No matter your niche, you need a solid digital presence. While sales and marketing may be of great value, a website is essential for enhancing brand awareness, customer retention, customer trust, and creating additional leads through service promotion.
For this reason, an effective WordPress website strategy for your business should focus on brand exposure and expansion. Developing such a strategy, however, is not a simple task. Nevertheless, with adequate planning, execution, and expert help, you can create an effective website that would help you accomplish more than just your current business goals.
1. Plan Ahead
Before you do anything, make a WordPress checklist. Start by selecting a web host and bundle that meets your needs. Then, choose a theme and evaluate any required plugins and modifications.
Be sure to think rationally and pragmatically. It’s easy to become excited about the future, but you must ensure that your objectives are feasible based on your WordPress design.
2. Consider Premium Theme Packages
While you could always use the free WordPress theme, it will limit your website. Premium themes are more adaptable than their free counterparts. They allow you to include any content on your website. You can experiment more freely with color schemes and widgets. Especially if you are starting with WordPress, investing in a premium theme will save you work hours.
3. Customize for Mobile
Responsive Style
Now that practically everybody has a smartphone, more people use mobile devices to browse the Internet than desktop or laptop PCs. While developing your site on a computer, be careful of how it looks on mobile devices, or you’ll lose a lot of traffic.
Fortunately, WordPress designs are mobile-friendly and responsive, which implies that your website content will seamlessly resize to match whatever screen size your viewers are browsing from, be it a desktop, smartphone, or tablet device. Although WordPress will handle all the heavy lifting for you, it’s still a good idea to continually check how your website appears on various devices.
Website Load Speeds
Google reports that the average loading time for a landing page is 10 seconds on a computer. However, if your website takes more than three seconds to load, visitors will leave without exploring your offerings.
4. Focus Some Attention on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which helps your site show up on search engine results pages. The more emphasis you place on SEO, the likelier you will reach the top of Google’s search results and capitalize on the resulting traffic surge.
While keyword research is essential for optimizing your website’s content, specific plugins can assist you—especially, if you’re an amateur.
5. Take Color into Consideration
Your website is a representation of your business, and the colors you select have a significant impact on how your visitors perceive you. And so, ensure your design and website match the color palette you choose for your business.
You could choose something straightforward, such as black and white, or you can creatively use several tones of blue or pink. However, you should be aware that color psychology can influence how consumers perceive any business.
For instance, the color red is commonly linked with danger, hazard, or stop. On the other hand, blue is a calming color that fosters peace. The result of their combination is purple. In addition to being connected with luxury and strength, like red, purple is also associated with tranquility, like blue. It denotes aristocracy and royalty, which requires both peace and stability.
When designing a website, consider the emotion you wish to generate and incorporate it across the pages.
6. Be Selective with Your Plugins
Plugins are essential. However, needless plugins consume too much server space. They will slow down your website’s performance and introduce potential security risks. And therefore, compile a list of the plugins you’ll need, either as you’re planning or creating, and then conduct research to determine which ones will achieve your goals most effectively.
Note that some WordPress themes have functionalities that eliminate the need for plugins. And so, unless your themes have in-built features, you may have to read through user reviews to determine which works best. Alternatively, you can consult a WordPress expert for a professional opinion. The last thing you’d want to deal with is a slow website in this highly dynamic world. Besides, by enlisting an expert, you can better equip yourself to select relevant themes for your future websites, among other endeavors.
7. Personalize Your Permalinks
Permalinks are your website’s permanent URLs. They should remain constant over time and are simple to read and memorize.
You can design a custom permalink structure having your posts’ names. You will see that each website has a URL structure, which may include the date, the type of post, or the post category. This makes things simple for users and improves SEO. It’s a win on all fronts.
8. Stay Updated
WordPress routinely changes its software to maintain the platform’s security. Minor updates occur approximately every two weeks, and significant upgrades arise monthly.
It would help if you weren’t too concerned about these slight upgrades, as WordPress only makes modest adjustments and corrects minor bugs.
But you should constantly check for updates to ensure you haven’t missed anything new; otherwise, your website may become out-of-date and susceptible to malicious flaws.
Visit your WordPress dashboard to see if you need to upgrade your themes, plugins, or WordPress version.
There will be convenient “update now” buttons to make things simple.
Always make a backup of your website before updating, and then again after that.
9. Consider Your Image Format
JPEG or JPG files work well for displaying images because they provide a high level of information, although the files are frequently vast and sluggish to load.
PNG files are ideal for images and logos. They compress effectively and act transparently, but not with photos.
GIFs are ideally suited for animations. They can bring any website to life with minimal effort.
SVG is the abbreviation for scalable vector graphics. The SVG file format is ideal for logos and other graphics that require interactivity. Unlike PNG files, SVG files are editable and do not fade as you zoom in.
BMP files are ideal for high-quality, clear images. It preserves color data for every image pixel, which gives it high quality but big file sizes.
WebP images are 26% more compact than PNG images. They are intended to seem similar to regular photos but have lesser file sizes.
10. Analyze Again
Once a website is operational, it is essential to monitor its performance. Ensure that an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics is installed on your site so you can monitor user behavior.
If you’re not administering the site, offer “how-to” guides for partners or workers.
Start Today!
Consider these WordPress recommendations and strategies when constructing a WordPress website rather than winging it.
Above all, keep in mind that establishing and maintaining a good WordPress website takes time. Besides, you may need to make numerous adjustments along the way. Nevertheless, you don’t need to walk this pretty challenging path on your own; working with experts will give you the best head start, enabling you to prepare better to handle potential roadblocks in the future.