Guide 09 : How To Set Up Product Specific Pages And Navigation

When set up properly, your WordPress website can generate a healthy income for you. It’s pretty amazing considering you’re not paying anything for WordPress, just the domain name and hosting (and in some cases, just hosting if you get a free domain with your hosting plan!). 

But how do you get sales? How do you get people to buy from your website? 

That’s what you’re going to find out in this guide. The first section will be dedicated to setting up product specific pages, and in the second section, I’ll be covering the importance of having good website navigation. 

How To Set Up Product Specific Pages In WordPress

Whether you’re selling digital or physical products, you need to have well-designed product specific pages on your site. You want people to buy your products, so you need to make it as enticing as possible. 

You can’t just put up a page saying this product is awesome, you should buy it right now! That’s never going to work. 

So, how do you create awesome product pages that actually convert? Here are a few tips:

Organize your product page

It’s a great idea to organize your product pages in a logical manner. For instance, if you have a website selling eBooks, you may want to categorize it into different genres or niches. 

It will be easier for people to find the eBooks they want by simply clicking on the product category page. 

If you have a blog-writing service, then you can organize your service page into the different areas you serve. For instance, you can list your preferred niches and your rates and packages for those niches.

Make your product descriptions short and informative

You don’t want to write a 2,000-word description of your product, no matter how awesome it is. You want people to buy it, not run away from it, right? For your product descriptions, you should list the most important benefits of the product. 

Try not to get too hung up on product specs. People want to know what’s in it for them. You can have the most hi-tech product in your niche, but if you keep on talking about technical specifications, people are going to get lost. 

Instead, talk about how your product is going to benefit your audience, how you can help make their lives or their work easier. That’s how you win people over, not by blabbering about the latest microchip on your device. 

Also, try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about what people are going to ask about your product. Figure out what they would want to know, and answer that in your product page. 

If you think people are going to be curious how your product was made, you can perhaps add a short video about it. Or if it’s a time-sensitive product, how about you include some shipping information on your page. 

Things like this will mean a lot to your customers. The more points you address (in a succinct manner, of course), the higher the chances people are going to buy from you!

Make your product landing page match your advert

If you’re selling a good product, you may want to advertise on platforms such as Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, native ads, and others. 

However, what some advertisers fail to do is they fail to make their landing page match their advertisement. This honestly is an epic fail. You spend money on ads trying to convince people that your product is the best in the market. 

But when people click on your ad, they land on a page that has nothing to do with the product you were advertising for! Or if it was, then the words and the overall design on the website just doesn’t live up to the hype in your ad. 

What’s even worse is when people try to navigate your site to find the product you were advertising, they can’t find it in your menu system because your website structure is practically non-existent. When that happens, I can guarantee that’s advertising money down the drain.

How To Add Your High-Converting Product Pages To WordPress

Now that you know what you need to do to make your product pages stand out, here’s how you can add those pages to your WordPress website. 

To begin, log in to your WordPress admin account, then go to Pages > Add New. Add your content, then hit Preview to check how your content is going to look like on the front end. Click Publish when you’re ready to go live. 

Let me just mention here that the WordPress text editor works really great for creating blog posts and other text-heavy content. However, if you want high converting sales pages and landing pages, then you may want to consider using a drag and drop page builder plugin. 

A page builder is basically a what you see is what you get editor or WYSIWYG.

With a page builder, you don’t need to imagine what your site is going to look like on the front end which is what you do with the default WordPress text editor. It helps save you time as you don’t need to go back and forth between editing and previewing your page. 

You can check out the free page builders on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. The most popular ones are:

  1. Elementor Page Builder (https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor
  2. Beaver Builder Lite Version (https://wordpress.org/plugins/beaver-builder-lite-version)
  3. Page Builder by SiteOrigin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteorigin-panels
  4. Live Composer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/live-composer-page-builder

If you want to go premium, you can check out the pro version of Beaver Builder. Or you can purchase Thrive Themes’ Thrive Architect plugin (https://thrivethemes.com/architect) or Elegant Themes’ Divi Builder (https://www.elegantthemes.com/plugins/divi-builder).  

Quick Ways To Improve Your WordPress Website Usability And Navigation

Your Website’s Navigation Structure

Have you ever been on a website that had a confusing menu or navigation system? I bet you have, and I bet you probably felt a little bit disoriented and left that site right away.   

When you design your own website, it’s important that you don’t make your visitors feel the same way you did when you visited that poorly designed website. 

