[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]With website builders like Wix and Squarespace becoming more sophisticated and adding features, founders have more options for building their websites.
There are other free and inexpensive traditional CMSs, which are worth looking at. Drupal and Joomla are the usual alternative ones. In most cases, these require development skills, which is why many founders prefer WordPress.
Compared to website builders, WordPress remains the best choice for the more strategically minded founders. Those whose visions extend beyond brochureware, are planning business-critical tools and want to set a solid digital foundation for their company.
Price is always a factor though. Website builders have argued that WordPress isn’t free. You have to factor in hosting and the bundle of Pro plugins you will inevitably need. What that small cost buys you, though, is scalability.
You want to add functions and features - both off-the-shelf and custom developments - as business and operational functions grow (along with customer expectations).
If you are investing in content marketing and SEO, for example, few other platforms are flexible enough to support these efforts at scale.
Writing and publishing blog posts 3 times a week is not enough. On-page technical SEO is very granular and you’ll need a strategy that covers navigation and contextual links while making it easy for both users and search engine bots to find what they are looking for.
This is where Wix, Squarespace, and the like fall flat on their faces. They can handle small sites. As soon as pages add up, you need a platform that can scale SEO efforts.
A similar argument can be made about the human resources a founder needs to drive growth.
A lot of founders start by hiring a full-time VA and a dev on a project basis. Once the site has been built a growth hacker can build a funnel to capture and convert leads. By the end of the first 12 months, they will have formed a team.
How does this relate to WordPress? The same scenario unfolds regardless of the tech you’ve put in place, right? Absolutely.
The difference is, the WordPress ecosystem is so big that you can quickly find and hire the right professionals for the job.
If you search for “drupal developer uk” you get 513 results. The same query for WordPress returns 15,100.
Founders can also tap into many WordPress communities where they can ask for advice and meet other like-minded people.
You decided to invest in WordPress. Good choice. Now it’s time to get ready.
As a proactive founder, you will have run numbers and projected growth over time to figure out how to sustain growth financially and operationally, factoring in risk, and best-case scenarios.
You also need to factor in unplanned events such as a story going viral on TechCrunch or ProductHunt resulting in the Shark Tank Effect. When a website receives 100 times the normal amount of traffic, can it accommodate the spike of enquiries and orders?
The good news is that WordPress is more than capable of handling shark tank effects.
Here are a few tips to get going.
You need good tech in place. What you need most is a partner who understands your business, the audience you are serving, and the growth trajectory you’re taking (and what that means to plan for additional capacity along the way).
This could be a developer or hosting provider, or both. Someone you can trust will take excellent care of your website as you focus on growing your businesses.
This is unlikely to be one of the big web hosting brands with hundreds of thousands of customers where relationships are purely transactional. Find a specialist in WordPress hosting provider and talk to the smaller players, even ones local to you.
Sofian Saoudi of Solusign found a great WordPress dev on Upwork on his fourth attempt. Through him, he found Convesio.
Solusign is an eSignature implementation specialist launching when many businesses are rushing to move their contracts online.
“I know little about web design and even less about hosting. But I know that I need to offer a great user experience and underpin that with tech that will not fall over as I ramp up my marketing. I don’t want to be kept awake at night thinking that my website will crash.”
We can relate to Sofian’s journey because we were in a similar spot just three years ago.
Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength to a point where over 800 investors trusted our vision, raising over $1M on Wefunder.
Feel free to reach out about this as it's a bit of a process and there are a few tips we can share if you're considering this funding route.
You can read more about how we help founders on our WordPress hosting for Startups page, and even test drive Convesio free for 30 days — no credit card required either.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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