How to Develop a Successful WordPress Website Strategy

Regardless of the niche that you’re running your business in, a solid web presence is a must. While selling and marketing can go a long way, a website is imperative for greater brand recognition, customer retention, increasing customers’ trust, and generating new leads by promoting your services.

That is why a successful WordPress website strategy for business is growth and brand awareness. However, developing such a plan is not a walk in the park. In most cases, the process of creating a growth strategy is complicated enough to make you want to start something else.

With this article, what a powerful WordPress website strategy can do for your business growth now and into the future.

What Do You Want to Build?

Creating any type of strategy is a comprehensive process. An in-depth analysis, both from a business strategy and a website building point of view, is a must if you want to have a clear picture of what you need to build.

Starting with your buyer persona is always the smartest move. To know for whom you’re making your WordPress website is to know what type of solution you can offer to target customers.

Take your time to collect feedback from your marketplace. Find out what people enjoy and hate in their web experience. Explore industry trends, and gauge what resonates with customers.

Think about the problem that your business is trying to solve. Websites that present solutions the best are the ones that convert. You need to show your customers that you understand their problems, and convince them that you can solve them.

Here are some ways to help you ensure that you’re building the right website that addresses your target customers’ needs:

• Start Interviewing: Only customers can provide you with detailed information that you need to make your website. Ask them about their challenges, and more importantly, how your business could help them. Ask how you can solve their problems better than your competitors.
• Research: Look at the reviews in your industry. See what customers are saying about your competitors, and how pleased they are about the service that they’re getting. What are the positives, and what are the negatives? How can you resolve those negatives with your product?
• Have the Solution: If you have the solution to your customers’ frustrations, your website must revolve around your UVP (Unique Value Proposition).

After you’ve envisioned your solutions, then you can start thinking about what your website should look like, and the functions it will contain. Take into account the following aspects:

• Functionalities: What type of features do you need for your website? How will the features work?
• Usability: What does your website need to help users complete a specific task? Will the features be mobile-responsive, and clear and visible to the users?
• Content: Will the content on your website help you achieve your business goals? More importantly, will it be informative enough for target users?
• Budget: You must allocate the proper budget for your website as well as the entire project scope. Keep in mind that the adage “you get what you pay for” matters here. For a high-scale project, allocating a corresponding budget is a must.

Depending on your goals and business model, there are virtually no limits to the type of website that you can build with WordPress. The platform is versatile, and it is excellent for high-scale B2B, digital publishing, SaaS, and eCommerce projects.

Read more: What Is WordPress: 11 Industries Based on It

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

When planning the design and functionalities of a website, it is easy to get carried away and believe that you’ve nailed every aspect. However, the reality is that only adequately defined goals will help you get to that conversion rate level.

Before building anything, you need to visualize how the website will fit into your business goals. For example, if you need to boost sales, you need to think how to take your WordPress site in that direction.

When defining website goals, discuss the following with your team:

• What do we want to accomplish with our website?
• How to direct users to perform the tasks that will help us accomplish our goals?
• What is the reason behind our goals?
• What would be the users’ motivation behind their actions on our website?
• How are we going to accomplish our goals with our website?
• How can we encourage target customers to perform the actions needed on our site to help them achieve their goals?

Each goal that you define must correspond to your business and your product.

For example, if you want to start a digital magazine, you will need people to continually read and scroll through articles, sign up for your newsletters, and benefit from the content and the ads that you integrate into your content.

If you’re a SaaS company, you will want to onboard as many users as possible, and of course, retain them so that they use your product.

Or, if you want to run a large online store, one of your main goals should be to bring people to your product pages and motivate them to fill their carts.

Bottom line, each of your website goals should have the conversion rate in mind. It can be anything from reading a blog post, booking a flight, signing up for a newsletter, to opting for a service package, and buying a product online.

Envision the Customer Journey

When you know the goals that you want to achieve with your WordPress website, the next step is to visualize the ideal customer journey on your site.

How would the customer relate to the functions, look, and the content on your website? Will everything be engaging enough to make them become customers?

Mapping out the customer journey should help you envision how target users will react to your website from the moment they open your site to the point where they opt for your product/service, and afterward.

Each interaction point must be carefully defined, and the motivation behind that interaction must be indicated equally well. To map out the customer journey, you can use a diagram or an infographic tool. Whatever works for you and your team.

