If you are about to start your WordPress site and you are fairly “green” when it comes to online work, you should be aware that the mere idea is not enough. You will eventually have to invest some money into the website if you want to see it grow and be successful.
It has all of the necessary features to help you launch an inventive and prosperous website with minimum effort and investment on your part. However, the minimum investment needed doesn’t mean zero budget required. If you want to run a profitable online business, you should just be clever when analyzing where exactly to invest your money and where to save it and opt for a free solution. In this article, we will talk more about some important things that you shouldn’t save your money on. Before you start panicking, we have to emphasize that all of these have fairly affordable solutions.
Prep the field
If you are about to start any kind of WordPress website, whether if it’s a blog or eCommerce, you need to prep the field. That may sound tricky, and it can be if you do it yourself. However, developers have designed an array of fine and easy to use prepping solutions that will do some valuable work, while you are busy working on the website itself.
One of the best such solutions is the Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin. Once you’ve chosen your favorite theme out of the 100 different themes, you can further customize it. This plugin has over 1 million free images and 26 filters to make them fit perfectly into your narrative or the message you are trying to convey.
Once you’ve activated the plugin it won’t just sit there and look pretty. It will immediately start generating more traffic to your domain and it will collect emails from your visitors. Furthermore, Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode also has built-in tests and guidelines, that will launch you to the very top of search results. These are just some of the awesome features of this plugin that will help you grow your website before the website itself is even finished. Investing some cash in Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin is really a no-brainer.
First impressions are important
You should keep in mind that your potential users and customers will first meet you through their preferred search engine, mostly Google. This basically means that the first thing they see is the home page of your website. Needless to say, if your website is poorly designed and of low-quality, the visitor will move on to your competitor’s website. This doesn’t mean your website should be flashy or over the top. It simply means that you should make it interesting and adequate.
It is easy to install a plugin and get yourself a nice-looking theme or use one of the themes that are already offered on WordPress, but investing a small amount to customize it and make it more appealing is quite important.
Your website promotes your business, so the money you invest in its appeal will quickly pay off.
Website Hosting
Website hosting is of critical importance to the overall success of your business. If you’re adamant about creating a serious and prosperous environment in which your website and business will thrive, you have to invest in a good website hosting solution. Keep in mind that you will run into a variety of free or shared hosting solutions, but they are free for a reason.
When hosting is shared, your site will take considerably more time to load. Most internet users expect a page to load within two seconds; you can’t afford to be cheap with hosting providers. On the same note, if you opt for an unreliable hosting provider your website is more likely to get weird or crash if it starts to grow. The bigger your website gets the bigger the hosting platform it will need.
Your hosting platform should be powerful enough to support all of the sudden spikes and fluctuations in online traffic.
That is why you shouldn’t be cheap when it comes to hosting services. Look for premium hosting providers with most recent reviews, that will keep your website up and running at all times.
SEO tools
You can most definitely run your website without the search engine optimization strategy. However, if you decide to do so, you have to be aware that your beloved site will be far away from the first couple of pages of Google search results. Basically, your website will be virtually invisible in the online stratosphere.
Furthermore, you can find a variety of free WordPress tools that could help you with the SEO, but if you want your website to expand and be progressive, you will have to invest in additional software. SEO tools that will help you improve your ranking quickly and efficiently will probably set you back for a couple of hundreds, but the pay-off will be fast and permanent. In other words, it will be worth it.
Mobile Optimization
Right off the bat, you should know that mobile devices generate more than half of the global internet traffic. In retrospect, that means that you would have a considerably more significant amount of traffic once you optimize your site for mobile devices.
Investing some cash into mobile optimization to make your website user-friendly across all devices should be imperative if you want to see your business grow. Just so we’re clear, WordPress has terrific features that could help you with some basic SEO, but it can never make your site as responsive and as active as paid solutions.
Starting any kind of online business demands a lot of work and investments, so it is only understandable that you will utilize any free tool at your disposal. Sometimes novice WordPress users get carried away and think that it is enough to use those free tools and plugins solely. That can indeed be enough if you are not particularly interested in the growth and development of your website. However, in order to expand your website and start profiting, you should definitely invest in improving these aspects of your online business.