More than 40% of all websites use WordPress, which makes it the most popular website builder. Anyone who uses the Internet has at least once encountered a WordPress website. Even popular brands like eBay, The New York Times, CNN, and many others use WordPress.
The reason is simple: WordPress is easy to use, free, and open source, and it’s not necessary to be a developer to create a website on WordPress. You’ve probably chosen it for one of these reasons. But besides being an easy-to-use platform, WordPress is also great for marketing reasons.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this article. What WordPress website development tactics can you implement to grow your business?
Share Fresh, High-Quality Content
Did you know that WordPress was initially a blogging platform, and, in fact, many websites still use it simply as a blog?
Blogging is a powerful tool that can contribute to the website’s visibility and traffic. On the one hand, it’s great for SEO, as search engines prioritize websites that are regularly updated with new content. On the other hand, it helps get new customers and attract your target audience. Users will start to refer to you as a trustworthy and reliable source with high-quality blog articles, videos, or other types of content.
So, research your target audience, find out what topics they are interested in and start sharing high-quality content. It’d be better if you set a schedule for posting so that you know precisely when to write the articles and post them.
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Create a Responsive Design or Choose a Mobile-Friendly Theme
Nowadays, having a responsive website is a necessity for every website, as people are browsing from mobile devices more and more, and responsiveness is one of the search engines’ essential requirements. Responsive design increases the chances of having higher rankings on Google and other search engines.
So, when designing or redesigning your WordPress website, ensure it works well on all devices and is easy to navigate. Or, if you’re using a theme, make sure it’s mobile-friendly.
There are thousands of themes on ThemeForest alone, available for any budget. You can choose whichever you want, but make sure you choose a theme that is marked responsive. Also, pay attention to the user ratings and downloads of a theme. This will help you get a better quality theme and timely support whenever you encounter a problem.
Use Reach Snippets
Reach snippets are another great way to increase your website traffic. Reach snippets are structured data that show search engines more detailed information about your page. When you search on Google and see results featuring ratings and reviews – these are the reach snippets.
Reach snippets can be especially helpful for businesses that offer food recipes, delivery services, etc. They are pretty helpful for search engines, as they can better understand what your website is about. But besides search engines, users also appreciate this information as it helps them to browse the websites that are more relevant to their search.
On WordPress, it requires some coding knowledge to enable rich snippets. But, if you don’t have any coding experience, you can look for plugins that will allow you to quickly implement the feature of reach snippets.
Create an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of the pages on your website. It helps search engines to efficiently crawl your website, understand your website’s structure, and index it. WordPress automatically generates a sitemap for websites, but it’s not always optimised.
To make sure your sitemap has all the essential pages and to keep track of your indexed pages, you can use a plugin like this one. Some of these plugins can also tell Google when your website is updated so that Google can index the page. This is important for blogging as you will constantly have new pages and updates.
Add CTAs to Your Blog Posts
Most landing pages or home pages contain a lot of CTAs to incite users to buy your products or subscribe to newsletters. But frequently, blog pages don’t have any CTAs. This is a mistake you should avoid. A blog is a perfect place to put some CTAs.
For example, when you want more subscribers, it can be a great idea to add a CTA somewhere in your article or at the end of it. When users read your article and find it useful they are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter to receive more quality content.
There are different types of CTAs you can add to your blog. You can add sidebar CTAs, or simple callouts, whichever fits better with your website structure.
Create Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are a very controversial marketing tool. Some think pop-ups are useless and only annoy users, while others think they can give good results. Well, both of these are close to the truth. When you browse a website, and the first thing you see is a pop-up, it can be annoying. Though they can sometimes be annoying, on average, pop-ups have an 11% conversion rate! And that’s a lot.
The key to success here lies in knowing the right place and time to show the pop-up. You need to use pop-ups on the pages with the most CTAs, like your homepage. In order not to annoy users, it’s better to use exit pop-ups. Showing pop-ups before users even know what your website is about is a bad idea.
Don’t use pop-ups on non-essential landing pages or blog posts. Users are on these pages not for buying but for other reasons, so they most likely won’t pay attention to your special offers or discounts. Make sure to research well your users’ behaviour to show the pop-ups at the right time in the right place.
Try A/B Testing
A/B testing can be a powerful tool for enhancing a website. Though, it’s also time-consuming. But it can work well when you have doubts about this or that feature of a landing page or when a landing page simply doesn’t give the results you want.
A/B testing is a testing method where you can create two versions of one page, and Google will randomly show them to different users. Depending on the results of each version, you can decide which one to choose as the final version.
In order for the A/B testing to be the most productive, it’s better to test only 1-2 design features so that you know what causes the difference in conversion rates or other metrics. These can be the colour of a button or the design of a form. This way, you can learn more about your audience’s preferences and build your future landing pages accordingly.
Don’t Forget About the Website Maintenance
In order to function correctly, every website needs constant maintenance. Yes, this is not a marketing tactic that will help you get more conversions, but without proper maintenance, no marketing tactic can make your website successful.
Specifically, you need to ensure that all the pages load fast enough and work without any errors. Page speed is one of the most common factors of high bounce rates and low traffic. Optimising the speed can help you improve user experience and incite users to stay longer. Make sure to check both the website and mobile versions’ page and website speeds.