Through user mapping,everyone will get a better sense of the website’s goals and how interactions influence users’ actions.

In general, an ideal customer journey should consist of four main stages:

• Awareness Stage: The moment when the target user learns about your product/solution.
• Consideration Stage: The stage where the target customer is interested in the product/solution.
• Purchase Stage: The stage when the customer made the decision and opted for the product.
• Retention Stage: Here is where you work to keep the customer pleased and motivated so that they advocate for you.

When analyzing how a prospect would engage with your website in the customer journey stages, discuss the following:

• What motivates users to visit your website and continue browsing and/or performing actions?
• What questions should we address on our website to encourage them at each stage?
• What are the interactions that would help them move forward in the user journey?
• What are blockers that would push users off your site and end their customer journey? How can we ensure that this won’t happen?

The more answers you get from these questions, the better. You need to know how to foresee users’ doubts and how to resolve them so that they can move through the website funnel. If you already have a defined buyer persona in place, the job of mapping out a user journey will be much easier.

As an integral part of your website strategy, a user journey map is beneficial for developing a better user experience and for your bottom line. Defining each website interaction upfront and knowing what type of concerns to address will help you convert more customers and retain them for the long-run.

What Will Characterize Your WordPress Website?

If you’re going to develop a strategy, you should devote serious time and effort on mapping out the website features.

Think of features not just in a functional manner, but also, in a strategic way as well. They form the characteristics of your WordPress website, and for everything to work effectively. The essentials that you need to plan for are:

Simplicity

The more options you provide, the higher the chances for them not to convert, it is as simple as that.

As the great man himself, Leonardo da Vinci famously said:

“Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.”

Regarding your WordPress website, too many features, and you will just confuse prospects. When users open your site to complete a specific goal, make the path as easy as possible.

Visual Content

Powerful websites use visual content to direct users to call-to-actions and conversion points. When planning such content for your WordPress website, keep in mind the balance between quality and size. Yes, the visuals must look fabulous, but they also should not be memory-heavy.

Aesthetics

You can have the best editorial strategy and the best solution to your customers’ problems. However, if your website does not look good, you will lose potential sales and leads. Pay attention to your brand colors and how you apply them to your website. Each color has a different meaning and sparks a distinctive emotion.

Fonts are another key aesthetic aspect that you need to consider before you design your WordPress site. In the same manner as colors, various fonts evoke different emotions. Some of the fonts, such as the ones for the sans serif family, have a more modern appeal. On the other hand, the ones from the serif family are more classical and elicit a traditional magazine feel.

When considering the aesthetics of your website, always keep your audience in mind. If you want them to read your content easily, you should choose the right font and the right amount of whitespace.

Familiarity

As much as you may want to stand out, people are used to familiar website layouts. There are conventional rules that must be considered in your website strategy, regardless of any designer’s ideas for it.

For example, the logo is in the upper-left corner, the navigational menu and the search bar should be at the top, the contact form is usually at the bottom, and links must change color when the users hover with their cursor over them.

Uniformity

Let’s not forget that you must also be consistent with your branding elements and design. The entire layout of your website must have a theme.

For example, you should maintain the same color palette and typography combinations across the entire site. Visuals must be similar as well as the menus on each of the main pages. Users should not click on another page of your website and find themselves in a different world.

User Experience

How well your website converts customers will depend heavily on how good the user experience is. Design means nothing if people can’t find the information that they need quickly, or can’t access a page in a couple of clicks.

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Performance

Performance is the quintessential characteristic of high-converting WordPress websites. You must plan for a blisteringly fast and efficient website from the start. If the site takes more than three seconds to load, you can kiss the potential sales goodbye.

Measuring the performance of your website is a must, particularly for media-heavy websites with large images and video files. For more on performance testing and improvements, read our guide here.

Mobile-Responsiveness

According to Quartz, over 70% of Internet traffic worldwide is on mobile devices. And it increases with every subsequent year. That means that more and more users will attempt to access your website on their smartphones.

Even though mobile-friendliness comes naturally to WordPress, you still must ensure that the entire smartphone experience is flawless. Each element of the layout must be visible and usable from each device, OS, and browser.

Keep in mind that designing and optimizing the mobile-responsiveness of your website is an ongoing process. Devices, browsers, and web trends change, and mobile versions of sites must act accordingly.

