Time is money. A well-known cliché, but it is true. Your online business depends on the loading speed of your website. With the increasing internet speed and decreasing attention span, speed optimization has now become necessary than ever before.

Even if you have a stunning website with advanced functionalities even then, your success is not guaranteed, unless you optimize the speed of your website.

Fast loading speed helps your visitors to stay longer that allows you to showcase your product/service to them. Thus, increasing the chances of sales.

Let’s Look at some of the aspects of fast loading speed that makes it imperative in this contemporary online business environment.

Why speed optimization is essential

It is part of the smooth user experience.

As page loads faster, users have to wait less and less that helps them in executing their task without any hindrance. Thus, making their experience seamless.

Low bounce rate

When the site is fast users tend to stay longer on that site, which gives you more time to convince the users to consume or buy whatever you are offering. In other words, it provides a greater chance to the user to engage with your offerings.

The search engine keeps the fast-loading websites at the top.

If a website has smooth user experience, low bounce rate, high engagement, then search engines consider that website as relevant. Fast loading speed means a high chance of ranking high on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Increase in sales.

Ranking high on the search engine ranking means high traffic. More traffic means more sales. At the end of the day speed of your WordPress website plays a significant role in your business. Thus, speed optimization becomes imperative for the growth of your business.

Many factors affect the speed of a website. For your convenience, we are only discussing those that are easy to understand. Now let’s Look at some of the metrics through which the speed of a website can be measured and later optimized.

Page speed metrics

• Load time: It is the time taken by a website to load completely. That means all the files and script must be loaded and all the HTTP requests must be fulfilled.
• Page size: Total size of all the resources of a website.
• Time taken to load the first byte: It is the time taken by the first byte of information to reach the browser after the request has been made.
• Round trip time: Time taken for the complete request of information- the time is taken for the request to reach the server and then the server to the browser.

Culprits of slow speed

Let’s get deeper into the problem of slow speed and look at some of the usual suspects that are responsible for slowing down your website. These are:

Images and media

Using media like images and videos make content engaging but, at the same time, it slows down your website. Therefore, you must be careful enough to optimize these so that you don’t have to comprise your speed for making content more engaging and vice versa.

Poor Hosting services

This technical aspect is a bit tricky and intricate. Hosting is one of the first decisions that you should focus on when building a website. Poor hosting service can slow down even a perfect website. Therefore, do some research before choosing a hosting provider.

Plugins, apps, widgets – any third-party integration

WordPress has an advantage in terms of scalability and flexibility. The ability to use plugins, apps, widgets or any third party integration provide that advantage to WordPress. At times these third party scripts and codes can create an issue regarding security and speed. Therefore, if you want to take advantage of these plugins and third party codes, make sure that it comes from a reliable source and are safe to use.

WordPress themes

Themes are not just design templates. They can provide a lot of functionality to a website. A complex WordPress theme is usually slower. Therefore, you should always strike a balance between complexity and speed. Hence, choose a simple theme with all the essential functionalities.

Number of redirects

Whenever you have found a broken link, you should redirect it to another link as quickly as possible. You might have done this several times but have you ever checked the destination link? I mean there is a possibility that the destination link is redirected to another link. For example

link 1 is broken and we replaced it with link 2, but link 2 is further redirected to link 3 and so on.

link 1—redirected to—>link 2—redirected to→ link 3→………—→link n

This continuous redirection is called link chain. Avoid these chains where ever it is possible. You can solve this issue by redirecting link 1 directly to link n. But in reality, discovering this problem is not easy. Sometimes, a plugin is needed to find these redirects chains.

Java scripts

Java scripts increase the server requests that affect the loading speed of a website. You have to be careful while using the java scripts and you should use only where it is necessary. Otherwise, a well-built website will also struggle with the loading speed.

How to check page speed

Before getting into the process of speed optimization, you should always check the speed of your website first. The test will give you a fair idea about where to begin and what to do. Moreover, you will know what parts of your website is already optimized. As the saying goes:

If it ain’t broke- don’t fix it.

It will save you a lot of time and energy. Let’s look at some advantages of using these tools. These apps generally are quite handy. They all do a similar job like:

• They discover all the issues which are slowing down your website
• Prioritize each problem in terms of low, medium and high risk
• They provide solutions so that you can fix them
• They can check the speed of your website for different devices

Some of the popular tools for measuring website speed are:

• Page speed insights by Google
• Pingdom
• Google Lighthouse (more advanced)
• Webpage test
• GTmetrix

By running tests in one of these tools, you will get a fair idea about the issues that need to fix. You can do it yourself or you can hire an agency or a freelancer to do it for you.

We at mobiwebapps offer similar services for speed optimization at attractive prices. If you buy our subscription plans, then there are some additional benefits like 24/7 WordPress monitoring. Check out our subscription plans.

Let’s discuss some of the best practices for optimizing the speed of your website. If you are successful in following these tips, then your website will remain fast. Moreover, it is not a one time job. You have to do it continuously. And becoming aware of these tips can help you in the longer run.

Best practices for Speed optimization

1. Choose a Quality hosting

Hosting plays a crucial role in the speed of the website. There are numerous hosting providers out there who are offering their services at cheap rates. But you must be careful to and beware of the services they are offering because it will affect your web traffic as well as page speed.

There are three categories of hosting services which are:

1. Shared Hosting
2. VPS Hosting
3. Dedicated Hosting

Shared Hosting: In this hosting type, different sites share all the resources like CPU, disk space, RAM and server. This service is the cheapest amongst all. It is suitable for low traffic and small websites.

