A high-converting WordPress site can be the foundation of a successful online business.
The right combination of landing pages, marketing tools, and premium plugins can mean the difference between surviving and thriving in today’s digital environment.
But this shouldn’t be news to anyone by now. Many of the world’s most reputable brands – like Bloomberg, Disney, and Time – have used WordPress for years. More than 70 million ecommerce shops use WordPress along with WooCommerce to connect people with the products and services they love.
Impressively, WordPress’ growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Every year, more and more companies turn to WordPress to bring their business online. For many of them, the dealbreaker is the ability to create a unique, automated, conversion-driven digital marketing platform without having to hire a team of expert developers in the process.
When it comes to achieving best-in-class results at minimal cost, business owners investing in WordPress-powered digital marketing technologies today have better options than ever before. Find out how to get the most from your WordPress project without overspending on development and marketing services at the same time.
5 tips for making a successful WordPress website in 2022
We’ve gathered some of the winning strategies that today’s most successful digital businesses use to get the most out of their WordPress website. These insights are equally valuable for digital publishers, ecommerce stores, and professional service providers alike.
Find out how to bring your business online the right way with these five key tips:
1. Use a code-free website builder
If you don’t have your own WordPress website already, the first thing you’ll have to do is create one.
In the past, most businesses did this with the help of a digital agency whose programmers would use their HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript expertise to create a sleek, modern WordPress website that runs quickly and includes all the features needed to optimize conversion rates.
These projects would take weeks to complete and come with a hefty price tag. The smallest projects cost a few thousand dollars, while large, enterprise-ready WordPress deployments can cost ten times as much or more.
As a result, even though the WordPress platform is 100% free and open-source, development costs gave it a high barrier to entry – until now.
Code-free website builders allow non-technical users to create fully featured, highly customizable WordPress websites without relying on any programming experience. This levels the playing field and enables business owners to create immersive, fully-featured WordPress websites without hiring an entire IT department to make it happen.
Elementor is one of the most popular code-free website builders on WordPress and should be at the top of the list of platforms you check out.
Millions of web creators and entrepreneurs use it to build websites without writing any code at all. In fact, even digital agencies are using it to streamline the website building process for their clients – and now you can too.
2. Perfect the art of non-intrusive popup forms
There are two kinds of popups in today’s digital environment – bad ones and good ones:
- Bad popups disrupt the user experience, offering no real value to website visitors and forcing them to close the popup window to get to the content that actually does represent value for them. Some users will simply give up and leave the site entirely, never to return.
- Good popups present valuable opportunities right at the moment when users are ready to convert. These are the rare, business-building popups that improve the user experience and boost conversions significantly.
The best, highest-converting WordPress websites display popups exclusively to users who are already about to convert.
These might be people who have already read two or three blog posts, or who have just signed up for your email newsletter, and are ready to see more.
Very few marketers know how to use popups the right way. That’s why so many websites and landing pages trigger disruptive advertisements the second you load the page. If you don’t spend any time configuring how and when your popups trigger, you won’t see any conversions from them.
The best popup builders give WordPress website owners the ability to precisely target users according to a wide range of configurable on-site events. This means you can display popup forms exclusively to users who are already primed to convert, and give them the extra nudge they need to become lifelong customers when it matters most.
3. Rethink YouTube embeds for presenting videos
Video is one of the best content formats for marketing out there today, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. When used improperly, video content can hurt more than it helps, and very few WordPress website owners successfully optimize their pages for video content entirely.
While video is an incredibly engaging medium, it’s also an expensive one, especially in terms of bandwidth. If you upload a video directly onto your WordPress website, you heavily constrict the number of users who can access your site and view your video content. If too many people try to view your content at the same time, website performance will slow to a crawl.
The simple answer to this problem is video embedding. When you embed a video download to a third-party hosting service, you offset some of the bandwidth cost and help ensure your website runs smoothly even for a large number of users.
YouTube is by far the most popular video hosting service used for this purpose, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best one. In fact, the main reason YouTube supports embedding is to get users off your site and onto YouTube – that’s why they show advertisements and suggest unrelated videos to your users, right on your site, without paying you a dime for it.
Professional video hosting solutions like Vidyard give you the ability to keep visitors on your website and even analyze video viewer data to optimize your marketing strategies. Drive sales with video content that keeps viewers focused on your products, services, and brand – while keeping distractions out of the picture.
4. Invest in robust SSL
For years now, every single major web hosting service consistently recommends adopting the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol on public-facing web pages. Your WordPress website is no different.
In the past, some experts only recommended SSL technology for websites that hosted private content, sign-in pages, or credit card transactions. Times have changed, and cybercrime has become a bigger threat than ever.
SSL technology is incredibly complex and beyond the scope of this article, but the easiest way to tell if a website has SSL is looking at the URL:
- “http://” is the protocol for unsecured, non-SSL websites.
- “https://” is the protocol for secured websites with SSL.
That extra “s” is extremely important. It ensures that your website interacts securely with its visitors, and that third parties cannot tamper with your website’s content.
Without SSL, cybercriminals could hack hardware routers at global datacenters, hijack millions of hosting servers (including yours), and force visitors to run cryptocurrency-mining scripts every time they access your website.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario, either – it’s exactly what Coinhive did for years. SSL protects users from crypto-jacking, ransomware, and much more.
5. Integrate with sales enablement tools
WordPress isn’t just a website hosting solution. It’s a full-scale platform for integrating your website with a wide range of third-party tools. Connecting your WordPress website with automated, high-performance sales enablement tools gives you deep visibility into every aspect of your online business.
Sales enablement tools are systems that connect content and marketing technologies to your sales cycle. This enables you to follow users through the sales process, tracking their behaviors from start to finish, and gathering data you can use to improve sales outcomes.
Since your WordPress website is the foundation of your digital marketing toolset, integrating these tools into your website is key to optimizing conversions throughout every step of the sales cycle.
Sales enablement tools like Seismic or Highspot give you the ability to identify and address inconsistencies in marketing messaging. It provides a platform for creating new marketing content and distributing it effectively to users, helping them through the sales funnel and encouraging them to become customers.
With sales enablement tools integrated into your WordPress website, you can create customer-facing assets that generate sales quickly and efficiently, lowering the price of customer acquisition while boosting conversions steadily over time.
Build Your WordPress Website and Optimize for Conversion with Elementor
WordPress is an incredibly powerful platform for launching highly effective tech-enabled marketing campaigns. It offers all of the technologies and integrations that a business owner needs to capitalize on today’s digital marketplace. Make the most of your WordPress deployment by integrating conversion-ready technologies from the start.
Elementor’s drag-and-drop interface and highly customizable feature set makes it the ideal starting point for your WordPress-driven marketing initiatives. Now you can build a successful high-conversion WordPress website and integrate best-in-class sales enablement technologies without hiring a development team.