After all, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and effort creating the best possible content for your audience. You don’t want them leaving your site on account of horrible navigation and menu structure.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to website navigation. In fact, you can place your menu anywhere you want. But, before you go about doing this, remember who your website is for. Is it for you or is it for your target audience? 

If you use a crazy menu system on your site, you’d be able to find it quickly because you designed it yourself. But what about your visitors? Would they find it easy to navigate around your site? 

Put yourself in their shoes. When designing your site’s structure, it’s important to put your viewers ahead of yourself. 

The Menu Structure

Your website’s main menu should be easy to locate. It helps people find what they want, and more importantly, it lets you guide your users to what you want them to find! 

If you’ve got hundreds of pages on your site, you want the most important pages on your menu. This is why you also need to make your categories well-defined, so it’s easier to link to it in your menu. 

You don’t want to have a complicated menu that lists all your pages on there! Organize and categorize your menu in a logical manner to make it easy for people to find where they want to go next.  

Menus are usually found at the top of a page, and to a lesser extent, the left sidebar. It’s very rare for a website to have its menu on the right sidebar. And I’ll explain why:

Various eye-tracking studies and heatmaps have found that people scan websites in an F pattern. People usually start at the top left side of the page, slowing moving in a horizontal line to the right. 

Then their eyes will move down and scan the next line. Then, they’ll scan the rest of the content, usually on the left side. 

Essentially, the reading pattern resembles the letter F. This is why most web designers put the logo and the main menu at the top of the page, so they can capture the user’s attention. The right sidebar is largely ignored, so it’s not a good place to put your menu in.  

The 3-Second Rule

In web design, there is a 3-second rule. The idea is that it only takes approximately 3 seconds for your website visitors to look at your site and decide if they want to stay or not. 

If you want to make your 3 seconds count, then you have to take note of the following suggestions:

  • Layout – use plenty of white space to make your content stand out. White space helps make your site look clean and easy on the eyes. Make good use of headers and sub-headers as well as bullet points to make it easier for your visitors to scan your content. 
  • Multimedia – use images and videos to your advantage. Attractive photos usually capture people’s attention than plain text. Whether you use stock photos or your own imagery, make sure it’s relevant to the content.

    Otherwise, your visitors will be scratching their heads trying to identify the relevance of your photo to your content. If you’re selling physical items, you can use videos to show your product in action. With the right photos and videos, you can expect your sales and conversions to rise. 

  • Minimize distractions – if you’ve got too many things going on at once on your web pages, chances are people won’t know what to do. They’ll end up confused and annoyed. If you don’t remove clutter on your site, then you’re not using your 3 seconds to convince your visitors to stay longer on your site. 

Implement these suggestions on your site, and I guarantee you’ll find people staying on your site far beyond the 3-second time frame.  

How To Build Your Mailing List On Your WordPress Website

The Call To Action 

Your website needs a call to action on every page and on every post. A call to action simply tells your audience what you want them to do on that particular page. 

Think about why you created your website. You probably built it because you want to sell products, or you want people to buy a product you’re recommending, or you want them to sign up to your mailing list, or you want them to request a quote for a particular service you offer. 

Whatever your call to action is, you need to place it somewhere highly visible like at the top of your website, in your sidebar, at the beginning/middle/end of your article. 

You need to make it stand out from the rest of your content, make it noticeable. The best calls to action will encourage people to take action right away. 

How To Create Menus In WordPress

Creating navigation menus in WordPress is relatively easy. WordPress gives you plenty of options to customize your navigation menus. Depending on your theme, you can have 1, 2 or more menu locations. 

In the default Twenty Seventeen theme, you can display menus in 2 locations (the top menu and the social links menu at the bottom). 

You can find how many locations you can use in your theme by going to Appearance > Customize > Menus. This is what it looks like:

If you want to add a menu in another location, you’re going to have to use widgets for that. (If you remember, I showed you how to create a custom menu and widget to add legal pages in the previous guide, Guide No. 8).

You can customize your menu all you want. Just remember that when you finally get bored with your current theme, and you want to use the latest theme from your favorite theme shop, then you may lose your current menu setup! 

Changing themes will affect how your entire site looks, and that includes your menus.

Final Words

When creating your website, it’s always important to remind yourself why you created it in the first place. You want people to buy from you, or follow your calls to action on your website. 

Setting up high-converting product specific pages, and using a clear navigation system on your site will help you win over customers.