VPS Hosting: In this, different sites only share the Server. Other resources are allocated separately to each site. This service is moderately priced and suitable for medium websites with considerable traffic.

Dedicated Hosting: In this type of service, each site has its dedicated server and resources. This type of service is the most expensive among them. It is suitable for a website with high traffic such as an eCommerce store.

Choose the hosting services for the website according to your requirements. There will always be a trade-off between the quality of the server and price. You have to be careful about this.

Bonus tip 1: Try to choose the server close to your visitors to increase the loading speed of your website.

Bonus tip 2: Opt for managed hosting, which will decrease a lot of maintenance efforts from your side and will keep your hosting servers optimized for security and speed.

2. Choose a lightweight theme

A theme serves a dual purpose for a website that is aesthetics and functionality. In other words, it is responsible for the looks and the performance of a website.

Most common mistake website owners often make is that they sacrifice the website’s performance for the aesthetics. If you choose a theme with unnecessary coding then no matter what you do for speed optimization, your website will always load slow.

So, always choose a light theme and focus more on performance and then optimize the aesthetics. This way, you will reduce the bounce rate, which gives you more opportunities to woo your customers with your beautiful designs.

Here are some of the Stunning WordPress themes which are lightweight and have good aesthetic appeal.

3. Keep your WordPress site/ core software updated

WordPress updates its software continuously by fixing all the bugs that create troubles. The advantage of the open-source system is that you tend to get multiple solutions for a single problem. For the smooth functioning of the website, the core software needs to be updated regularly.

There is a lot of innovation happening and, new versions are releasing at regular intervals. Software codes are getting short, which improves their functionality that directly impacts speed.

Moreover, using the latest version of PHP for the coding will also help you increase the speed of your website. Currently, WordPress is using the new version of PHP (version 7) which is twice as faster than its previous versions.

By using the latest languages and installing new updates, you can increase your website’s speed significantly.

4. Optimize your plugins

Often plugin is most used (for implementing a function) and most neglected (in terms of updates and maintenance). For the slow loading speed of a website, most of the times, plugins are the main contributors.

It is easy to neglect them since they work well without even updating them. But, this is a misconception. The updates may not be visible in the functionality but, it includes bug fixes, security enhancements and other upgrades that improve the overall performance.

Along with this, you have to get rid of all the unnecessary plugins that are no longer in use or are outdated. If you can’t uninstall them for whatever reason, you can also disable them. In future, if their need arises, then you can activate them. By doing this, you can speed up your website significantly.

Apart from this, to improve the overall security of the website, use plugins from reliable sources only. Always check their positive and negative reviews. This way, you can access the overall picture of how the plugin will function and what are the issues that may arise in the future. This pro-activeness will save you a lot of effort in the future.

5. Image Optimization

It is wise to use high-quality images to your website. It makes your website attractive and engaging. However, this too has its downfall. High-quality photos are large. Thus, they need compression, which is a separate problem in itself.

Compressions are of two types :

• Lossy Compression
• Lossless Compression

Lossy compression reduces the file size significantly, but it adversely affects the quality of the file. Whereas, lossless compression doesn’t reduce the size significantly, but it retains the quality of the image.

Therefore, you have to choose compression techniques according to the significance of the images that you are using. Moreover, optimizing all of them on the website is hard. For that, there are plenty of plugins available in the market that can make your task easy for you.

6. Database optimization

As your business grows, data stored in your databases grow even more rapidly. It goes unnoticed until a crisis emerges out of nowhere. We tend to ignore the task of organizing data efficiently, which by-the-way is a crucial thing in improving the speed.

With time your website accumulates a lot of data which needed to be processed and stored neatly. It is a pretty messy task for a non-programmer, but there are plenty of plugins that can do this task without requiring you to be a technical wizard.

Also, there are plenty of service providers that offer database optimization services at a nominal price.

Apart from that, there are some best practices you should follow for a cleaner database:

• Use a High-performance CPU
• Allocate more memory
• Carry out data defragmentation regularly
• Keep your database up-to-date by using the latest version.

7. Enable caching Systems

Caching is a technique in which the subset of data is stored often in browsers and servers. This reduces the amount of time spent to retrieve the data from its data source and hence increases the loading speed.

WordPress has this functionality. It converts dynamically generated pages into a static HTML page to reduce the processing time for the server.

8. Use CDN

For loading a website, the user’s web browser has to download the website’s data. The user and the server are usually far from each other. It often takes a lot of time, to process the requests and for transfer of the files. Businesses are using the content delivery network (CDN) to avoid this situation. CDN distributes the files to multiple servers across the network of servers located at different places. When a visitor request file then the closest server sends the data to the user which reduces the time. Moreover, if that server is down, then the next nearest server will send the data, which also reduce the errors related to the server.

9. Minify the codes

Minifying a code means removing unnecessary part of code by getting rid of the code formatting and whitespaces. Hence reduces the number of the HTTP requests which directly impacts the page loading speed. You can use various tools online or even a plugin for minification. Nowadays, speed optimization plugins are automatically taking care of this.

10. Reduce server requests

The website before loading on the visitor’s browser requests some essential files like CSS, Javascripts and media to download. A large number of components on your website means a large number of server requests which means high loading time and vice versa. Therefore, only use CSS, Javascripts and media which are essential to reduce server requests.

To reduce the server requests further, carefully analyze the requested files. After that, identify the files which can be bundled into a single request and avoid the sending the unnecessary files. By doing this, you can significantly reduce the server requests. Thus, optimize the speed of your website.

