The WordPress platform is so immense that everybody seems to be fascinated by the way it functions and delivers online results. Owning a business means having an accurate website that reflects your brand to the audience. However, it isn’t easy to launch such a website; needless to say, you don’t need to be a web designer with a huge budget to build a website. If you are interested in creating a WordPress site but unsure where to start, here are a few WordPress tips that will help you go about things the right way. The initial steps are simple. You first must pick a great WordPress theme and then accordingly make changes to improve your customer’s perception. From the suitable theme to adding widgets and installing plugins, a lot goes into the perfect WordPress site.

Cherry-pick the suitable WordPress Theme for your Business

With the upgrading of web design, there are times when your website will need a fresh look and prevent your site from becoming outdated. Therefore, it is essential to timely update your website. You can consider some free themes if you want, but remember that a premium theme can offer you more options and a better chance to manage your site. Choose a theme that goes with your business idea and is compatible with the latest WordPress version.

Create an Eye-Catching Visual Content

Visual content comes in many shapes and sizes, but before you start creating it, you need to know why, how, and what kind of a difference it will make for your business. In most cases, words are not just adequate to deliver a compelling message. When it comes to engaging a targeted audience, visual aids are essential, as creating great visual content helps companies to stand out from the crowd and go a step further than their competitors. Over the period, it has become dominant and comes in various forms like images, video content, GIFs, infographics, presentations, and much more. When publishing content on your website, try including high-quality images, videos, and detailed infographics to explain complicated things.

Add a Favicon to your Website

You must have come across a favicon when creating and developing a website. It is an icon associated with a particular website or web page. In layman’s terms, a favicon is your website logo next to the meta title on your browser tab. In other words, your website will display your official website icon instead of a blank document icon on the browser. It is generally intended to be used when you bookmark a web page. Therefore, having a favicon on your website is crucial, as it makes your site distinguishable on browser tabs and gives a professional look to your website.

Invest in SEO

Most industries and brands are unaware of the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for their website. Using the best SEO practices would work to take your website to the next level. Moreover, by optimizing your content and site for search engines, you can rest assured that your site will not only get noticed but will also be a huge success. SEO practices indulge in thorough keyword research, linking externally to authoritative sources, internally to other relevant and quality content on your site, and much more.

Set Up Google Analytics

It is quite simple to use Google Analytics, and the setup is free. You can easily start tracking your visitors and the time spent on your website. In simpler terms, setting up Google Analytics on WordPress helps track your website traffic and provides valuable insights about your visitors.

Create an Eye-Catching Visual Content

It would be best if you become more interactive to ensure that you have a constant group of visitors who like to read your content. A simple method to keep them engaged is to reply to their comments on your content or engage with them on social media or via email. By doing so, you will be able to create a positive impression by valuing their opinions and appreciating their input. Above all, you can also send occasional emails or personalized messages to a set of audiences will work wonders for your company if you have a medium-scale or a large-scale website.

Create an Effective Call-to-Action Button

Attracting visitors to your website is essential, but converting those visitors into customers and subscribers is the ultimate goal. Here is where the call-to-action buttons come into existence and are a common yet important website element; you almost certainly already have some on your website. It guides visitors where you want to take them on your website. So, If you are using WordPress, we recommend the user-friendly MaxButtons plugin to help you build, optimize and test different call-to-action button types. The CTA button can be anything from establishing yourself as a blogger to growing your mailing list of followers, and above all, you can place it in several places on your site to make it more effective.

Enable Social Sharing

One of the easiest ways to increase the reach of your website is to include a sharing button on your site. The social media sharing buttons make it easy for the readers to share the content of their choice on their social media profiles, which will not only help more and more people become aware of your offering but will also work towards increasing your followers.

Hence, a WordPress site with great quality content might be adequate to draw potential readers and engage them. But using WordPress to create an eCommerce site or for posting a blog, these tips could help you elevate your business to the next level. 

