you integrate easily with WordPress.

 

4. WPForms

WPForms is another WordPress survey plugin that allows you to upload the plugin to your website to create and embed forms directly into your WordPress theme.

With this tool, you can also create conditional surveys, leading website visitors through different directions and questions based on how they respond. With its own drag-and-drop interface, WPForms is a simple way to create useful forms and surveys.

5. Jotform Poll Maker

Jotform Poll Maker is a very handy poll tool that doesn’t require any coding. Use their drag-and-drop interface to create your polls and embed them on your website using their WordPress plugin (Jotform Online Forms).

Simply install and activate the Jotform Online Forms plugin from your WordPress admin dashboard. Whenever you try to edit a post, you will find the Jotform icon in the formatting toolbar of the editor. Use it to open the form picker where you can select your ready polls.

Use their custom conditional logic and choose one of their many templates to help you create beautiful and engaging polls. Collect feedback and analyze the data to gain insight into your users.

 

Ready to Start Using WordPress Polls?

Ready to get started ramping up your website design? Don’t rely on your own team to approve your website. A/B testing and surveying your website visitors is an essential strategy for improving conversions and increasing traffic.

 

If you liked this article, and you want to learn more about how to design a WordPress website, make sure to subscribe to Colibri’s Youtube channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

 [sibwp_form id=1]