Summary

Loading speed is one of the most crucial factors that affect the sales (that comes through the internet) of a business. As discussed, there are many ways through which the speed of a website be checked and enhanced. Most of the tips that we shared here can be taken care of by premium plugins. But you have to take care of things like hosting and CDN by yourself. Hence, it is advantageous to be well informed and fully aware of the environment.

If you need any help related to speed optimization or you want to optimize speed in a quick time you can avail services at mobiwebapps. You will get your optimized website for really affordable price with a quick turn around time.

But let us first discuss its origin :

In 2003 Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress. It was initially developed specifically for bloggers just like Blogspot (name changed to blogger and now owned by Google). It aimed to deliver exceptional tools to bloggers so that they make their blogs more exciting and engaging. 

In May 2004, one revolutionary change created an ecosystem and a billion-dollar industry for developers, creators, bloggers, businesses, web hosting services and much more. 

That change was the introduction of plugins. In this, any user can add new functionalities by creating new plugins which they can use and share with the community. This gives a lot of freedom to users to customize their websites.

With the time WordPress brought new updates like pages, comment moderation tools, admin dashboard, multisite networks and much more.

Now nearly two decades later, WordPress has become a powerful and popular platform on the internet. Here are some mind-boggling facts about WordPress:

• Around 30 % of websites are built with WordPress
• WordPress has nearly 60% market share of the CMS(content management system) industry
• 23% of the top 10k sites use WordPress
• BBC America, Sony Music, MTV News, The New Yorker and many well-known names are using WordPress.

After this brief history, let’s dive deeper into why so many people are using it and what makes it so appealing that sets it apart from its competitors. Let’s discuss the benefits of WordPress.

 1. WordPress is Open source and free

Open-source software is the software with the source code which everyone has the freedom to inspect, modify and enhance. 

According to wordpress.org, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2) which includes:

1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
2. The freedom to analyze the working of the program, and to alter it to your requirements.
3. The freedom to redistribute.
4. The freedom to share copies of your altered versions to others.

Today there is a community of thousands of developers who are continuously improving WordPress and making it more user-friendly.

What does this mean for you as a user? Well, open-source software brings a lot of benefits to the users like:

Control over the software and your website

Unlike the licensed software (which is not open source) WordPress gives you the freedom to make changes in the software’s code at your end. This means you can modify and personalize your website according to your needs. 

This is a rarity when it comes to web development platforms like Wix, Shopify, Weebly, Squarespace etc. Moreover, you have to pay for their software and sometimes even for their hosting as well. WordPress is a self-hosted platform which means you have the freedom to choose from different web hosting providers of your choice.

Obviously, there will be other expenses like domain and web hosting like any other website. 

This means it is one of the most economical ways of creating and maintaining a website.

Also, you will own your data and create backups whenever you want. You can also migrate your website however you like. But in the case of some paid platforms (like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify), this often comes at a high cost. Sometimes for you moving your data can’t be as easy as it is in WordPress.

Frequent updates

The second most significant thing about WordPress is that it releases updates regularly. With each new update, they fix the bugs, remove security anomalies and add new functionalities.

This is the reason why WordPress has evolved from just a blogging platform to become a powerful platform for every kind of website. You can build a website ranging from static websites to dynamic e-commerce, written blogs to video streaming, community-based to news portals and many more.

Long term stability

As it is open source which means no organisation has its sole ownership of WordPress. This is really important because you are not at the mercy of that organisation.

Your website will remain there forever because WordPress can not be restricted or phased out just like any other typical product of an organisation.

This means you don’t have to worry about the long term stability of the platform.

Better security

Security has become one of the most important aspects of maintaining the website. The increasing cyber-attacks in the form of ransomware and spyware pose a security threat to the corporates. Thus, forcing businesses to spend billions of dollars on cybersecurity.

WordPress has a large community which means that there will be a lot of eyes looking for security loopholes which can be discovered and resolved quickly. This makes it really secure. Apart from this, in every new version WordPress brings changes to enhance the security.

WordPress has done a great job by introducing some of the fundamental security measures like:

• Gave the options of limiting the wrong login attempts
• Limit the access for different users
• Logging out idle users.

And much more

These provisions can provide quite reasonable security to a website.

2. WordPress is easy to set up

Setting up WordPress is very easy. Some of the hosting providers are offering one-click WordPress install, which makes the process even simpler.

Moreover, its manual installation is pretty straight forward too. There are plenty of resources and guides online that can teach you how to install WordPress manually. 

The best part of setting up WordPress is that it requires no coding at all. You can set up a simple website without writing any code. The inbuilt content management system let you design pages according to your needs. 

You can further make it more advanced and complex through coding or by using the relevant plugins.

After setting up the structure of your website, you can start writing a blog right away. This is because blogs are inbuilt to WordPress, as it was primarily developed as a blogging platform. It feels natural when it comes to blogging in WordPress.

3. WordPress is Customisable

By now, you might be aware of the customizability of WordPress. This is because of two reasons i.e.

1. Themes
2. Plugins

Let’s discuss them one-by-one.

Themes

Themes are generally the design templates that give looks and provide basic functionality to a website. Unlike templates of other website builders, WordPress themes are more powerful. 

Each theme comes with its own page builders and setting panels which let you customise the design, layout and even functionality according to your needs. You can:

• Change colour, image size, block size 
• Add media 
• Edit the background 
• Insert & modify sliders 
• Apply CSS 
• Build popups 
• Create forms 
• Insert tables
• and much more.

You can do all of this without any coding skills. Isn’t it wonderful?

