When you spend weeks or months creating a new website or redesigning an old one, it becomes difficult to imagine life outside of development. You become laser focused on the big day: launch. You tell yourself that if you could just get to that special day, you can move on and focus on other projects, right? Not quite. Owning, managing, and maintaining a WordPress website continues after launch. A new journey begins the minute your site becomes viewable to the world. To help you navigate this new journey you will embark on, here are five things to consider when you launch your WordPress website.
Content is King
With more than 1.6 billion websites on the internet, Google has to figure out how to rank them. There is no point in having a beautiful WordPress website if no one is going to see it. When a user searches for lawn services in Las Vegas, 37,000,000 results pop up. If you’re the new kid on the block and on the last pages, this potential customer will not find you.
Your next order of business, after you launch your WordPress website, is to start creating blog posts and quality content so that you can improve your ranking. Google takes hundreds of things into consideration when ranking your site, but content is still king.
It is very important that you write content your visitors love and publish consistently. Your rankings will suffer if Google recognizes that you’re not providing any value to your readers. Educate your readers and offer them helpful tips.
If you give, you will receive. Readers will view you as an expert in your field and will in turn support your business. You will improve your rankings if readers are spending large amounts of time on a page, scrolling down on the page, reading other content on your site, and returning to your site more than once.
Digital Marketing
Social Media
There isn’t a single business that can’t benefit from having a social media presence, which is another way to get people to your website. There are many platforms you can choose from: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on. You can build slowly over time or run paid campaigns to reach larger audiences faster.
Once you launch your WordPress website, research what platforms your competitors are on and start building your presence there. Sharing impactful content and posting frequency are key. You may need to hire a social media manager if you feel that you don’t have the time to properly maintain your channels.
Guest Blogging
Another way to get traffic to your site is by guest blogging. More established sites have lots of traffic and dedicated readers. After you launch your WordPress website, pitch offers to write a blog post for an established site as a guest blogger. You can then link back to your own website to help increase traffic. Be sure your content is high-quality and find sites within your industry. If you’re not an established blogger currently, you may have to start with smaller sites and build up to the larger ones.
Email Marketing
Would you believe that I have 35,000 emails in my Yahoo account? Even still, I do still read the newsletters sent to me from my favorite brands. Coupons galore!
Email marketing briefly became the stepchild of digital marketing as social media and paid advertisements started to become the preferred method to reach audiences. However, do not sleep on email marketing. You can see some great benefits if your messages are authentic and you send newsletters that focus on personal experiences and storytelling.
Continue to offer value in the form of eBooks, giveaways, sales and coupons. Mobile is now the preferred method to view emails, so you definitely want to make sure your newsletters are mobile-friendly. The ultimate goal is to get them back to your website.
Ongoing Maintenance
Our Director of Business Development, Jodie Riccelli, compared maintaining your website to getting regular oil changes for your car. It’s absolutely necessary that you maintain your car or you can end up with a blown engine, like me. I bought my first car at 18—a brand new Nissan Sentra. I didn’t get an oil change my first year, and my engine blew after going 10,000 miles over.
It is equally necessary that you plan for ongoing maintenance after your site has launched, which is why we highly recommend for you to transition to our Maintainn team once your site has launched. Maintainn will handle all of your site updates, monitor for security risks, back up your site, make changes to your site, if you need, and more.
One of the most important reasons you need ongoing maintenance is security. A hacked site can compromise your customer’s data, which can lead to lawsuits, loss in money, lost trust in your brand, etc. Having regular monitoring, constant security scans, and a response team can save you from this.
Also, your theme, plugins and WordPress itself releases regular updates. You could update these yourself, but beware that sometimes updates can break your site. Having a team like Maintainn handle these updates and any of the issues that arise is highly recommended.
Technology
Plugins and new technology are constantly being released. The way consumers interact with your site evolves with technology. Once upon a time, a blog post would’ve been an advice column in a physical newspaper.
Previously, websites would just have a contact page and customers would fill out a form if they wanted to be contacted. Then they would have to wait for you to reply back via email. Now, you can add a chat icon that allows customers to chat with you in real time. Users grow accustomed to these new technology releases and may disregard your site if it doesn’t offer a similar experience.
If your site does not evolve with the times, you will get left behind. New technology can help to improve your workflow and user experience.
Time
Time is a resource we never seem to have enough of. All of these steps above are critical to ensure your site receives the attention it deserves. Follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to online success. If you lack time, consider hiring professionals in each of these areas to help take your site to another level. I am sure you would prefer to be running your actual business. Let the pros handle your website.
Contact us when you’re ready to launch your WordPress website!
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