Business websites are a quintessential aspect of any business. Owning a business website for your small business gives you a perfect sense of online presence and helps you get a professional outlook in front of your clients. A business website can help you connect faster and more efficiently with your customers. Creating a Small Business Website has become more accessible than ever, and we are here to guide you in every step.

Steps to Create a Business Website

Determine Primary Purpose of Website

A website is generally the company’s digital face and thereby helps to construct footprints in people’s minds. Identifying the main objective of building a website is a crucial facet of the small business website. Whether you create a simple or complex website, you must convey your message about the company and its products and services in basic terms on its homepage. You must pre-determine the purpose of building a website and compare it when the website has been renovated. 

Select a Domain Name

As soon as the purpose has been identified, the next step is to obtain a domain name. You must purchase a domain name highly relevant to your business name, product, or service. It would be best if you used your business name as your domain name, allowing your customers to identify your business from that of your contemporaries. You can also use top-level domain extensions like .com, .in, .org or even .net for better search relevance. 

Choose a Web Host

Once you have obtained your domain name, the next thing you need to move on to is finding a web host because every website needs a host. A host is a server where all the data is stored for public access. Hosting your website can be costly, so you must find an external host that fits your pocket. Initially, if you are on a tight budget, you can start with free hosting plans, but once your business grows, you need to make sure that you upgrade your hosting plans to handle your website needs and operations. 

Build your Pages 

A good homepage is always more than a static homepage. While you are building your website, you need to make sure that you create multiple pages highlighting various aspects of your business. It is always recommended that you create a separate contact page with all the necessary details, as it directly links you with your customers. Moreover, you should update and post your information regularly about the growing aspects of your business through blogs, customer reviews and ratings or even photographs to create awareness among your existing customers and potential clients.  

Curating Designs and Templates 

Once you have finished finalizing the content of your page, the next step is to personalize the website’s designs and templates. As your customers conceive the website as the face of the entire entity, you must ensure that you select a layout design that pleases the eye of the client. If you do not want to waste too much time customizing the template and design, you can always use the pre-made layout designs. Also, with the evolution of AI (Artificial Intelligence), there are excellent layout personalization options available wherein you need to answer a few questions about your business and form a layout page accordingly at the tip of your fingers. 

Adding Plug-in Features 

Plug-ins and extensions help you to add new features to your page. With the help of these tools, you can get the most out of your small business website. You can always download the extensions and use them on your website. However, you can sometimes be tempted to use too many plug-in due to the numerous plug-ins available, but you need to handle your impulse and only use the required amount of plug-ins for your website to run smoothly.

Test & Launch Your Website 

Your website is ready to go live as soon as you have completed all the previous steps. However, a crucial aspect often tends to get neglected in the process – you need to test your site before the launch. A test will give you a broader outlook on how your website looks and responds to compatible devices. You must also go through your website carefully in case of typos or broken links. Once all the minor issues are fixed, you can launch your website and promote it on all social media platforms. 

Optimization of Search Engine

Once your website is live, you must ensure that people can find your website easily. One way of doing this is by using appropriate keywords in your posts and pages, employing post names in permanent links or even optimizing your website for speed by narrowing down the size of the posts. It allows the SEO to showcase your page more frequently in the SERPs (Search Engine Result pages). Another way is by analyzing the traffic on the page and posting content that is only primarily relevant. Even though this can be a slower process, it will eventually help you in the long run.

Owning a small business website often helps you to gain popularity and reach a broader audience to sell your products or services. The bottom line of creating a website for a small business is a way of promoting your business and building an online brand presence. You can quickly build a website with the help of tools available online within a short period and with no previous experience. 

Most business owners are familiar with platforms like Wix, Weebly, Joomla, Magento, WordPress, and more, but for a few, it might sound like the names of aliens. However, in today’s era, where technology is moving at a faster pace, it is obvious that you have heard the name WordPress. Yet, unknown and puzzled about the uses of WordPress, this article will give you a complete insight.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is free and powerful software for developing websites, which was started as a simple blogging platform and later set into a powerful CMS. Written in PHP and using MySQL as a database, WordPress’s main purpose PHP is to write dynamic web applications, which are open-source software so that you can use it to create a beautiful website, blog, and complex applications. It is very simple and easy to use, even for beginners.