There are thousands of themes available on the internet both free as well as premium, which comes with advanced functionalities.

You can find themes for every type like for blogs, e-commerce, social networks, forums, podcasts etc. You will get amazed at the variety that is available online.

Their designs are often stunning, although some of the premium themes come at an additional price. But if you want to, then you can choose the free themes as well. It’s really your choice!

If you want a custom theme, then you can do that also. Do you know the best part? You can personalise that theme later on just like any other theme.

Just like themes which give stunning visuals to your website lets talk about the second aspect of customisation, which is plugins.

Plugins

As discussed earlier, the introduction of the plugins was a revolutionary step in the history of WordPress. Now, we will see why this was so revolutionary.

First, let us discuss, what is a plugin?

“A plugin is a small software which runs on top of the WordPress platform to execute specific tasks to provide the desired functionalities.” 

These are just like mobile apps, you have to install them and voila! You can have your desired functionality. This means you can transform your website according to your vision.

It is a saying in the WordPress community that goes like:

“There is a plugin for every functionality that you can think of”

Do you know what this means? 

It means low coding and hassle-free implementation of the advance features.

If you still can’t find the right plugin, you can develop it from scratch. There is a separate industry for plugin development. Some developers earn their living through plugin development.

Plugins are truly magical because it lets you change the entire website. Let’s suppose you want to implement e-commerce into your website. 

This will require days of complex coding. There will be a lot of parameters to take care of. Instead, you can install a woo-commerce plugin which will implement the advance e-commerce feature to your websites. 

Simple, hassle-free and quick.

There are plugins for everything i.e.

• Search Engine optimization
• Security
• Speed Optimization
• Backups and Recovery
• Migration and Cloning
• Database optimization
• Data visualization 
• And much more

4. WordPress is easy to use

Well, by now, it might sound too repetitive. But it is the truth and is the most incredible thing about WordPress- Ease of use.

Let me break down this feature into various factors so that you can evaluate by yourself.

Compatible with many media types

When it comes to compatibility of media, WordPress is a king. It supports nearly all media types that exist in cyberspace. Whether it is a weird image file or a barely known video format, there is a very high probability that it accepts them.

Take a look at the list of accepted media types on WordPress. (link: https://wordpress.com/support/accepted-filetypes/)

Same is true for other document formats as well. Moreover, you can embed any media in WordPress that means you can embed youtube videos, Instagram photos, tweets, a blog post etc.

Simple interface

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to operate WordPress. It has a user-friendly dashboard from where you can change any setting that you want.

It has an inbuilt drag and drop feature which lets you edit your content with more freedom.

Blocks feature

WordPress lets you create your content in the form of blocks. Each block can be customised separately without affecting other blocks. You can even group different blocks to customise them as a whole.

Intuitive text editor

If you have ever used a text editor, then you already are a master at using WordPress’s editor. It automatically creates new blocks whenever there is an addition of media. This editor will automatically convert your text and style into code. If you want to tweak the coding, then you can do that too.

Handy keyboard shortcuts

Yes, there are plenty of shortcuts that come handy when you are working on a website. Shortcuts make the process a lot quicker and efficient. Here are some of the shortcuts that you can use while working on WordPress

Easy to learn

There are some advanced features which can confuse you. But, trust me, these features are easy to learn. Thanks to its popularity, there are plenty of resources available to learn WordPress. 

These all things and many other things as well make WordPress easy to use. Plus, WordPress is evolving continuously to become more user friendly. This is what makes it even more exciting.

5. WordPress is Scalable and flexible

Everything big usually starts with something small. On most platforms, you can’t expand your website after a certain level. But this is not the case with WordPress. There is virtually no limit to what you can do with your WordPress website.

You can transform your simple website into a giant e-commerce store or any other complex website. You can further add more advanced features to your existing website with the help of plugins and APIs.

This feature is commonly known as Scalability, which is what makes WordPress so popular. You can either expand or limit your website’s functionalities whenever you like. The power lies with you.

Further, you can also expand your website by using third party APIs.

Types of websites that you can develop via WordPress are:

• Blog or personal websites
• Business Websites
• Ecommerce
• Job board
• Business Directory
• Question & Answer Websites
• Non-Profit and Religious websites
• Portfolio websites
• Online communities
• Coupon Websites
• Auction websites
• Knowledgebase websites
• Podcasting websites
• And many more

The list is endless, and the possibilities are infinite.

6. Integration

In today’s world, there are plenty of softwares and tools available online for analysis and marketing. These tools are useful in building successful business strategies. If they can be linked to your websites, then it can make the processes fast and effective. 

Take for an example, there is a tool for inventory management. It is already a useful tool, but you can increase its effectiveness by integrating this tool with your e-commerce website built in WordPress. You can keep track of your inventory on a real-time basis. You can further use this data to form new strategies.

Some of the tools that you can integrate with WordPress are:

Google analytics

This is no secret that google analytics has become a bloodline for any business. It provides crucial data and reports that can improve your business processes. It tells a lot about your visitors which helps you in enhancing your product to serve your customers well.

WordPress lets you integrate with google analytics without any fuss. You can make this process simpler by installing a plugin which will set up google analytics in a single click.

Not only google analytics, but you can also integrate any analytic tools that you like. It will integrate seamlessly with WordPress.

Maps

For a local business, location is the key. Popular tools for maps like google maps are often used to show the exact location. This integration is pretty simple and straightforward. Moreover, it is mobile friendly too.

