Six Must-Have Features of an Enterprise Website

From lead generation to SEO, a powerful enterprise WordPress website must be capable of retaining users and boosting your sales. In today’s digital world, an exceptional website packed with functionalities is what helps you stand out from the pack.

In short, you need to know how to leverage your website along with its powerful features. Speaking of features, let’s learn more about the six must-have features of an enterprise website.

1. Scalability

Scalability is the ability of your website to handle workloads and resources while keeping its structure intact. If a site has poor scalability, it can only cope with small increases in its resources.

When your website reaches the saturation point, it can lead to malfunction and unjustified jumps in its operation. Through proper scalability, the website performance rises proportionally to the workload.

The Principles of a Scalable Website

If you’re building a scalable website, you need to ensure that it’s founded on the following principles.

Continuous Availability: As a business, your website must be available at all times. A scalable website must be accessible at any time of the day and from any location.

Smooth Performance: Besides availability, your website. It’s either that, or you risk pushing your customers away and diminishing the position of your website in SERPs.

Fast Data Recovery: Today, third-party technologies are responsible for administering and integrating data. If you’re using a bad database service, problems will happen. It is your responsibility to avoid issues so you can recover your data fast!

Malfunction Identifiability: Your website must be effortless to operate, maintain, and update. When a problem with its performance arises, you should be able to trace it immediately and fix it.

Why WordPress Is the Most Scalable CMS for Your Enterprise?

Every business built on top of WordPress knows about its advantages and potential. It is the biggest CMS in the marketplace. And you can scale it to infinite heights! With the right configuration, you can serve millions of weekly visitors without problems.

The more your site expands in functionality and traffic, the more you’ll have to optimize and scale. The areas that you need to focus on are:

• Database load
• Handing a large volume of simultaneous users
• Storing data
• Dealing with a spike of HTTP requests
• Implementing caching layers
• Media assets
• First-class coding architecture

2. Extensibility

The CMS that you use for your business must be easy to integrate with any other outside technologies. Your website will improve with the help of other tools and systems. Operations can improve while integrations stay linked to each other. This is what makes WordPress the perfect CMS for your website.

Its flexibility and growth are essential considerations as to why enterprises love WordPress. With more than 55,000 plugins, WordPress offers much more than any other CMS.

For example, with WooCommerce, you can keep the core functions of WordPress, but with added Commerce abilities.

Or, you can seamlessly integrate a CRM in your build.

While WordPress offers a lot, there are still some functionalities that simply can’t be attained through plugins. If you need more than just a plugin, you can always connect with an experienced B2B WordPress agency like DevriX and we’ll build a custom solution for you.

3. User-Friendliness

Nowadays, users have big expectations for the website’s design and functionalities. If you want to retain users and keep them coming back, a user-friendly design for your website is a must! Websites that have poor usability lose conversions and revenue.

User-friendly websites are designed with the user in mind. Ask yourself if your WordPress site is helpful to your prospects. The elements that you need to focus on when assessing the usability of your website are:

Layout Simplicity: Most users open websites with a specific goal in mind. Excessive elements will only reduce your retention rate. The simpler a layout is, the better.

Visual Hierarchy: The website elements must direct visitors to the most important parts of your page. However, it should be done as naturally as possible.

The Sitemap: The sitemap is a great way to enhance the usability and accessibility of your website. It provides an overview of your website structure and it includes all of the main sections and links.

Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs improve the findability of your pages. They also help users navigate between categorized pages faster.

The Logo: A logo reminds the visitors about the brand and increases brand recognition.

Search Function: A proper search function on your site helps users reach their desired pages.

Buttons: Users must recognize what is clickable and what’s not on your site. If they struggle to discover the buttons, it won’t matter how beautiful your design is. This is why you must highlight appropriately clickable buttons. Never assume that they are apparent to users.

Navigation Menu: One of the best ways to help users get around your website is an effective navigation menu. This is especially important if you have a large website and you want to include each category on the menu. Prioritize the categories and provide the essential pages first.