According to industry experts, 41.4% of the top 10 million websites and around 60% of all CMS are powered by WordPress. As a result, with such great stats, it continues to dominate the web development industry. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automatic Inc., quoted, “WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.”

Uses of WordPress

In this ever-growing and competitive digital world, everyone wants to have a powerful place in the market. Earlier, to build a website, we had to understand and learn coding to create an interactive and eye-catching website. Gone are those days when one must know how to code to put their website online by building everything from scratch. WordPress technology makes it too easy to start building a site with just a few clicks.

Open Source Software 

Whether you are creating a commercial site or a personal blogging website, WordPress is open-source software that allows you to freely use, modify, build and distribute the software with zero cost. Thousands of talents have contributed to developing this software from around the globe. Moreover, a core development team is leading the project development, but anyone can provide patches, report bugs, suggest features, and much more. Once you know the workflow, it is time to go online by just buying a domain name and a hosting service, depending on the scale of the website.

Easily Build Simple to Complex Websites

One of the common misconceptions about WordPress is that it is mainly for building blogs. Indeed, there is no room for discussion, WordPress was developed as a blogging platform, but over the years, it has changed significantly with the various new releases. Nevertheless, WordPress is at an advantage due to its blogging roots. It’s one of the cleanest, fastest ways to write and publish blog posts, and that’s all included right from the start.

WordPress Operates on Multiple Terminals

Websites built by WordPress can also be operated using tablets and smartphones. At present, most WordPress themes are responsive themes. Regardless of whether users access our WordPress site with a PC, tablet, or smartphone, they can access and browse normally, and WordPress is also optimized for mobile devices. Therefore, after you use WordPress to build the site, there is no need to worry about mobile access and optimization. One of the perfect illustrations of WordPress media support, the Sony Music website promotes music tracks and videos. AS a result, you often find several forms of video and audio clips on this website.

Google Friendly

As this is a CMS-based framework, Google and other search engines crawl into these websites that help to rank. Most businesses developed their website using this framework to take this advantage of WordPress. To get ranked in Google is the main motto of every website. With this website, you can easily enjoy the benefit of WordPress. According to a few industry experts, using the WordPress framework can boost your ranking. This is because some plugins optimize the pages to drive more traffic. Hence, if you don’t know anything about SEO, install the recommended powerful SEO plugins with a few basic settings, and WordPress will take care of its own.

WordPress Security

For everyone, whether a commoner or a business owner, safety will always be the priority, even when developing a WordPress website. No matter how easy it is to build anything, it is unacceptable for any platform to compromise security. Therefore, WordPress implements every security measure to prevent any possible breach of information and stay protected. Of course, it is best to use the latest version to avoid vulnerability attacks at the source. Further improve the security of your website by installing security plugins, such as Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan, iThemes Security(formerly Better WP Security), or Hide My WP Ghost – Security Plugin.

SEO Friendly

WordPress is known for having SEO built into the platform and automatically generates title tags and Meta descriptions for all your pages and posts. Furthermore, most themes are optimized for SEO by default which is conducive to search engines retrieving, including your website and increasing organic online presence. In addition, there are more advanced SEO optimization plugins to choose from with just one click to install—for instance, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and SEO Framework.

Therefore, WordPress is the best CMS for creating small to medium-sized websites and applications if you have a limited budget and tight deadline. However, it is not limited as WordPress can also be used to build top-class complex custom e-Commerce and web applications if you have a highly skilled developer.