Payment gateways

Conducting business online may sometimes require online transactions. For that, you need some payment gateways. WordPress integrates with nearly all payment gateways. Some of the most popular payment gateways that are used on WordPress websites are:

• Paypal
• Stripe
• Authorize.net
• Amazon Pay
• Square payments

Marketing tools

There are a lot of marketing activities that are being performed simultaneously. It becomes quite tedious to keep track of them all. A website often acts as an anchor which lets you perform various activities at one place.

• Activities like lead generation
• Email marketing
• Social media management
• Etc.

These all have their tools which can be integrated with WordPress. 

For sales and customer support, it is compatible with various CRM tools which let you handle your clients at a single place. This truly makes your life easier. 

These integrations make the WordPress class apart from the rest. This is because other platforms have limited options when it comes to integration. They often put limits on what you can integrate with their platform. Further, they charge a premium fee to enable this feature and yet they don’t give you complete freedom.

WordPress also lets you integrate with no additional fee and gives you complete freedom.

7. WordPress is SEO friendly

It focuses on user experience

Since its inception, WordPress has been focusing on enhancing the user experience. With the introduction of plugins, APIs and themes. It has made it easier for developers to make user-centric websites.

Good user experience reduces the bounce rate of the website, which is one of the significant parameters for Search engine optimization. Thus impacts the ranking on search engines.

It allows you to create custom permalinks with ease

WordPress lets you customize the permalink. You can add your targeted keywords into the URLs which are friendly to search engine crawlers. The URLs will be easily read and shared when it is simple & easy to read.
Thus it gives you the freedom of making your content more shareable.

Meta-data is easy to manage

When it comes to SEO, you have to think about both your visitors and search engine crawlers. Crawlers don’t understand what you have written and can’t process images. Therefore, it becomes crucial to make websites readable to them, as well.

This can be done by optimizing the meta-data. WordPress offers simple options to edit meta-data that includes:

• Meta titles
• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords (not as relevant today as they were in the past)
• Alt text

By altering all these parameters, one can optimize their website quite easily. This process can further be simplified by using SEO plugins like :

• Yoast
• Rankmath
• all-in-one-SEO

Fast loading time

High-speed internet in today’s world is omnipresent, which means things will load up faster on the web. Moreover, people’s attention span has reduced quite a lot which demands low loading timing for websites.

WordPress does exactly that. It has tools and plugins that help the users to optimize the speeds of the websites in an easy and quick way.

It is highly responsive

You might have noticed that we as humans are now spending a lot of time on portable devices like mobile phones and tablets. So, it becomes imperative to develop and design websites that are compatible with these devices.

Google has made it clear that its algorithm will give advantage to the sites that are highly responsive to mobile phones.

WordPress has this feature inbuilt in its code. Every website that you create in the WordPress adapts itself according to screen size & resolution of the devices.

Moreover, you can customize your website for different screen sizes. This makes it even more useful.

These all factors are an essential part of SEO which it handles with ease. This means if your website is SEO friendly, then you will have a high chance of getting seen on search result pages. Thus, increases traffic to your website and hence increases your business. 

Conclusion

We have covered nearly all the essential features of WordPress. Now it is quite evident that it provides a lot of features that make the user’s life easier. 

It lets you customise your website without any prior knowledge of coding. That doesn’t mean it is useful only for non-coders, in fact, it is equally loved by coders also. This is because, with coding, you can take your WordPress website to the next level.

This is why WordPress is so popular and is considered the best CMS.

The best part is that there are plenty of web developers and agencies that can help you with WordPress. Like Mobiwebapps, which provides a variety of services to you from web development to customisation, from website maintenance to 24/7 support. Moreover, you can choose from a gallery of stunning designs which has the option of the preview. You can see what your website will be like even before development. 

Our plans are carefully crafted to suit the needs of every business. You can have your website ready just in one day at just $99. Check out our WordPress services.

In this digital world, everything and everyone is connected through the internet. It has now become imperative to mould your business according to the changing environment.

Websites have now become the new faces of the businesses. That’s why everyone is currently focusing on making an impeccable website.

There are several benefits of creating a website like: 

• It shows your professionalism.
• You can showcase your products and portfolio.
• It helps you in branding.
• It gives you a competitive advantage.
• It helps you in building a global customer base.

And many more.

To make your life easy, we’ve compiled a list of ten points that you should be aware of before making a website.

Let’s get started

1. Establish the aim of your website

It is an old saying

‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’.

Therefore, you must always plan before doing anything. While planning, there are a lot of things that need to be addressed, which may overwhelm you. Don’t worry, we’ll go step by step so that you can understand and plan well.

So the first thing is to:

 1.1. Define Website’s Goals And Objectives

There is a lot of confusion regarding the meaning of goals and objectives. Let’s try to explain it thoroughly.

Goals are the outcomes that you want to achieve whereas, objectives are the actions that needed to be taken to achieve that goal. 

You must be aware of the goals that you want to achieve through your website. By doing so, you will get a clear idea of how to achieve those goals.  This is because objectives can only be formed based on the goals that you want to achieve.

Few of the goals that can be achieved by the website are listed below:

Goals:

• Building the brand
• Position the owner as an industry authority or expert(Becoming the industry expert through content marketing)
• Grow the email list (Growing the email lists)
• Increasing the leads
• Gives sales a push
• Creating awareness
• And many more.

Objectives:

Now, let’s discuss the objectives. So, these need to be SMART in nature. That is:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Achievable

R – Realistic

T – Timely

SMART objectives help you to reach your goal more consistently.

To give you an idea, we have compiled a list of objectives that a website can achieve. 

