In today’s fully-digitized era, it’s foolish for a business owner to touch highs without having a business website. It’s a tool that can bring adequate attention and expands a business’s reach. But, having a website is not enough. You need a super impressive website, fully optimized, has the right kind of widgets in the right place, and can keep the visitors hooked for hours.
Such website development is not easy unless you’re using WordPress. Emerged as the world’s most powerful CMS, WordPress has become businesses’ first choice for creating highly engaging websites.
Around 810 million websites are built using WordPress, which is a huge number. Of course, it is, and this is because of the laudable features and facilities that this CMS offers to the developers.
In this post, we will learn about these key capabilities and how businesses from different domains can reap the benefits of them to build a highly functional website.
WordPress and its Relevance in 2023
Created by two folks in the year 2003, WordPress is going strong even in 2023. It started as a blogging platform and became a full-fledged CMS platform over the years because of constant evolution.
As time passed and demands modified, WordPress modified too and launched new features. For instance, WordPress launched the Gutenberg Editor in the year 2018 seeing the demand for an editing system. This tool is a block-based editing tool with modern capabilities and gives undivided attention to user-friendliness.
Seeing the security threats, WordPress has launched automatic security updates. It enjoys huge community support, which is a great thing for its users.
The ecosystem of WordPress is so strong that developers will get every possible help from this platform itself. Whether you need themes or compatible plugins, everything is here to help you.
- Other than these, have a look at a few notes that confirm that this CMS is still relevant in the year 2023.
- The user base of WordPress has been growing since its launch. It holds 60% of the total CMS share, and it’s growing with each passing day.
- WordPress and all of its offerings are highly SEO-friendly. With its usage, it’s easy to design an SEO-friendly website with the least possible effort.
- It’s an open-source software allowing everyone to use it. The hosting cost is also affordable, making it a perfect choice for businesses of all sorts and shapes.
- WordPress is not adaptable in that a business can create a simple portfolio website and a fully-functional e-Commerce store with the same sources.
- WordPress supports more than 160 languages making it suitable for global audiences.
- For all your queries and concerns, there is dedicated customer care support that provides immediate assistance.
Who Should Use WordPress and Why?
As you’re now aware of the fact that WordPress is still as viable as possible, it’s time to learn which business should use it for what reasons.
#1 – eCommerce Businesses
The eCommerce industry has experienced a massive boom in the past few years, and it takes a lot to establish it. One key resource you need to establish an online store is a powerful website, and WordPress offers a wide range of resources for this purpose. For instance:
- There are ample eCommerce plugins to choose from. You have plugins for inventory tracking, payments, shipping, marketing, and many other crucial workflows. With these, running and managing an online store becomes a piece of cake.
- WordPress supports endless customization that allows online store owners to optimize the store according to different customer profiles.
- You have eCommerce-specified themes to pick. These pre-built themes make designing an online store an effortless task. WordPress benefits for eCommerce businesses are copious.
#2 – SaaS Product Owners
SaaS product owners should use WordPress for two purposes; building a website and supporting product development. Here is how and why.
- As a powerful CMS, it provides tons of pre-built themes and plugins that you can use to build a website instantly.
- You have a wide range of default data models around post architecture to use. Hence, it’s a powerful tool for content creation. As it uses MySQL as a database, it is easy to use WordPress for creating tables that are part of data modeling.
- When used for product development, WordPress provides capabilities like user registration, authentication, and core query models.
#3 – Service Provider Companies
If you own a business that offers direct services/products to the customers, it’s important to reach out to the customers impressively so that they become your loyal customers. WordPress, as a CMS tool, helps you make it happen as:
- You can integrate multiple customer relationship management resources like appointment scheduling tools, email marketing platforms, and more over a single click. They all streamline their business operations and enhance customer experience.
- WordPress provides numerous plugins and tools for lead generation and conversion optimization. With their help, it’s easy for a service provider to create contact forms, generate testimonies, engage leads, and perform other actions that are required to build a strong business-customer relationship.
- WordPress offers a wider range of SEO features that you can use to make your business website accessible to the target audiences. For instance, you can provide SEO-friendly URLs, customizable meta tags, and engaging meta descriptions.
