7 Ways WordPress Sites Can Leverage AI to Boost User Engagement

User engagement is a metric that measures how visitors interact with your website's content, products, or services. By understanding and measuring user engagement, you can stay on top of what keeps visitors engaged on your WordPress site.

In the digital age, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) is the most effective way to enhance user engagement.

For example, suppose your user engagement metrics show that most website visitors spend only a few seconds on your homepage before leaving. In that case, your copy or imagery likely isn't engaging or compelling. Luckily, WordPress's many AI-powered content creation tools and plugins can help make your homepage more engaging and user-friendly.

This article will explore seven ways WordPress sites can leverage AI to boost user engagement, along with examples of effective plugins.

1. Automate Content Creation
2. Boost SEO
3. Take Advantage Of Chatbots
4. Suggest Personalized Recommendations
5. Enhance Email Marketing Campaigns
6. Automate Alt Text
7. Offer Multilingual Experiences

1. Automate Content Creation

Content creation is time-consuming for website owners and marketing professionals. Not only do you have to write the content, but you have to research relevant topics and keywords. However, content is essential for boosting user engagement, so you can't overlook it.  

Fortunately, AI tools and plugins can now generate engaging blog posts, product descriptions, meta descriptions, and social media captions tailored to your chosen topics and keywords. This reduces content production time whilst ensuring content is search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly and consistent.

However, we recommend that a human proofread and edit all AI-created content to ensure the content is accurate, engaging, and true to your brand voice. AI is a robot, so content can be plagiarized, lack emotion, and be of bad quality.  

For SEO-optimized, automated content creation, consider using WordPress plugins such as AI Bud, AI WP Writer, and WP AI SEO. 

2. Boost SEO

If you prefer to create your website content yourself, you can still use AI tools and plugins to ensure it is SEO-friendly. This will help you rank even higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), which will result in more first-time website visitors and new potential customers.

AI-powered SEO plugins can suggest relevant keywords based on your brand and industry, analyze content structure and readability, identify content topic gaps on your WordPress website, and monitor your competitors to help you succeed.

The key is to choose an AI plugin that integrates seamlessly with your WordPress hosting plan. To enable real-time, on-site analysis, your website needs guaranteed uptime and fast load times to capture the most traffic. Opting for a powerful hosting plan is essential if you want your AI SEO plugin to monitor and optimize the best possible version of your domain.

Traditionally, SEO requires extensive research and ongoing updates to yield the best results. However, Rank Math is a WordPress plugin that offers AI-powered content analysis, high-ranking keyword suggestions, and real-time SEO recommendations as you create or reoptimize content.

When you first install Rank Math or another similar plugin, run a full site audit to instantly identify where you can make SEO improvements that will significantly increase organic traffic to your WordPress site.

3. Take Advantage Of Chatbots

Conversational AI is the key to boosting user engagement, and chatbots allow you to create powerful AI-driven conversations with your website visitors. They use AI processes to imitate human interactions and recognize speech or text inputs.

Integrating a chatbot with your WordPress site will take a load off your customer service team while giving your website visitors access to 24/7 support. This will increase engagement, satisfaction, and conversions.

AI-powered chatbots can direct users to the right page of your website, answer frequently asked questions, collect information from leads outside of business hours, and escalate issues to human support when necessary.

In addition, as AI becomes increasingly important, visitors expect to see AI-powered chatbots on websites, with 81% of consumers believing that the technology is an integral part of modern customer service.

With tons of WordPress plugins available, such as ChatBot and Tidio AI, you can easily integrate engaging conversational AI chatbots into your website.

4. Suggest Personalized Recommendations

Personalized product recommendations can significantly increase average order value and conversion rates for e-commerce stores, as they create an engaging shopping experience for site visitors.

These AI-powered plugins analyze user browsing and purchase history to suggest relevant products, show customers frequently bought-together items, and identify cross-selling opportunities. You should install your chosen recommendation plugin on key pages, such as product and cart pages, to maximize sales.

On WooCommerce sites, Product Recommendations for WooCommerce is a plugin that uses AI algorithms to analyze customer behavior and deliver personalized product recommendations.

In addition to personalized product recommendations, WordPress sites can significantly benefit from personalized content that boosts user engagement and improves user experiences. AI plugins, such as If-So Dynamic Content, make it possible to display personalized content to each visitor based on their behaviors, interests, demographics, and preferences.

5. Enhance Email Marketing Campaigns

Despite the significant popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, email remains one of the most effective marketing channels.

When you integrate an AI-powered email marketing plugin with your WordPress site, you can make your campaigns significantly more powerful. Plugins like Mailchimp utilize AI technology and algorithms to segment audiences based on website behavior, generate personalized email content for these different segments, select send times that maximize open rates, and create subject lines with higher open rates.

To boost user engagement, set up behavior-triggered email campaigns that are based on specific actions that users take on your WordPress site. For example, a 'now on sale' or 'here's a discount' email campaign is most relevant to someone who recently left your website with a specific item in their shopping cart.

6. Automate Alt Text

Alt text provides the reader with information about the image, describing it and providing context for how it relates to the webpage content. This can significantly boost user engagement for those who rely on screen readers or other assistive technology.

In addition to accessibility and engagement, alt text is crucial for SEO because it enables search engines to index images accurately.

Alt Text AI is an effective WordPress plugin that automatically generates accurate and relevant alt text for images. It utilizes AI to analyze uploaded images and automatically add alt text to the image properties, ensuring compliance with web accessibility standards, enhancing search engine rankings, and increasing user engagement. 

7. Offer Multilingual Experiences

A website user is 65% more likely to convert when reading product pages in their native language, making multilingual websites essential for boosting user engagement. Even as cross-border e-commerce continues to grow, going multilingual is also a wise choice for domestic brands, as Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the US.

In addition to increased conversions and a larger customer base, multilingual websites can enhance your brand's reputation and image, improve international SEO, reduce bounce rates, and help you gain a competitive industry advantage.

The TranslatePress plugin is designed to create multilingual WordPress websites, allowing you to easily translate your entire site.

Ready To Leverage AI To Boost User Engagement?

There are already over 65,000 WordPress plugins available, many of which are AI-powered or plan to adopt AI tools and technologies in the near future. As digital experiences become more important for boosting user engagement and ensuring visitors stay active on your WordPress site, integrating these AI plugins will become a must for businesses across all industries.