For many small business owners, designing and managing a website can be challenging. You may have designed your site when you first started your business and are now feeling a bit behind the curve when it comes to having an attractive site that’s both user and SEO friendly.
With the wide variety of website options available, from custom designed sites to cookie-cutter themes, it can be overwhelming to think about doing a website redesign. You want to make sure that your site is a strong and accurate reflection of your business, but also that it gets ranked in Google and people are able to find it.
When it comes to doing a website redesign, we highly recommend that businesses use WordPress. Some people think WordPress is simply a blogging platform, but it’s much more powerful than that. WordPress is our #1 recommendation for an SEO-friendly website platform, and we’re not alone. Matt Cutts, former head of Google search quality, calls WordPress “a fantastic piece of software.”
There are many reasons why we recommend WordPress for website development…
1. WordPress is easy to use.
Initially, it may take you some time to get familiar with WordPress’ dashboard and interface. But, once you learn how to use the interface, it’s very easy to update your website structure, design, pages and blog posts.
Website Structure
WordPress offers users a way to create a simple website structure, which refers to the layout of the pages on your site.
Most WordPress templates include a homepage with a navigation bar that links to the various pages on your website. The layout for this makes it easy for a website user to look for what he/she needs and click through to the page.
Google considers the website structure when ranking a website. Not all its users are computer-savvy and Google wants to ensure that even those people have a positive experience on the sites they’re ranking. When users can go to a site and quickly find the information they need, Google is happy. This is why it’s imperative that your site’s layout makes sense.
Website Design and Content
You don’t need to know how to do any type of custom coding or HTML in order to take advantage of all of the capabilities WordPress has to offer. Thankfully, their interface makes it simple to add text, images, video, and effects to your webpages and posts.
Plus, you can also easily customize your website’s colors, fonts, and design features through your WordPress dashboard as well. And, if you do know how to custom code, WordPress still gives you the option to do so, making it a great fit for everyone.
2. WordPress offers professional and inexpensive themes with convenient plugins.
With WordPress, you don’t need to spend a fortune having a site built from scratch. WordPress has thousands of themes that create a basic layout and structure for your website and its pages. These themes range in price from being completely free to costing $299, which was the most expensive theme we found. The average theme costs $40, which is way more affordable than a custom site. Plus, themes are available for every industry, so choosing the one you like the best is the real challenge.
And just because there are themes, it doesn’t mean your site will look just like someone else’s site. All themes can be customized to look just the way you want it to reflect your branding and the personality of your business.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress is known for its plugin functionality, which can make your website faster, more attractive, and useful to users. There’s a plugin for just about anything you can imagine, and that can make it easy to solve many common site problems.
For instance, if you use GTMetrix to test your website speed and find your site’s speed is slow, then you can install the W3 Total Cache plugin to optimize your website’s speed. This should speed up the site quite a bit.
While it’s still important to have a WordPress developer take care of major problems or changes to your site, many non-developers can successfully take care of minor issues with the use of plugins.
3. WordPress is mobile responsive.
Back in 2018, Google officially announced that they are taking a “mobile-first” approach to rankings. That means it’s critical to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
The good thing is, WordPress makes it easy to create a mobile responsive website and nearly all WordPress themes are mobile-friendly, so you don’t have to worry about your site not being accessible by people using their mobile devices. Plus, the themes automatically update the mobile site when you update your site for desktop, so you don’t have to worry about designing two looks for your site.
4. WordPress is SEO friendly.
While no website platform is SEO friendly out-of-the-box, WordPress definitely comes the closest and also makes it easy for you to update your site to make it SEO friendly. With WordPress, it’s easy to customize the URLs of your pages, add keyword-focused title and meta tags, install Google Analytics to track your SEO efforts, and more.
WordPress also has some great plugins available that will help you understand if your pages are optimized for Search Engines. Our top recommended SEO plugin is Yoast SEO. This plugin offers a user-friendly way to stay on top of your SEO and optimize your website content and structure to help raise your rankings.
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