WordPress is the perfect place to start if you’ve been thinking of launching a small online business. This post is a step-by-step guide to creating a small business website on the world’s most popular content and website management platform.
Why Should You Bother to Build a Business Website on Your Own?
There are several reasons why you should go DIY about your business website. Here are the top three:
Save Money
Developers charge between $40 and $120 per hour of website building work, and the whole project can take about eight weeks to complete. That’s a lot of manhours to pay.
WordPress provides clients with the right tools and plug-ins to get a small business website up and running quickly. It will cost you less than $100 a year to host a WordPress site, maintenance included.
Express Yourself
A good business website must have a clear purpose and deliver a solid message to a strictly targeted audience.
However, some essential nuances may get “lost in translation” while you are trying to communicate them to the developer. When you create your own site, you can edit your mission statement for free as many times as you want.
Enjoy The Flexibility You’ve Always Wanted
With WordPress’s rich theme library and plug-in marketplace, you can tweak and adjust your website to accurately match your business’s growth.
You won’t need to hire expensive web designers every time you wish to announce the launch of a new product or service.
Let’s Get Down to Website Building
Having established why you should build your business website on your own using WordPress, let us now outline the key milestones you’ll have to accomplish.
Choose a Domain Name
A domain name looks like this: https://yourbusiness.com. Choosing a unique name for your small business website sounds easier than it actually is. Google is the best vantage point for your search.
You should dig well past the fifth page to make sure a domain with a similar name hasn’t already been registered. Skipping this step may result in costly court altercations over a trademark name.
Once you’ve managed to register a domain name, you should check if you can use it to create social media accounts.
Find the Best Hosting for Your WordPress Website
Here are the seven Ss of a WordPress site hosting:
- speed
- security
- scalability
- support
- space
- server location
- SSL
Of these, we can pick up speed, security, scalability, and space as the main pillars of small business website hosting.
First, it’s not a good idea to go for WordPress hosting because the domain name will look like this: htpps://yourbusiness.WordPress.org or WordPress.com.
Either way, your business’s subdomain will be orbiting the almighty giant and will thus lose a bit of its uniqueness. You should purchase a paid plan if you want a custom domain name. Prices start at $50 a year.
As an alternative, we suggest SiteGround or BlueHost. Their plans start at about $3 or $4 per year, and they guarantee 100% uptime and load times of about 1.20s.
What Can You Do from the WordPress Admin Panel?
A popular business website must be full of high-quality content that facilitates sales.
Create Posts
The admin panel lets you create posts very quickly and publish them in chronological order. The UI automatically measures the content’s readability and uniqueness. As a free, open-source platform, WordPress allows you to upload videos and pictures into your posts to make them more interesting.
Create Pages
You can also create various pages from the WordPress admin panel and link them to the homepage’s sections, such as: About Us, Order Now, Our Mission, etc. You may have to pay extra for some premium WordPress themes to make these pages more appealing.
Important WordPress Site Settings
Before your small business site goes live, make sure it’s got the correct title, tagline, and time zone.
