Design your way

Digitization of a storefront in the form of a business website has become a mandate, especially post Covid-19. As the pandemic hit us, most companies adopted a digital model since taking and fulfilling orders through websites became ubiquitous.

A website gives you the ability to manage your brand’s online presence. If you consider building a website for your organization, WordPress is something you cannot miss. It is a content management system (CMS) that powers almost 43% of the global websites. The sites built using WordPress get over 400 million unique visitors and 20 billion page views each month.

The numbers hint that WordPress is one of the best options to build a professional business website. But is it possible to create a WordPress website by yourself? Thanks to technical advancements, building a basic WordPress website does not require a lot of expertise. Here’s how you can do it.

Install WordPress After Selecting a Domain Name and Hosting Provider

The first thing you need to do to build a website is to pick a domain name and hosting provider. You can think of a domain name as an address that will allow viewers to locate your website on the internet. On the other hand, a hosting provider is like your house, where your website will live and store all the data.

Choosing an Appropriate Domain Name

While selecting a domain name, ensure that it is easy to pronounce, remember, and resembles your business. For instance, if you have a gaming website, it can be something like “www.stargamer.com.” However, if you can get a domain precisely similar to your brand’s name, you can go for that too. For example, McKinsey’s brand has the domain name “www.mckinsey.com,” and IBM’s domain is “www.ibm.com.”

You will also have different extension options like .com, .net, .us, etc. However, sticking to .com is the best choice, as the visitors will remember it quickly. Almost 40% of the total domain names are registered with “.com” extensions. Hence, using it for your business website will garner a sense of professionalism and trust.

Selecting a Hosting Provider

When choosing a hosting provider, you will have tons of options. Each provider will have different benefits and limitations. You need to select the one that can help your business grow. For instance, scaling should be your prime focus if you build an eCommerce website.

An eCommerce site will have to include hundreds of product pages. Adding these pages will slow down your hosting provider’s performance and lead to slow loading, impacting the customer experience.

Similarly, if you are a startup that requires a simple website for educating your potential customers, hosting providers’ pricing should be a vital factor in making the decision. The hosting provider will let you install WordPress and add the domain name details.

Choose a WordPress Theme

The next thing after installing WordPress is choosing a theme for your website. There are multiple free and paid WordPress themes you can use for your website. But if you think that you can go ahead and select any design without putting much thought, you are wrong.

The theme of your website will play a vital role in attracting more consumers, thereby helping you scale your business quickly. However, appearance is not the only reason behind selecting the right design for your website.

Besides appearance, the theme also controls the navigation around the website. Selecting a cluttered design that does not meet your business requirements will impair customer experience.

Customer experience has surpassed product and pricing to become the top brand differentiator. According to a PWC study, around 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Suppose you are building an eCommerce store, but the navigation is complex. The sophisticated UI will indeed lead to cart abandonment. In fact, many theme-related issues, such as the lengthy checkout process and cannot see or calculate the total amount quickly, are some of the top reasons behind cart abandonment.

Poor website design can also impact the number of monthly page views. You will agree that you can leverage the business website only if you get visitors to convert to clients. But that requires ranking high on the search engine results, and your website’s theme plays a vital role in it.

If your site is not visually appealing, it will result in an increased bounce rate, which will hint to Google that your website is not providing informative content or a good experience. Similarly, the WordPress theme also affects the following SEO elements:

Loading speed
UI experience
Technical SEO
Content formatting

You can choose any free or paid WordPress themes and customize them to create a perfect website.

Install Plugins for Extended Capabilities

Basic WordPress websites are great to start. But depending on your business requirements, you might need to add many other functionalities to your site, and plugins can help you do that.

Plugins are like applications that, when installed, can add more functionalities to your website. For instance, you can add features like contact forms, improve images, increase security, Google Analytics, etc.

There are thousands of free and paid plugins. Hence, you can add almost any feature you want to your website. Some of the most helpful WordPress plugins include:

Yoast SEO: Helps optimize your website and individual posts to improve rankings on search engine results
WPForms: Enables adding interactive forms to your website
Google Analytics for WordPress: Allows monitoring and analyzing traffic on your website
Optimole: Optimizes all the images on your website

Start Adding Content

Once your website is ready, you need to add content to it. There’s no use in having a website without valuable and informative content to educate your visitors and potential customers. Hence, 82% of marketers are actively using content marketing. You can leverage content marketing strategies for ranking your website high on search engines and utilize them to generate leads and customers.

WordPress allows you to create landing pages and blogs within a few clicks. Suppose you have an understanding of marketing; it’s well and good. Otherwise, you can seek help from a digital marketing agency that can provide you with all the resources to help your website scale once it is established.

Final Thoughts

That’s how simple it is to build a professional business website for your company. The best part about this is that you can do all of it by yourself. So go ahead and embrace the digital journey to scale your business.

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