Kicking off a startup is not the easiest thing in the world, the business journey is demanding but also excited. The well-crafted website is a must-have to leverage your business potential and emphasize online visibility. While looking for a perfect product-market fit usually is better to turn into reliable and proven solutions that guarantee a quick and successful digitalization.
The experience your website offers to visitors says a lot about your company - being responsive and high-performance it displays professionalism and gives your brand a sense of credibility.When you direct customers, partners, and investors to your new website, you want them to be impressed and a great web experience is one of the best tools you have against skepticism and doubt.
At the same time, running your own business is not an easy task. You have many different responsibilities to take care of, and not enough hours in the day to address them all. Your website doesn’t just need to be fast – it needs to be done fast too.
These issues have driven entire generations of entrepreneurs and business owners to WordPress. As the world’s most popular content management system, it promises fast, reliable performance while also making it easy to update and manage the website itself. It’s now easier than ever for startup owners to build and deploy a fully functional WordPress website. New tools and technologies have eliminated the barrier to entry that used to prevent people from quickly making their own websites.
Now, you can create your own business website without writing a single line of code. If you follow certain steps, you won’t need to know HTML or JavaScript, and you won’t need to hire a developer who does, either. So let’s dig into the tips on how to easily create a user-friendly website on WordPress!
Select a website builder and hosting service
WordPress is an excellent content management platform, but it isn’t designed for non-technical users. This is especially true when creating new web pages from scratch. You’ll need a website builder that can help you create high-quality web pages without requiring you to write any code.
You’ll also need to host that website builder somewhere. There are many different types of website hosting packages available on the market. You have a few broad categories to choose from:
- Shared hosting packages put your website on a server, where it shares server resources with others. This is by far the least expensive hosting option you can opt for, but it comes with severe limitations. You have no control over how server resources are distributed, or even how secure your website is.
- Dedicated hosting puts your website on a unique server, and puts you in control of all its resources. This can provide you with a robust, high-performance website, but configuring the server is a technically demanding task, and you’re likely to overpay for server resources you don’t use – especially in the beginning.
- Managed hosting lets you outsource the technical requirements of managing your own server, providing you with a readymade solution for building your own website. There are many different types of managed hosting services, from simple hosting plans to extensive market-leading solutions powered by cloud technology. Elementor, for example, offers best-in-class built-in cloud-based WordPress hosting.
For non-technical entrepreneurs who need to have a full-featured website up yesterday, managed hosting is a compelling option. Not all managed hosting providers are equal, however, so it’s important to pay close attention to the services and expertise they offer. Badly managed hosting can create unnecessary problems, while premium providers can support your website with secure, high-quality cloud infrastructure.
Invest in SSL
The need for high-quality infrastructure is especially apparent when it comes to cybersecurity. Small businesses are far more vulnerable to cyberattacks than large enterprises, yet these types of attacks often go unreported.
Just under half of all small businesses experienced a cyberattack in 2021. For a new business that has yet to establish its credibility, cybercrime represents a serious threat.
SSL certification is just one of the technologies your website needs to protect itself against cybercriminals – and it is an important one. This certificate establishes a secure link between your website and its visitors. That makes it much harder for hackers to spoof your website and steal sensitive data from users (including you).
The easiest way to tell if a website is SSL certified is to look at the URL in your browser. If it starts with “https://” instead of just “http://”, that means the website is certified. Most browsers will also display a small lock icon and show you the certificate when you click on it.
Most hosting providers offer SSL certification alongside their hosting packages. If yours doesn’t, you can obtain SSL certification using a free service like Let’s Encrypt.
Perfect the art of non-intrusive popups
Your website isn’t just a collection of webpages. It’s a platform for building an entire web experience for customers, business partners, and potential investors. Many of these tools are things that every day Internet users take for granted – like popups.
Popups have earned a bad reputation for disrupting the user experience and distracting website visitors from your content. There are more ways you can use popups, however. When done right, they enhance the user experience and show valuable content to the right people at the right time.
The key to using popups correctly is in your timing and audience selection. With the right popup builder, you can configure popups to trigger exclusively for people who are already primed for the content you want to show them.
You can trigger popup content to display for users who spend a certain amount of time on a particular page, for example. You can also set popups to trigger after users scroll through your page by a set amount. If you keep your popups focused on the content of the page in question, they can be used to answer peoples’ questions before they even have a chance to ask, so in the hands of a clever entrepreneur, this tool can be incredibly effective.
Optimize for mobile
Your website needs to be fully responsive to the wide range of mobile devices your visitors use. The vast majority of people connecting to your website will be doing it via phones and tablets – you need to provide a great user experience in the portrait format.
Mobile optimization is about more than content orientation, though. It’s also about usability and accessibility. Think about your website’s navigation. Are the buttons easy enough to see and tap on a small screen? Now imagine a powerful sun glare reflecting off the screen. Is the website still accessible to people using it outside during the day?
These are important considerations that often don’t make it into the web design process. Mobile optimization is about more than making sure your website functions technically on smaller devices. It needs to function well in a variety of scenarios, with a variety of devices and use cases. You also need to consider mobile users with poor network connections. Find ways to optimize bandwidth use so that people can connect with your business from anywhere, including remote areas without Wi-Fi.
Consider using a video host
Video is one of the highest-converting content formats you can use. While it is important to conserve bandwidth and server resources, the benefits of video marketing far outweigh the costs – as long as you go about it the right way.
For example, you can host video content directly on a WordPress page, but that means your hosting server has to do the work of transmitting that video to every user who accesses your page. That task becomes an extraordinary expense when you have hundreds of thousands of website visitors per day.
Video hosting providers operate separately from your website host, providing you with a high-bandwidth hosting infrastructure designed specifically for video content. By publishing an embed link instead of the whole video on your page, you can keep your pages loading quickly while providing visitors with high-performing video content.
But great video hosts can do much more than save server resources. They can also support advanced digital marketing strategies by collecting demographic and behavioral data on users.
This data can help you improve the performance of your videos in many ways. It may show that viewers tend to skip over certain parts of your video, or inform you when viewers are connecting from foreign countries and need subtitles. This kind of information can form the foundation of your business growth strategy.
5. Integrate with sales enablement and CRM platforms
Once you start collecting and analyzing users’ data, you’ll need to store all that data somewhere. Customer relationship management platforms give you a single point of reference for all the information you’ve collected about your users and customers, so that you can easily analyze trends and develop your strategy accordingly. Sales enablement tools give you the ability to harness that data when closing deals. They also enable time-consuming automation of sales tasks while keeping careful track of individual customers and partners. This helps you monitor engagement and deploy strategies for increasing that engagement by connecting with users on multiple channels - depending on their communication preferences.Crucially, both of these tools need to integrate fully with your website in order to work smoothly. The customer journey begins the moment someone engages with your brand and in many cases, that’s going to be the first time they click onto your webpage. Third-party integrations with tools like Hubspot and AgileCRM allow you to monitor and improve that experience with each passing day.
So how to create a professional website for your startup without losing time? Hiring a web development agency to prepare your website can take weeks or months. As a startup entrepreneur, you need a faster solution that doesn’t involve compromising on the quality of the web experience. Elementor is the website builder you need to quickly create a professional website for your brand without losing valuable time in the process.
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