An online presence for your business is not just an advertisement but a website that offers space to find volunteers, increases fundraising, promotes brand awareness, and much more. Therefore, for every organization operating an online website, a nonprofit business website is something they shouldn’t overlook, as it can make or break your organization. Doing the right things online can result in fundraising, brand awareness, and membership growth. Creating a digital nonprofit marketing strategy can be exciting, as it allows you to build an online presence, spread the word about your mission, and boost supporter engagement. Your nonprofit site must have several important features to attract people’s attention and collect donations, as they help make the nonprofit website an effective tool that inspires action.

What is a Nonprofit Website Development?

Building nonprofit and association websites can be a great survival for any organization as the goal of a nonprofit website is to convince donors to give begins at your website, a public-facing home base of your operations. Like any other company website, it is easily navigable, aesthetically appealing, comprehensive, and operates with a thin budget. 

Essential Features for Nonprofit Websites

The success of a nonprofit’s website depends on how many people know about them and so get concerned about the website’s structure, contents, features, and much more. Every nonprofit website must follow a few essential features for successful business growth.

Engaging Imagery 

Using a powerful image captivates users’ thought processes from the time they land on your homepage via sources. Therefore, a vital part of any effective nonprofit website is compelling visuals strategically placed to further your mission by evoking emotion in readers. Make sure to feature them across your website by using appropriate images to convey your brand, keeping minimal usage, and strategically placing your images within the content.

Optimized mobile design

In today’s era, mobile users make up most of the website traffic, as around 60% of all internet access is completed through mobile phones. As a result, nonprofit website development must be fully functional on all devices. As technology moves toward a mobile approach, optimized and streamlined mobile pages are essential for any nonprofit to succeed. In addition, consumers are more likely to donate or volunteer if they can access your organization’s information from any location. Therefore, when designing your nonprofit website mobile page, emphasize only the most important features of your service, such as your mission statement, what your organization does, how to donate, and where to volunteer.

Enhance visibility with SEO

To increase awareness about your organization, all you need to do is have a website that is visible and searchable online. Although we are all aware of the role of SEO (search engine optimization), they help optimize your site’s content to help it prominently rank on popular search engines like Google. To help, your CMS should offer SEO tools like Meta title editors, custom Meta descriptions, and customizable URLs that help your nonprofit and association website optimize your content and rank higher on search engines. 

Volunteer Registration

For an excellent user experience, nonprofit website development should feature online forms, including interactive user forms or submission links for in-page online forms. For instance, these services include cloud-based spreadsheets or online-based forms such as event registration, blog submissions, member registration, contact forms, and donation boxes. Therefore, online forms are simple for the volunteer and you, as everything gets updated automatically.

Create an interactive calendar

Operating a nonprofit website means a constantly updated calendar of events in person or virtual. Your donation platform or membership software should support online event registration and payments. If your site is in WordPress, your software may offer widgets to promote a list of upcoming events in the site-wide sidebar or footer. Event attendees’ nonprofit websites appreciate the convenience of online registration, which is likely to sell more tickets.

Streamlined Donation Page

From being creative to engaging, your donation page can still influence website visitors who end up clicking through to your donation page whether to donate or not. Therefore, it is better to bypass various ad links or CTA on the donation page that would distract and direct people off the page before they make their gift. Above all, the page consists of all the required information donor needs to know before donating to your organization and the online form to donate. 

Hence, creating an outstanding nonprofit website development is necessary by adding essential features that can reach the audience. So, draw ideas from our selection of the best nonprofit organization illustrations and get the go-ahead to implement your ideas. Although this is far from a complete list, these key elements are a solid foundation for your nonprofit website.

Living in an era of complete digitization and constant technological innovation, diverse businesses have a website, regardless of size or nature. Without a digital front, your marketing efforts are likely to go futile. It is so because customers prefer to gather information about the company using Google, as they are likely to get acquainted. In simple words, having a website establishes a sense of credibility. So, if you haven’t yet, it is about time you make a WordPress website for your business.

Bringing high-quality leads to your local service business site is not a cakewalk. For this, you require a solid web presence that can do wonders for your business, even when it is offline to the world. In addition, a good website can drum up a lot of interest, especially if you’re brand new. A company’s online presence is essential to operating in any field. And here is where wordPress plays its magic as the perfect platform to power your local businesses. 