Think About Website Security Factors

The security of your WordPress website is far more than a simple password change and a plugin. Hackers are capable of cracking any website, that is if you allow them to. To not let any breach or targeted attack occur to your website, there are several things you can do to secure your WordPress build strategically.

Learn What Makes Your Website Defenceless

There’s a common myth in the web development industry that WordPress is unsafe and unstable by nature. That’s far from the truth! Sure, like with every other CMS, eventual vulnerabilities can be detected and promptly resolved in the Core. However, those possible “weaknesses” are significantly lower than on any other web platform.

Generally, four major factors make WordPress websites vulnerable:

• Non-updated WordPress Core and plugins
• Low-quality themes and plugins
• Substandard hosting service
• Weak passwords, accessing the admin panel from open Wi-Fi networks, etc.

Choose a Bulletproof Hosting Service

Among the major factors that determine the security of your WordPress site is the hosting. The minimum that a hosting service should offer you is a firewall, spam filters, virus, and DDoS protection.

Using a proven Managed WordPress Hosting such as Pagely means that you’ll have a dedicated team working to protect your website from any threat. Managed hosts handle updates, backups, SSL management, and monitor your website 24/7/365 for you. Pagely’s PressArmor manages both the WordPress application, and server security of your website.

Use Proven and Updated Plugins

Another important security aspect to pay attention to is the updates of your plugins. If you don’t update them after the new version is available, the chances are that there are vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

Related Article: WordPress 5.4 Is Released: Are You Prepared?

The developers of reputable plugins always patch vulnerabilities and keep the versions fresh and safe for their users.

Quite frankly, there’s hardly an easier task on WordPress than an update. You just navigate to the ‘Plugins’ tab, check for updates, and click on ‘Update now’. As simple as that.

Have a Website Marketing Plan

Creating a WordPress website growth strategy? Then marketing is a crucial part of the equation. This includes lead generation, sales, customer service, public relations, and content marketing efforts.

When developing a marketing strategy for your website, you must start with a thorough understanding of your buyer personas, the marketplace, and the right value proposition to base your marketing efforts on. Analytics, data-driven decisions, and testing are also an integral part of every marketing campaign.

Ultimately, your website site and its content must support the entire user journey sales cycle. When creating a strategy for your website, one marketing channel is not enough.

There are two main marketing approaches to base your strategy on:

• Inbound Marketing: A marketing method that helps you attract leads and customers by providing value through targeted content.
• Outbound Marketing: A marketing approach that helps you attract customers to your website by sending them a message or initiating a conversation.

Don’t think twice about delivering value on your website. Because value:

• It’s cost-effective.
• It revolves around your unique value proposition.
• Valuable content is engaging content.
• It strengthens trust.

Here’s an example of how you could apply an inbound marketing strategy for your website:

Attracting Leads – When people open your site, they want their questions answered. Offer them informative content that you’ve published on your blog, case studies, product documentation, and service pages.

Engage Leads – If your content is not enough to convert leads, it is time to initiate a conversation. Potential customers can request help, or you can ping them via live chat asking whether they require any additional help or information.

Delight Leads – Ensure that potential customers are satisfied with the information that they’re receiving, and ask them to rate the experience. If they opt for the product, make sure they’re pleased with the customer experience even after the sale.

Don’t forget that every good marketing and publishing strategy must be regularly monitored and improved. Decide on the crucial metrics that correlate with your business goals, such as:

• Value per Visit: How much value do you get from each unique visit to your website?
• Cost per Conversion: How much you invest in marketing per conversion on your website.
• Most Visited Pages: What pages bring you the most traffic? Which content resonates the most?
• Sources of Traffic: Where do you get the most traffic from? By analyzing traffic sources, you can better understand if your marketing campaigns are effective or not.
• Average Session Duration: This metric tells you how long guests stay on your site so that you can assess content engagement.
• Bounce Rate: A crucial metric that indicates whether people leave immediately after landing on your website or whether they spend time browsing per session.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, having a well-thought-out strategy in place for your WordPress website involves much more than just the design and technical elements of your website. It is the core of your business, and you must build your strategy on top of your business goals.

If you address each aspect outlined above, you will create a detailed strategy and ultimately, your WordPress web presence will become reliable and profitable.