#4 – Bloggers and Vloggers
Blogging, as well as Vlogging, is a prosperous career option for all of us, and one can make big in this domain using WordPress. WordPress has many capabilities that empower beginner bloggers and help them rise.
- It’s an open-source and free tool. So, anyone can own an engaging website easily.
- The platform is easy to use. So, you don’t require any special skills to get started.
- Even if you have no special knowledge of SEO, you can build a fully optimized website with WordPress, as you have multiple plugins and resources for end-to-end SEO optimization.
Precautions to Take Before Your Site Goes Live with WordPress
By now, you must have clarity on the fact that WordPress is indeed one of the most powerful CMS tools to own for businesses belonging to any domain and industry. It does provide bountiful capabilities that are hard to see elsewhere.
Its automation is laudable. But can you trust it blindly? You can, but you’ve to take full charge of your website and keep a few things in mind before launching a WordPress website.
- Don’t make the mistake of going live without taking a backup. Take the backup of every component of your website, including the files and databases. It works like a safety net for you in case anything goes wrong during the launch or subsequent updates.
- Experts recommend testing the website extensively before a launch. If any of your website components are not working properly, it will hamper the user experience heavily. So, check all web pages, links, forms, and functionalities beforehand. Test your website on different devices and browsers to ensure proper responsiveness and compatibility. WordPress testing benefits are endless, and you must ensure that you get all of them.
- Scan your website for any broken links or missing images before going live, as these components have negative impacts on the user experience and SEO of the website.
- Optimize your website’s performance to ensure fast loading times and a smooth user experience.
- Invest time and effort in installing and configuring essential plugins to support essential workflows like contact forms, backup, and security plugins.
- Check whether the website is optimized for mobile, as most of the users access a website on mobile first.
- Install a website analytics tool like Google Analytics to track visitor statistics, monitor traffic sources, and gain insights into user behavior. Keeping track of all these metrics is highly important for businesses as they all will help them to find out whether the website is bringing the right value to them.
- Enable SEO checks. A website that is not SEO-friendly will not bring any value to the business. Hence, we recommend using an SEO plugin to set up meta tags and XML sitemaps and optimize your content for relevant keywords.
- Create a maintenance plan for your WordPress site post-launch to make sure that all the plugins, themes, and WordPress core files are timely updated. If any of the website components are not timely updated, they end up causing serious performance issues. Hence, the wise move is to set up a maintenance schedule beforehand so that the website receives timely updates.
Keep these things in mind, and we’re sure that you will have a functional WordPress website ready to help you.
Use InstaWP to Test Your Site for Free
As mentioned above, testing a WordPress site before it goes live is important to make sure that the website is designed as per the goals and is capable of delivering the expected results. However, many website owners avoid doing so because of the tediousness involved in setting up a sandboxing ecosystem for early-stage testing.
InstaWP is a great solution for all kinds of WordPress websites. The change maker offers enough resources that you can use to develop a quick yet fully functional staging site for your main WordPress website. The platform offers a wide range of pre-built themes that you can use to build a website.
The best part is that you don’t have to worry about the hosting of the staging website, as InstaWP takes care of it as well. With the InstaWP Connect plugin, you can bring all of your websites together and test all of them, saving a huge deal of time and effort.
That’s not the only help you get with InstaWP. The platform offers a wide range of benefits to the table.
- The tool is fully compliant and offers a wide range of pre-built templates.
- A powerful code editor and logs viewer.
- PHP configuration for every WordPress website.
- Support for over 13 hosting platforms.
- Hassle-free migrations.
- An impressive integration profile that includes seamless connectivity with platforms like Chrome, Slack, and Drag-and-drop editor.
- Magic login facility that allows you to log in to all your WordPress websites over a single click.
Try InstaWP to test your website today.
Conclusion
WordPress is the world’s leading platform with endless capabilities. Even after two decades, this CMS is relevant and is the first choice of many website developers because of its functionalities, features, ease of usage, extensive community support, and other offerings.
eCommerce businesses, service providers, bloggers, and many other professionals can use this tool to own a powerful website and Excel. However, they need a few things in mind, like testing a site before making it live to avail benefits of using WordPress.
WordPress benefits are only bagged when the live site is functioning properly, and InstaWP is a great way to make it happen. The platform offers InstaWP Connect, a plugin that brings all of your WordPress websites together and helps you test all of them in one go.