Whitespace: It helps you break up the layout and group together specific elements on your pages. Also, whitespace helps readers focus on the most important elements.

4. Impeccable Performance

Efficient performance is everything! Time is money, and the same can be said about your website as well.

Up to 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less. The longer it takes a user to do something on your website, the higher the chances are that he/she will bounce off it.

Why Good Performance Matters

Your website speed is one of the vital factors when it comes to your ranking in SERPs. Your conversion rate is directly dependent on your page load time. This is why website performance matters.

According to Google’s PageSpeed Industry Benchmarks, the chances of people bouncing off your site are pretty high.

Testing the Performance of Your Website

The easiest way to test the performance of your website is with the right tools. Here are two powerful tools that you can use to examine your site’s performance:

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools allows you to test the speed of your site in accordance to different server locations:

PageSpeed Insights

With PageSpeed Insights all you gotta do is type in your URL, and click ‘Analyze’:

 

Maintaining the Performance

The following practices will help you maintain the performance of your WordPress website:

• Reduce HTTP Requests: 80% of a website’s load time is used for downloading images, stylesheets, and scripts. For each of them, an HTTP request is made. Thus, the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to be rendered. Reducing the number of requests will maintain the speed of your site.
• Minifying Files: Minifying files requires removing unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code. The redundant code increases the page size. This is why you must delete extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation.
• Asynchronous Loading: If your scripts load synchronously, they load one after another. In contrast, when scripts load asynchronously, only part of them will load simultaneously. This speeds up your site because when browsers load a page, it moves from top to bottom.
• Enable Compression: The smaller your files, the faster your website will be. Compressing files is an excellent way to minimize load times. For this, try enabling compression with Gzip.
• Enable Browser Caching: It allows a visitor’s browser to store a cached version of your site. In turn, when the visitor opens your site again, it will load faster.
• Use a CDN: With a CDN, you can cache your site on a global network of servers. When browsers request files from your site, that request is directed to the closest server, loading your page much faster as a result.

5. High-End Security

Hardly a day goes by when an organization isn’t being affected by a high-profile data breach. Ensuring peak security for your website doesn’t just safeguard your data. It also protects your customers and your business from serious public data exploitation.

Start Strengthening Your Website Security

Website security is an ongoing process of implementing protection measurements. The following are the main areas of security strengthening on your enterprise website:

• Code Level: In some cases, source code modifications must be made to eliminate the potential vulnerabilities without changing the functionalities of the software.
• Process Hardening: Solidifying the development process. This is the stage where security test suites are developed and deployed.
• Operating Strengthening: Every enterprise website is connected to a whole set of networks, libraries, APIs, and databases. If that environment gets fragmented, it can result in lots of vulnerabilities. You need to make the website environment robust so you can better face potential security problems.

Examine Your Plugins

Plugins can be one of the main security risks for enterprises that use WordPress as a CMS. With thousands of plugins available, security problems can arise if you don’t use the appropriate plugins for each function.

Examine where and how to use plugins. Contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of tailor-made, commercial, and free plugins.

Here are a few things that are important to remember when choosing plugins:

• Check for Updates: Most security gaps come as a result of out-of-date software. If a plugin hasn’t been tested and updated recently, stay away from it.
• Who Uses It: Powerful plugins have a plethora of high-end clients. Examine whether the best names in the industry are using the extension or not.
• Stick with Leaders: The best way to stay safe with plugins is to use the best ones. Choose from an experienced and reputable supplier in the industry. The best developers regularly uncover vulnerabilities and fix them immediately.
• Use Less Plugins: See if you can solve your problem by working on your code instead. The more plugins, the higher the security risks.

Use a Managed Hosting Provider

Managed hosting is perfect because of the first-rate security and performance. The industry leader in managed WordPress hosting and that we recommend to our clients is Pagely.