WordPress Features and Plugins To Grow Your Business

You can keep optimizing your website by adding WordPress plugins. However, over 55,000 WordPress plugins are available today, so it can be pretty daunting to choose the right ones. In addition, there are plugins for various purposes, and you have to determine what is best for your site. With WordPress plugins, you can not only improve your SEO but also increase site speed, add contact forms, create an online store, and much more.

Enhance Your SEO

To bring your website to the top, Search Engine Optimization is vital in getting your page a high ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). According to statistics provided by market researchers, about 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine. Therefore, your site needs to be search optimized to start gaining traction. One such plug-in – Yoast SEO, helps enhance your site’s content using appropriate keywords to increase your website’s ranking on search engines. The role of this plug-in is to check keywords or key phrases and analyze your text for all variants, giving you a score and an elaborate explanation of the problems in your content and how to fix them.

Responsive Google Maps

If you are operating a brick-and-mortar local store, the growth of your business is seen in the number of customers visiting your store. The Responsive Google Maps plug-in makes it super-easy for potential customers to find your store by allowing you to add a fully-responsive Google map to your website. It is full of functions yet remains easy to use and set up.

HubSpot WordPress Plugin

The HubSpot WordPress plug-in is an all-in-one lead generation tool to attract, engage, and delight your contacts and customers by creating forms, pop-ups, emails, and much more right from your WordPress dashboard. Apart from this, you can track how potential customers interact with your website and keep tabs on their page views, form submissions, live chats, email engagement, and more via a well-laid-out timeline. Besides this, you can launch automated marketing campaigns and sales follow-ups after monitoring all this data. With this plug-in, you can auto-sync form submissions with HubSpot CRM and obtain comprehensive analytics to track market performance.

Sucuri – A Complete Website Security

A secure and protected website delivers peace of mind from future cyber attacks. Around 70 million websites are operated using WordPress themes and plug-ins. It is a common misconception that only high-traffic websites get hacked, but the truth is even smaller websites are targeted. Taking the popularity of WordPress as a CMS into the picture is even more reason to be safe. Therefore, it is of the essence that you use a security plug-in to ramp up the security of your website. Here is where Sucuri Security comes into the picture, offering website monitoring, malware removal, and other website security-related issues for small and large businesses. 

SeedProd

One of the most user-friendly WordPress landing page plug-ins, which effectively helps visitors know the latest updates and offers, persuades them to contact your sales representatives instantly. With no coding required, this SeedProd plug-in allows you to build compelling, mobile-responsive sales and other landing pages easily.

WP Forms

A business website means you need to have a contact us page, which consists of forms or contact details, as it is easy for visitors or customers to get in touch. For WordPress, WPForms is the most user-friendly contact form plug-in; as it allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, polls, and other online forms with just a few clicks. In addition, it comes with powerful features that don’t exist in other form builders, such as conversational forms, form landing pages, user journey tracking, form abandonment, geolocation tracking, GDPR friendly, custom WordPress user registration and login forms, and much more.

Web Push Notification Plug-in 

Whenever we come up with new business ideas, offers, or announcements, we look for a plug-in that can notify the customers. Here is where PushEngage comes to action – the most powerful and user-friendly web push notification service for WordPress that allows you to send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors using the browser push notification technology.

Shared Counts

A social sharing button – Shared Count is the best WordPress social media plug-in that helps businesses to increase traffic and engagement by helping readers share your posts and pages with their friends on social media. How share counts are calculated varies a bit depending on the social network. Therefore, the best way to interpret the share count number shown is to represent the most accurate number of quantifiable social actions on the shared URL.

Hence, pivoting on your business, you can choose the most suitable WordPress plug-ins by either downloading the plug-ins straight from the WordPress.org plug-in directory. Even if you’re a small offline store, a good website can go a long way toward growing your business.