• Achieving a conversion rate of 5% in the next quarter.
• To increase the sales of accessories by 50% in next 6 months.
• Obtain at least 50 leads from the website per month.
• Increase the readers by 10 % every quarter.
• Reduce the bounce rate by 25% within a year.

1.2. Who The Website Is For?

This is the most critical step in this journey. Your success is not guaranteed even if you’ve made a perfect design with top-class functionality. This can happen when the website is not designed keeping your targeted audience in mind. 

Therefore, it is recommended to know more about your visitors. This can be done by:

• Conducting market research
• Listening to the customer’s feedback
• Conducting competitors analysis
• Analysing analytics data from your existing website (If you have one), social media and other platforms.

You can use the gathered data and can divide your targeted audience according to some criteria to serve them more effectively. These can be segmented according to their:

• Geography
• Age 
• Gender
• Behaviour 
• Common interest

Any many more.

This will give you a fair idea about what your visitors are looking for. You can use the gathered data and build a buyers persona which will help you in building a website that your customers will love.

1.3. What People Are Looking For?

Now that you’ve understood your audience well, the next thing is to know about their intentions – why they are visiting our platform. Go through the following questions and try to answer them :

• What problems are they facing?
• What solutions are they looking for?
• What goals do they want to achieve?
• What do they need to learn?
• What do they want to know or find out?
• How were they tackling this problem earlier?

This exercise can give you a fair idea about the needs of your potential customers. Further, you will get more clarity about functionalities that you might want to add to your website.

Using all this information create a document for your website. So that you can use this later for your development purposes. Moreover, this can also act as a reference document whenever you want to audit your website.

1.4. What Is Being Offered?

Now that You have made the basic structure of your website, it’s time to figure out what should be offered to them. Yeah, there can be plenty of things that you might want to offer to your customers, but you have to be very careful. In other words, you must be aware of the buyer’s journey.

A buyer’s journey is a collection of processes that a buyer goes through before buying a product. Most common steps that are included in this journey are:

Awareness

Where a buyer recognises his problem and looks for a solution.

In this, your goal should be to educate your visitors so that they can solve their problem. This will help you to build authority and gain their trust, which will be pretty useful in future.

Through blogs, you can educate your visitors and can become a knowledge leader.

Consideration

Buyer is aware of the solution and considering various options to choose from.

At this stage, you should showcase various benefits and USPs of your products/services. Moreover, you should emphasize how your product can solve their problem.   

This can be done by designing a product/ services page highlighting their benefits. 

Creating a special offer and something similar to attract customers to buy from you.

Purchase

The buyer makes a purchase decision

Making the checkout page smooth and easy to use by integrating various payment gateways.

These are only a few examples of how you can structure your website. Rest is up to you how well you can use your imagination and experience to make a smooth user experience.

1.5. What Action Visitors Should Take

A visitor often needs a little push. That’s where calls to actions come into the picture. You need to be very specific about the call to actions to be used and where. If your CTAs (call to action) are not consistent with the flow, then it will yield nothing.

Suppose, you have placed a call to action at the right place but, you have not given the relevant link then, this will not serve any purpose. Therefore, research a little bit about them before taking the plunge.

Here is a list of few call to actions that you can use on your website.:

• Subscribe
• Sign up
• Register
• Enrol
• Buy
• Download
• Click
• Join
• Fill out a form
• Request a quote
• Send a message
• Book an appointment
• File a ticket

So far, whatever we’ve shared with you is just the first step of creating a website. The main aim of the comprehensive first step was to form a reference document which surely will make your life easier later on. 

Now you’ll learn about various other aspects which should be taken care of in the web development process.

2. Domain

Before starting any business, you’ve got to name and register it first. Likewise, before making a website, its name should also be registered first. This is popularly known as Domain registration. Without getting deep into the technicalities, you just have to remember it as an identity of your website, which needs to be registered.

 A domain name is a crucial part of branding. Reasons for Choosing the right name for your website are:

• It affects your ranking on the search engine.
• It is part of your brand identity. That can’t be changed once it’s fixed.
• Your desired domain name may not be available. 
• If it is written in a local language, then it can become a little problematic for global audiences.

So, it’s quite clear why it is necessary. The next thing that you should be focusing upon is finding the appropriate domain name for your website. Here are a few tips that’ll help you in choosing the right name for your domain.

• Your Domain name must be related to your business in some sense.
• It should be SEO friendly. Do not use special characters and numbers. Try to add a keyword related to your business.
• To make it more attractive, try to come up with a short and sticky word/phrase.
• It should be clear and concise.
• The name should be easy to read and pronounce. So that it can be remembered and recognized easily.
• Use a domain name generator when stuck.
• Use appropriate domain extensions (.com, .org, .net are more popular)

Now that you’ve decided your domain name. It’s time to discuss hosting, which is a different ball game altogether.

3. Hosting

Hosting is the online storage where all the files of your website get stored. Therefore, you must be careful while choosing the right hosting provider. If done right, it will save a lot of money and effort.

Before choosing the right hosting service providers, you need to figure out a few things.

• Amount of traffic that your website might receive. Be realistic about this as it can impact your budget in a big way.
• Where should your hosting servers be located? It can have a huge impact on the loading speed of your website.
• WIll you use payment gateways? This will need a more secure hosting service.
• Do you want to use website builders or want to build on platforms like WordPress? We will discuss this in detail in the technology section.

Okay, now you probably have a fair idea about your requirements. Let’s figure out the criteria on which you can compare different hosting providers. 