When you work with a managed WordPress hosting, routine software updates are regular. Together with a high-end hosting environment, your site is safe against malware and other threats that come your way.

Enterprise Websites on WordPress: Six Tips for Successful Growth

6. Multisite Option and Support

Many enterprises have dozens or even hundreds of websites for different brands, global regions, or product lines. They need to control those sites and create a consistent experience across the entire network.

Multisite management lets you create, view, and edit every website from a sole interface. Thus quality control becomes simpler and content creating more efficient.

The WordPress codex defines Multisite as:

A feature of WordPress 3.0 and later versions that allow multiple virtual sites to share a single WordPress installation. When the multisite feature is activated, the original WordPress site can be converted to support a network of sites.

The subsites on Multisite networks share the same plugins, themes, and databases. You can use the same plugins or you can activate specific plugins for individual subsites. The management level of a Multisite network consists from:

Network Admin: The Network Admin controls the entire network by supervising the settings and the entire content.

Subsites Administrators: Administrators can utilize only the administration options within the site. A subsite admin doesn’t have access to the rest of the sites in the network.

One Registration for the Network

One of the biggest perks of WordPress multisite is the opportunity to access every subsite or just a set of them with a single registration. Registered users can:

• Subscribe to subsites or a group of subsites.
• Have specific admin roles for each subsite: editor, writer, contributor, or follower.
• Subscribe to a subsite without knowing that it is part of a network.
• You can have several members of your team in charge of a hierarchy of different subsites.

Domain Structure Flexibility

For their domain structure, subsites can either use subdomains or directories:

• Subdomains: Each subsite in your network can have a URL like subsite.yourmultisitenetwork.com, where “subsite” is the specific site and “yourmultisitenetwork” is the network.
• Subdirectories: Each subsite in your network can have a URL like yourmultisitenetwork.com/subsite. It’s not recommended to apply this option to an existing WordPress installation as it may clash with existing URLs.

Also, if you enable domain mapping for your network, you can map the subdomains to non-network domains. For example, a subsite formed as domain.example.com can be mapped to appear as domain.com. This is useful when you have numerous domains that you want to in your network.

Bottom line, you should use the Multisite feature for:

• Big Hierarchy of Users: Users on multisite networks can create an account and use it to create their websites, and hold various user roles.
• Quicker Updates: In Multisite, you have a single panel to update the entire system. This makes updating across the network faster and easier.
• One Install: With a sole install, the entire network of the site can use a plugin activated for the whole network.
• One Admin, Many Sites: With Multisite, you can create as many sites as you want under one single URL. Each of these sites can use the same theme, plugins and be accessed from a single hosting account. Their domain names will be predicated on the original URL.
• Centralized Access: The Super Admin doesn’t have to log on to each site to have access to the dashboard. You can have a unique dashboard for that role and for each administrator.

How DevriX Builds Scalable WordPress Multisite Networks

Need someone to build your high-end WordPress Multisite Network project?

We work as a technical WordPress service provider specialized in large WordPress platforms, SaaS projects, Multisites, migrating proprietary platforms and developing safe and scalable WordPress-driven solutions.

The platforms that we work on are robust, secure, and compatible WordPress Core updates.

We handle server infrastructure and track our projects to predict traffic spikes that can be solved right away. Our team of WordPress Core contributors, PHP, and plugin developers can develop custom tools and integrate different APIs that bring value to the network.

The networks that we build are designed and integrated within the WordPress platform, including the server setup, caching and security installments, and the configuration.

Discover more about why our clients work with us here and review our standard SLA policy.

Wrapping Up

As your website evolves, customers’ demands rise. This is why you should know exactly what types of features are essential to your enterprise CMS. You need to have a more efficient and safer website both for your team and for your customers.

With the right technology and expertise in place, any business can rise to the top. And if you want to run a successful business in the digital age, quality is a must, and this comes as a direct result of adopting high-quality features.