A website plays an important role in the success of small businesses because it helps them to generate revenue in a shoestring budget.
Especially with the help of a WordPress website, small businesses can not only establish their online presence at an affordable cost, but they can also grow their revenue with a limited budget to spend.
Why WordPress is an ideal choice for website development for small businesses:
Most of the plugins for WordPress websites are either free or nominally priced.
WordPress is loved by search engines, so small businesses have an advantage to leverage on the higher search engine rankings.
Now since we know the major reasons of using WordPress to build websites for small businesses, let’s have a look over some of the useful tips to design & maintain a WordPress website for small business owners.
In this blog post, I have shared 9 such tips that will help you, as a small business owner, to manage your website effectively.
#1 Install Yoast SEO plugin
This is perhaps one of the best advices for small businesses.
Yoast SEO plugin can help you to rank your websites on higher positions of search engines by:
Allowing you to input important meta tags like title & meta description for each of your webpage.
Suggesting keyword density in your pages and blog posts to make your content optimized for search engines.
Creating XML sitemaps for your website.
Allowing search engines to index important webpages on your website.
Writing the content in easy-to-read format for the users.
& more…
#2 Mobile-friendly theme
It is understood that most of the small business owners have a low budget to build their business websites.
In other words, they can’t spend a lot on their website development because they have to take care of other business activities too.
But the good news is that building a mobile-friendly website doesn’t require any additional cost.
Especially when you choose WordPress to develop your website, you will find most of the WordPress themes as responsive or mobile-friendly.
A mobile-friendly theme helps small businesses to:
Capture more mobile traffic.
Lower down the cost of web development.
Load the webpages faster.
Lower down the bounce rate.
Get more conversions, leads and sales.
Improve SEO score.
#3 Choose reliable hosting
A reliable web hosting is very crucial for small businesses.
Since small business owners have limited budget to spend on their website development, they must take a special care while choosing a website hosting package or company that’s reliable and at the same time affordable too.
It would be wrong to say that all the expensive things are good and all the cheap commodities are inferior in quality.
Same applies to website hosting too.
There are several web hosting companies that provide high-performance servers & best support yet they charge very nominal price.
Here are some of the factors that every small business owner must consider while choosing a website hosting package:
24/7 support
High-performance servers
Good reviews
Affordable pricing
Security enabled servers
#3 Hire affordable web developer
One of the best advantages that you get while choosing WordPress to build your website is that WordPress developers are available in abundance and that too at affordable cost.
No matter if you need a new website or looking for your existing website redesigning, you can find plenty of options to shortlist & hire an affordable website developer for you.
Not only this, but you can also engage a website developer to maintain your WordPress website regularly for:
Plugins update
Themes update
Integrating security patches.
Uploading & updating the contents.
Making minor changes in the design & functionality of your WordPress website.
#4 Add alt tags for all the images
Here is another great tip for small businesses to follow on their WordPress websites.
They must optimize and update the alt tags for all the images on their websites.
What is an alt tag?
An alt tag, also known as “alt attribute” and “alt description”, is an HTML attribute applied to image tags in order to provide a text alternative for search engines.
Here are but some of the major reasons for every small business owner to optimize the alt tags:
Alt tags let search engines interpret images through these alt tags.
It also allows users to view webpage on browsers that can’t process images.
#5 Keep blogging
Why blogging?
Here are some of the important reasons for every small business to publish blog posts on their WordPress websites regularly:
A blog can boost your search engine optimization. Being a small business owner, you may have a low budget to market your website. So, blogging is a great way for you to get quality traffic at no additional cost.
A blog can help your business to establish a communication & engagement channel with your customers.
A blog can help you to establish yourself as an industry leader. When you write & publish blog posts based on the problems that your targeted customers must be facing, you get an opportunity to showcase yourself as a solution provider.
#6 Encourage users to contact you
A website will serve no purpose if there is no option for the users to contact the business owners.
Since the primary objective of any website is to get more sales & revenue, it must have several options for the users to contact business owners and enquire about their services or products.
If you too, are a small business owner and wish to get more sales from your website, do encourage your users to contact you through enquiry forms and several CTAs (call to action).
#7 Keep measuring loading speed
The loading speed of any website is as important as its existence.
A slow loading website may have higher bounce rate. In other words, the users may quit a website that loads too slow.
There are several free online tools to check the loading speed of any website. Therefore, you must make use of these free tools to measure & diagnose the loading speed issue on your WordPress website, if applicable.
You may use any of these reliable tools to determine the loading speed of your website:
If you find that your website is taking more than 5 seconds to load the webpages, you must consult a WordPress developer immediately to resolve this issue for you.
#8 Interlink the webpages
What is interlinking of webpages?
Internal links are hyperlinks that point from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain.
Interlinking the webpages and blog posts can also help you to optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
Here are some of the major reasons for every small business to interlink their webpages:
Interlinking enhances the website navigation for users.
Interlinking helps spread link juice among the webpages which helps the website to secure higher search engine rankings for the interlinked keywords.
Interlinking among webpages also reduce the bounce rate as the users can click on several links to find out more information on your website.
#9 Keep in touch with your web developer
Last but not the least advise for all the small business owners is to keep in touch with their website developers.
There are many ways in which a website developer can help you to create, maintain and grow your online business.
Here are some of the benefits that you get when you engage a website developer for long term:
Your website gets updated regularly with fresh content & images.
Your website is less likely to get hacked or virusinjections because your web developer can maintain &. update all of the plugins and security patches on your website.
Your website loading speed is maintained because your website developer can help to optimize your website regularly.
You always get latest backup to reinstate on your server in case of any emergency such as server crash.
You get all-time support from your website developer when you engage him or her for your website maintenance.
