How to Build a “No Fail” Conversion Optimised Website

This isn’t one of those run of the mill articles that tells you which are the best plugins you should have on your conversion optimised WordPress website for it to hum. Why? Because having  a website that is optimized for your business actually takes a lot more forethought than that.

Don’t get me wrong there are a few base plugins we use when we build a website, however there are others you may need based on the purpose of your website. For example, and e commerce website may use the Woo Commerce plugin.

Thanks to a number of “D.I.Y” websites such as Wix, Squarespace, Red Starfish and all of the other site builders that are popping up all over the web, anyone can build a website (or that’s the intent!).

The only problem with using these sites compared to WordPress is that you don’t get the fine-grained control you need to optimize and maintain your site and to make sure that the Google bots look favorably on your website.  And you may not actually own your website, so beware!

As you may know, WordPress is the world’s dominant content management system, having 60% market share.

It’s unarguably the clear platform-of-choice on which to build a well-designed and optimized user friendly website. So honestly, don’t look further afield when it comes to your business website and digital presence.

There are some core factors you need to be aware of if you want to ensure your website is a cut above the rest in relation to your competition.

Let me explain.

Building a User Friendly Optimised Website

When it comes to your business, whether you be B2B, B2C or NFP the key to building a great website is to start with a solid foundation.

Get the foundation right and your website will hum along and convert. Get the foundation wrong and you’ll spend much of your time dealing with bugs and other fixes rather than, actually focusing on what you need to be.

So, what goes into a solid foundation for a WordPress website? I’m glad you asked.

I’m convinced that a solid WordPress website needs six core elements:

• Performance: Slow websites kill businesses and careers. You need your WordPress website to load quickly.
• Monitoring: You need to keep a constant eye on the health and functioning of your website. You need to ensure updates and maintenance are done routinely; you have SSL certificates and are securely protected for brute force attacks and hackers.
• Security: The only thing worse than a site that is down down is a site that’s been hacked. You should never cut corners here, because downtime is costly in a number of ways.
• Backups: You need an automated backup process that ensures you have a recent backup on hand when you need it.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You need your WordPress website to be optimized for search engines and you need to ensure that you have granular control over the way your sites look when they show up in search results.
• Conversion Optimization: You need to continually work on improving the effectiveness of your website to boost enquiry/ sales/donors, given the same amount of traffic you are currently receiving.

By taking care of these six core needs in a way that is robust, affordable, and requires as little effort as possible. That way, you can stop thinking about WordPress and focus on building your business.

Let’s look at each factor briefly so you can begin formulating a cohesive strategy for building a solid WordPress website foundation.

1. Your Website Performance

When it comes to the performance of a website, web page load time is arguably just as important as web design and website features. This is because a site that loads slowly will have a direct and pronounced negative impact on conversions.

Website visitors often form an opinion of your company, intent and services based on the performance of your website. And this also impacts on your ability to convert visitors and get them to take the action you would like them to.

To ensure that you optimize website for performance, you can use plugins like Hummingbird and Smush Pro  together to make your WordPress website load in a snap of your fingers.

2. Your Website Monitoring

There are two parts to the monitoring equation that every website owner must consider in keeping your website live and healthy:

• How to keep on top of your website updates to plugins, themes, and WordPress core and content files and
• How to keep your website performance humming along?

It is critical to keep all elements of your website updated. If you don’t log into your site every day, there may be times when days or weeks pass between the time an update is made available and the time when you install it. A lot of website owners NEVER do their updates and they end up paying a small fortune when something goes wrong with their website to get it working again.

Seriously, get a managed website solution so that you can focus on what you need to.

If a frustrated visitor is the first to let you know that your site is down, you haven’t solved the second part of the monitoring equation.

Every website owner MUST find a way to keep on top of WordPress updates and keep an eye on their website performance. There are very effective tools available to take care of this process and it’s something we focus on for our clients, as a part of their website package.

This protects websites against evil bots and hackers with automated security scans, vulnerability reports, safety recommendations, blacklist monitoring and customized hardening.

3. Your Website Security

To ensure the core of your website is secure, be sure to keep everything updated and use unique secure passwords. This will help to swing your website upwards on the security bell curve.

Whilst this is a step in the right direction, this alone isn’t good enough. You need to harden your WordPress sites against common attacks and scan them on a regular basis to catch and get rid of any security risks before they compromise or pull your webiste down.

You need a plan for hardening your website and scanning on an ongoing basis to stop and check for any security risks. This is the only way to secure WordPress website and keep it secure over time. We automate the checking and put elements in place, to stop even the most die-hard security risks and nasty bots.

The message hear is keep your site 100% defended at all times – downtime is a cost in lost revenue and cedibility.

4. Your Website Backups

Servers crash, sites are hacked, and website CSS code hits the fan. If and when your site comes crumbling down around you, you better hope and pray you have a recent backup on hand.

Some website managers attempt to keep track of backups manually. This sounds OK in theory but the truth is that most people aren’t disciplined enough to count on a manual backup process. This is a task better left to automation.

The ideal backup system will include three components:

• Automatic backup creation,
• Backup storage in the cloud away from your site’s server, and
• Automatic management of stored backups.

There are several services you can use to set up automatic backups, there are lots of cloud platforms to use for storage, and some backup services will even manage your backups for you. Be sure you have all three components in place to configure automatic backups if you ever need them.

5. Search Engine Optimization

If you don’t optimize your WordPress website for search engines a few things can go wrong:

• Your site may not look the way you want it to look when it shows up in search results.
• It may take longer than necessary for Google and other search engines to index any new content that you post.

The answer to this problem is to have an excellent SEO plan in place.

The first part of this is to have a good SEO plugin you can manually control the text displayed when your site shows up in search engines results. In addition, with a properly formatted sitemap that gets pushed to search engines after every update to your site, your content will be added to search engines as quickly as possible.

The second part is to be focused on great optimised content, building quality backlinks and getting your site crawled by the bots.

Trick is to have a pro setting up and managing your SEO, because SEO that gives good positive ROI, is an art best left to an expert. SEO is not just a plugin that sits on your website. It’s much, much more!

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Wrapping Up:

There’s quite a few basic moving parts that you need to get right to ensure you have a website that hums along. Websites are not just something that need to look pretty, they need to be functional user friendly, built for conversion optimisation and reliable day in, day out.

Are You Considering a Website Design?

If you’re considering a website redesign or up for a brand new website,  we’d love to help. We’re able to create a professionally designed website while still making sure that you have everything in place to ensure a website that is conversion optimised, is user friendly and never let’s you down.

Have a look over our packages on our home page and take advantage of our free 15 minute strategy call.

If you’ve got any comments we’d love to hear them below.