No matter whether you own a small restaurant or an online store, it’s important, now more than ever, to have a professional looking website. It is essential to the growth and success of your business.
Visitors are immediately turned away from a poorly-designed website, as scam is the first thought to creep in their mind. WordPress has been helping small businesses with this dilemma for the past 20 years, by having an easy-to-use interface, simple maintenance, low development costs, and abundant business themes and plugins.
In this article we’ll go over why WordPress is good for small businesses, and how it can help yours.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It is an open-source platform and is a popular content management system used by millions of websites and blogs around the world
It’s known for its ease of use, flexibility, and large community of developers and users. With WordPress, you can easily create and manage content on your website, including text, images, videos, and other media.
Benefits of Using WordPress for Small Businesses
Well where do we start? Like we said earlier, WordPress offers simple maintenance, low development costs, and easy-to-use interface. It’s also known for its abundant business themes and plugins, quick and easy setup, and total website ownership. Honestly, the list goes on.
According to recent data, around 810 million websites throughout the world use WordPress, roughly 43% of all sites on the internet. Unless you are a web developer WordPress is pretty much the best option for creating and managing a professional website with a relatively low budget.
How Does WordPress Work?
WordPress is an open-source software and content management system (CMS) that is installed through your hosting provider. After installation, you will search through the available themes and install the theme of your choice. After that installation, customize your website’s appearance and publish your first pages.
Easier said than done right? You may have difficulty initially with making your site appear exactly as you envisioned. This is where plugins come to the rescue! There are plenty of third-party plugins that can bring your site to life and help show your small business’ personality.
Don’t worry, companies all around the world use third-party plugins. Look at the reviews and make sure the plugin of choice is safe and reputable before installing and activating it on your site.
Different Types of WordPress Themes
There are thousands of styles of WordPress themes, but they all fall underneath the one of the two categories: Multipurpose or Niche. Multipurpose themes are best for those who have a broad use of niches. They usually include multiple extensions, widgets, and pages for those working in multiple niches.
Niche themes are specific to whatever niche a business owner may work in. Typically doesn’t have as many extensions and tools as multipurpose themes, but still has exactly what is needed to complete work. And of course all of these themes are either free or premium(paid) themes.
What are the Different Types of Plugins?
Developers have had a lot of fun and come a long way with the development of plugins within the last 15 years. Because there’s a plugin for everything. Want to automate your emails? There’s a plugin for that. Want to backup your site everyday without thinking about it? There’s a plugin for that.
With over 55,000 plugins for WordPress websites ,you can really change the functionality of your website with the right ones. Although, with so many plugin installs and downloads, your site might get weighed down if you don’t delete any old or inactive plugins. So be weary of what you download.
Choosing the Right WordPress Theme and Plugin
Now here’s where you start having fun. Picking out the theme of your website. The first thing you will probably do is pick a theme that has a color scheme similar to yours, which isn’t wrong. But you will actually want to find a theme that has a layout and button placement that is desired. Then when you choose the correct theme with properly functioning buttons and layouts, you can easily change the color scheme in the theme settings.
Install and Set Up WordPress for Small Businesses
We’re going to make this really easy for you. First thing you’ll want to do is purchase a domain and hosting. We recommend using GoDaddy to purchase your domain, and using BlueHost or HostGator for your hosting, but of course you can use whoever is best for you. After your domain and hosting is purchased you’ll want to connect them by replacing the domains nameservers with your hosting providers nameservers. Allow 24-48 hours for propagation.
Access your cpanel through your hosting provider. Locate the WordPress installer, typically at the bottom of the page. Click this installer, insert your domain, and let it install. Voila! Your site is ready to go. Access the administrator dashboard through the link you are given during installation and begin to customize your site.
What are the Disadvantages of WordPress?
Now there are disadvantages to everything, we’re not going to lie to you. But the disadvantages of WordPress are meager in comparison to the great benefits. These disadvantages are usually slow page speed, frequent theme and plugin updates, and poor SEO ranking.
These issues may sound concerning but with the right plugins and web development these become less problematic. For example, we just discussed how a plugin can automatically update your site, making frequent plugin and theme updates little to no issue.
Common Problems and Issues With Using WordPress
The common problems with using WordPress that small business owners often face is realizing how time consuming it is to manage a website. It looks like an easy drag-and-drop system when you are first customizing your site. Then later you see that you’re not getting as many pageviews as you wanted, or not as many meetings booked as you’d hoped.
A WordPress website can be the key your business needs, but if you don’t know how to use it, you’ll get frustrated with your results. This is where we come in! Let us install, design, and manage your website while you worry about the day-to-day activities of your business. Give us a call! We’re here to help.