There are a plethora of technical specifications of hosting services, but for simplicity, we’re mentioning only the essential ones. 

Server types and their specification

Comparing products specifications is an effective method which you can use whenever you’re buying any technological gadget. Hosting is also a gadget that you will take on lease, but you can only access it remotely. Therefore, for comparison, you must be aware of specifications like: (reference 10)

• Storage and RAM.
• Bandwidth and data transfer
• Uptime rates and reliability
• Security and support

Apart from this, you must be extra careful about

• The cancellation policy. 
• Renewal policy.
• Constituents of the technical support that you will get. 

Being vigilant about these policies will protect you from all the disappointments and frustrations.

Next step after choosing a hosting provider is to figure on which platform your website should be built.

4. Technology

From here, your actionable tasks will begin. If you are tech-savvy, then you might want to build a website all by yourself. But if you are not, then don’t worry, there are a lot of options available for you as well.

If you want to build your website all by yourself, then you must be aware of the fact that developing a website is an exhausting process. You need to be :

• Consistent in your work, otherwise you will not be able to complete your website.
• Committed to the mock-up plan or the reference document. 
• Careful about the security and must back your files regularly.

If you don’t have any technical skills, then you can build your websites on various website builders. Let us discuss their pros and cons. 

Pros

• They are easy to use, even for a non-technical person.
• They offer hosting within their plans
• They are cheap and fast

Cons

• Not suitable for professional business
• They have limited features that are not scalable
• They are not SEO friendly

Popular website builders are:

• Wix
• Squarespace
• WordPress.com
• Weebly

If you have some technical skills, then we recommend you to build your website on platforms like: 

• WordPress
• Magento
• Drupal
• Joomla  

You will have a lot more freedom while creating a website on these platforms. Here we’ll online talk about WordPress as it is the most popular and widely used platform in the world. 

There are plenty of reasons why WordPress is so popular. Some of its advantages are:

• It is an open-source content management system which is free to use.
• WordPress websites are responsive and fast.
• WordPress websites are often SEO friendly.
• The blog feature is integrated into WordPress. It is a well-known fact that WordPress is best for blogging websites.
• It is scalable, that means any customisation whether implementing e-commerce or adding unique functionality you can do almost everything.
• There are plenty of plugins available for WordPress. These make your life easier.

5. Design

Sometimes, Choosing a design can be a nightmare. You might have experienced the pain, especially when there are a lot of options available. Well, there is no need to worry now, just follow these easy to remember tips:

Your design should be aligned with your goals.

Based on the goals of your website, you should choose your website design. Take an example of a fundraising company that might need a simple design that can evoke an emotional response from the visitors.

But, a restaurant might need a design which can evoke a similar aesthetic feel as their restaurant. 

Your design should be simple  

Even after thousands of years, we humans still love simplicity. It comes naturally to us. Pick a theme which is simple in looks and has all the functionality to fulfil your goals.

The design of the website should not be overly complicated, which acts as a hindrance rather than an enabler to the users.

Always remember it is a tool for your customers to solve their problems. It is not a fancy theme park where they are coming to admire the beauty of your website’s design. In short, the website should be able to perform its function. This should be the topmost priority. 

Your design should be Translation or multilingual ready

In this global world, barriers are blurring. You should be ready to transform your website to accommodate this change.

Before choosing a theme, you should always look for multilingual or translation functionality. Maybe in the future, you want to expand your business to a new country where language might act as a barrier. Don’t let that happen.

Your design should be SEO friendly and compatible across various browsers and devices

Look for themes which are compatible with SEO. They should be :

• Responsive
• Compatible with various devices and browsers
• Have low loading time
• Provides easy navigation and strong hierarchy

Is your design customizable?

The themes should be customizable. That means, their functionalities can be enhanced using code. As your business grows, your website should also grow with it.  

Earlier personalization was a luxury, but today it is a necessity. To make a smooth experience for the visitors, you have to customize a little bit.

Some themes have issues with the plugins and page builders. Therefore, before choosing the design, check out whether it is compatible with various plugins and page builders or not.

6. SEO

You might have often observed how Google shows the most relevant pages in the search results. To understand that, you need to decode the enigma of the search engine algorithm, which is continuously evolving. Trust me, it is not an easy task.

But by optimizing your website, you can increase your chances of featuring on the first page of the results. Let’s check out why search engine optimization is necessary:

• Organic search is often the main source of website traffic.
• It builds trust and adds credibility to your brand.
• Good SEO also signifies good user experience, which automatically will help your visitors. Hence impacts the buying cycle.
• Helps in creating brand awareness.

Tips regarding search engine optimization:

Keyword research

Keyword research is the first step in search engine optimization. Keywords are a combination of words or phrases that your customer uses in a google search.

If you are aware of those keywords, then you can optimize your website according to those keywords. 

Keywords research is conducted by doing:

• Competitors analysis.
• Using keyword research tools like ubersuggest, Moz, semrush, ahrefs etc.
• Analysis of your customers’ feedback.

• Use meta tags and descriptions.

Now use those keywords and write them into meta titles and descriptions of your pages. These are the ones which will be shown when your website comes up when someone searches for that keyword. Therefore, it should be attractive enough so that the visitors click on your link.

Fast loading speed

With the advent of high-speed internet, our patience with the websites has decreased. We now have less and less attention span. If a website takes too long to load, we just exit it without giving it’s content any chance.

This is the harsh reality of this era. Therefore, you must optimize your website for speed. Less loading time will also decrease the bounce rate, which is a significant factor in search engine optimization. 