Then you need to make sure you don’t have broken links, or they are all redirected. You can do this with the help of plugins that will automatically check the broken links.
Here, we’ve listed all the essentials of website maintenance and what you need to check.
Show Reviews and Build a Portfolio
One of the best ways to show your customers that you’re a trustworthy business is by showing your past works or that your past clients were satisfied with your job. Of course, it depends on your industry, as not all businesses can build a portfolio, but you can indeed show your product/service reviews.
Other businesses that work, e.g., in the design and media industries, can build portfolios and use different platforms like Clutch, Dribbble, and Behance to show their portfolio, ratings, and reviews. These channels can bring new customers and make your business more successful.
Encourage Social Shares
Social media marketing has become a powerful marketing tool nowadays, and many brands have their social media accounts on some of the platforms. If you also have social media accounts and are active on them, you can put links to them on your website so that people can easily connect between your channels.
Moreover, when you have a big community in one or several of your social media accounts, you can promote your website by sharing your blog, case studies, or other content and encouraging social shares. Social media is a great channel that can bring new and returning visitors to your website.
Also, ensure that your blog posts and other content on the website are shareable. Add social media links on a visible spot around the content so users can easily share it.
Accept Payments on Your Site
For eCommerce websites, it’s a necessity to have a payment system on the website so that customers can easily shop. Luckily there are a lot of international payment systems like PayPal that you can implement on your WordPress website. And there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help you there.
But for websites other than e-commerce, it’s not necessary. Though, if you’re selling or offering some products or services, online payment can still be helpful even if you’re not an eCommerce business.
If you’re unsure whether it will be helpful, you can research your customers’ behaviour to understand whether they’ll need a payment system on your website.
Create Email Newsletter
Email marketing is still considered one of the best marketing channels. If you haven’t started using it to grow your business, this is the perfect time. And in order to grow the list of your email newsletter subscribers, you can use your WordPress website.
There are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help you here so that users can connect to your email list with one click (Mailchimp can also help you here).
One of the most important things here is to place the subscription form in the right spot on your website so that more users subscribe to your list. Besides your main page and landing pages, you can add the subscription form in the middle or the end of the blog post. It’s a perfect spot to ask users to subscribe because if they are already reading your article, it means they find it helpful and are more likely to subscribe to read more of your valuable content.
Set a Messenger Button
The easier users can communicate with you and ask questions about your products, the more likely they will convert. And, as your website is the primary source of information about your brand, and products, it’s better to have means of communication on it.
Almost all websites indicate their email address or social media links so that people can communicate through them, but the truth is users may not want to bother themselves to open these links. But if there’s a messenger button, they are more likely to ask you a question.
And luckily, there are WordPress plugins for almost everything, and a messenger button is one of them. For example, this plugin lets users chat with your Facebook messenger directly through your website.
So, you don’t need to write code to build a messenger so that people can ask you questions; you can simply connect your Facebook Messenger to your website.
Monitor Website Analytics
Without monitoring your website, you can’t know whether your tactics and strategy work and what you need to change to improve your website. Google Analytics and Search Console Insights are great tools for that. They show the essential metrics about your website, e.g., how many website visits you get, which pages are more successful, etc.
It’s better to have a schedule and regularly check the metrics that are important for you to reach your goals. This way, you will know if your website works correctly and whether you need to change your marketing strategy.
Don’t Forget About SEO
Some of the points mentioned above are part of SEO, but still, SEO needs a separate mention. Search engine optimisation is one of the essential tools to help your website and your business succeed.
An SEO-optimised website gets more organic traffic, more website visits, and has more chances to have high conversion rates. Above, we’ve talked about tools like Google Analytics, but there are also other advanced tools, like Semrush or Ahrefs, that help with SEO. They can help you find the right keywords to target, improve your content and optimise it so that search engines rank it higher.
Also, there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can also help with SEO, like Yoast SEO which can help you optimise your meta tags and content so that it corresponds to search engine requirements.
Improve Web Design
Web design is also an essential factor in the success of the website. When the website has easy navigation and an appealing design, it has more chances to attract and retain visitors. They will more likely stay longer on the website and consume your content.
If your website is old and you haven’t updated its design for years, now is the time to do it. Discover new trends, what your competitors’ websites look like, and what you can change to improve your website design.
Summing Up
There are millions of WordPress websites on the Internet because of the many benefits WordPress offers. But besides all its benefits, businesses need to pay attention to its marketing if they want their websites to help grow their business.
That’s why we have compiled all the essential tactics to help you make the most out of your WordPress website.
Increase brand awareness, build trust and drive conversions.
General FAQ
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source and free content management system (CMS) that allows anyone to create and build websites from scratch. It’s the most popular website builder with more than 40% of websites using WordPress.
Where to find WordPress plugins?
There are thousands of WordPress plugins on the Internet. ThemeForest is one of the most popular platforms where you can find lots of WordPress plugins and themes.
Is WordPress the best CMS platform?
WordPress is the most popular platform, but it’s wrong to say that this or that platform is the best. It all depends on your needs and what kind of website you want. For example, Shopify is an eCommerce platform and has some specific eCommerce features that other platforms don’t. WordPress is an open-source and free platform that makes it affordable for most businesses to create a website. Each platform has its benefits and disadvantages, and you should choose one based on your needs as a business.