Internal and external linking

Whenever you visit a store, you look for labels for navigation because you want to know where your desired product is located. Likewise, on the website, you should provide internal and external links for better navigation. This will also connect your various pages with each other, which will enhance your rankings on the search engine results page.

7. Google Analytics

Data has now become the new gold. Therefore, the collection of data is the new gold rush. You have probably heard about google analytics. It is one of the most popular data collection and web analysis tools. 

It provides a lot of information about the visitors. This can be used for proper targeting of your products. It reveals various details about the visitors like (data is gathered anonymously to protect the identity of the visitor) :

• Geography
• Age distribution
• New vs old users
• Preferences

Along with this, it gives other valuable indicators like :

• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Total visitors
• source/medium of the traffic

And much more.

You can use this tool to create an effective marketing strategy. By understanding your target audience well, you can design your products to better serve your customers. A lot of stuff can be done through this tool.

You can set up google analytics for websites by creating an account on google analytics. Using a plugin, you can add a google tag which will gather your website’s data. Just remember the name because you will be using this quite a lot. 

8. Security

This is the last but definitely not the least important thing which you should be aware of before building the website. Website security has become imperative because a lot of websites are getting hacked. Here are the reasons why you should be concerned about your website security:

• Hackers target your customers
• You can incur a Revenue loss
• Hacking can compromise your business reputation
• Sometimes websites get blacklisted when they are hacked consistently.

You’ll be surprised to know that many of the hacked websites can be secured by taking simple measures. Here are these simple measures which you can follow to prevent an attack on your website:

• Keep your software up-to-date
• Install a SSL certificate
• Enable different access levels
• Implement reliable passwords
• Set up automatic updates
• Install a security plugin

By taking care of all these things, you will be able to build your website more effectively. This is a complete guide that you can refer to whenever you get stuck or whenever you want to audit your website. 

Always remember, before jumping into any pool, you should be aware of its depth. This will increase the chances of your success.

If you’re wondering whether or not you should create a website for your business then you’re not alone. After all, this can be a big decision for your business.

Any business that exists has its physical presence, whether it’s an office space, a storefront, or any physical address. It makes it easier for purchasers to reach you and to buy products and services from you.

Traditionally this was the norm, but our world has changed dramatically during a short period. The main reason behind this transformation is quick advancements in internet technology.

People now have a strong presence on the internet, which means they spend most of their time on the internet. So naturally, want sell where your customers are.

Since, COVID 19 crisis, social distancing and working from home has become the new normal. People prefer to buy things online whenever possible.

This shift in consumer’s behavior has forced businesses to move online. But, many still are wondering whether or not they should build their website.

Developing your website has become easier than before. Below are the few reasons why you should create an internet site for your business.

1. It shows your professionalism- You need a digital business card and an online face.

As consumers are spending more time online, they will look you up on the internet before purchasing anything from you.

On your website, you can display awards and recognitions of your business. Moreover, you will come across as a credible source when you will use a branded email address. 

Also, you can be as creative as you would like to be on your website. You can provide a unique user experience to your potential customers so that they can feel your product or services even before purchasing it. 

2. A website gives you the opportunity to showcase your Products and Portfolio

Your website is the best place to showcase your products and services. You can use your creativity to create a unique experience for your customers that can lead to more sales.

Not only this, but you can also share testimonials of your happy customers which can act as social proof of your service.

 The best way to build a favorable relationship with your potential customers is by earning their trust.  So, a website is a perfect place for creating credibility and building trust for your business.

3. A website helps you to compete with your competitors who are already on the web.

There is a very high probability that your competitors already have their websites. If you don’t have a website then, this will give your competitors an added advantage which means you have to work even harder.

A Website gives you the perfect opportunity to show your customers how you are different and better from your competitors. Also, you will be able to compete with the giants in your industry which were impossible in the past.

4. Creating a website lets you grow your business globally by ranking on search engines

You can make your business global without spending a fortune. You can rank your website on the search engine by optimizing it for business-specific keywords. These keywords are relevant throughout the world. Therefore, search engines can help you in attracting international customers.

The best part of having a website is that you can run ad campaigns on social media and search engines with ease. This is because a website collects useful data of your customers which is crucial in designing new products or improving the existing ones.

Moreover, these ad campaigns are of low cost as compared to traditional advertising.

5. A website can help you in customer service

If your customer is facing a problem and is looking for a quick solution then, you can give your customers plenty of options through your website. You can help them through FAQ’s, product guides, help forums and providing contact details so that you can resolve their queries.

This way, you can establish trust and build a loyal customer base.

6. Building a website Helps you in building your brand

Can you imagine running a business without creating a brand? I don’t think so. A brand gives you an identity and helps in proper positioning of your business in the customer’s mind.

People connect with businesses through stories. Brands are ideal for conveying stories. Through your website, you can tell the origin story of your business; you can use images and videos to make your story engaging. It will help your customers to connect emotionally with your brand.

You can showcase what your business stands for and how you are achieving your vision. You can also highlight the importance of your customers and how they are contributing to fulfilling a common goal.

Bonus Reason !

7. It is a lot cheaper to build your website

There are plenty of affordable options out there. But I will only talk about mobiwebapps.

On this platform, you can buy your website at $99 only. At this price, you will get a highly scalable WordPress website.

Mobiwebapps also offers various other options where you can get premium features like : 

• eCommerce 
• social media integration 
• google map integration 
• marketing plugin and much more 

if you purchase their monthly plan then, you will get free hosting for a year. If you would like to know more about this, then click here.