As a small business owner, building an online presence through a WordPress website is essential in today’s market filled with various businesses. In today’s digital world, consumers prefer to shop from small businesses on the internet. However, creating a website can be a costly affair, with prices ranging from $2000 to $9000 for a basic website with 8 to 16 pages and $5000 to $55000 for an e-commerce website with 100 to 1000 products. For small businesses that can become a costly affair as they cannot spend hundreds and thousands in the initial stages.
And that’s where WordPress comes to the rescue! With WordPress, small businesses have the ability to create a online website that is on par with their top competitors in terms of features and functionality. All without breaking the bank!
What is WordPress and why is it important for local or small businesses?
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) around. So popular that it powers 43.2% of all websites across the internet. And the best part, it is completely free and open-source, which means that anyone can use it and make changes to it without any restrictions.
WordPress is naturally in the spotlight ✨ for small businesses because it is a huge money saver. Just because it is free doesn’t mean it limits you with limited features and functionalities, and its open-source nature allows for endless possibilities for customization and scalability, making it a versatile and powerful solution for small businesses.
Before we look at the benefits of WordPress, here are 10 Vital Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Website.
Benefits of using WordPress for small businesses
Easy and quick set-up
⏩ Installing and configuring WordPress site is a quick and easy process that can be completed in less than 5 minutes. Once you have the necessary software and resources, the installation will be done within a snap (not exactly, but yeah). Upon completion you will be directed to the CMS interface, where you can start adding contents of your website, like text, image, and videos.
Website Ownership
🦾 Having control over your website is a big deal for small businesses because it lets you make changes and improvements as necessary. Choosing a wrong Content Management System (CMS) for your website can have severe implications on your ability to manage and customize your online presence. It can limit your access to essential features and functionalities, making it difficult to fully utilize the potential of your website. Many CMS on the market do it on purpose to keep users locked into their platform.
WordPress, on the other hand, gives you FREEDOM! To publish, manage, and moderate any content on your website without any restrictions. You can easily scale or move it freely whenever there is a necessity.
Low Development costs
💳 Money for any business is like fuel to a car that helps you reach different horizons in your business. By utilizing cost-effective solutions like WordPress as your CMS, you can utilize those resources for marketing and strategic development strategies.
The only necessary financial commitments you should be thinking about after choosing WordPress is the hosting service and domain name.
The free themes and plugins are more than enough to start a professional small business website.
User friendly
💙 Building and managing a WordPress website is easy with its intuitive interface. Users can customize their WordPress website without having to code, thanks to Full-site editing and WordPress Block Editor.
WordPress websites are also SEO friendly, it is built in a way to provide better user experience, optimized for mobiles, makes meta data easy to manage, and many other factors which are very much helpful for small business owners.
The WordPress dashboard serves as a central hub for managing and customizing your website. It provides easy access to all the necessary tools and functionalities needed to create the foundational elements of your website, such as adding and editing pages, managing media, and configuring settings.
The WordPress dashboard serves the central hub for managing and customizing your website. It provides all the necessary tools and functionalities needed to create the foundational elements of your site. Even though it may have a slight learning curve, it is still a lot easier than learning about Fluid mechanics 😜 or other CMS’s out there.
Permission management
👔 As your website and your business grows, you will need more people to maintain it. And giving full access to everyone might put your website in danger. To avoid this hectic situation, WordPress contains different user roles that let the site owner decide what users can and cannot do within the site.
The WordPress website contains six different roles by default. These are Super Admin, Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. The Super Admin role is used for multi sites. Admin role can access all files and do all possible tasks within the site and the subscriber can only read content. You can learn more in-depth information about the other roles and the level of access they have to the website here.
To manage roles go to the WordPress admin dashboard and head over to the Users menu.
Supportive & inspiring Community
🤝 WordPress has a large community of people who discuss various topics related to CMS and their experience with WordPress. You can find people from every field, be it developers, writers, designers, etc. In fact, there are many entrepreneurs who use WordPress and are active in the community. They can be the best people to give you some tips and tricks to utilize WordPress better for your online business.
You can also join and become an active member of the community by participating and contributing through various roles available in the WordPress platform. By doing this you are not only making a meaningful impact in the community, but you are also gaining valuable skills and experience from WordPress professionals. You have the ability to propose any specific feature that you believe would be beneficial for yourself and the community as a whole. If the community also feels that the feature would be helpful, they can raise a ticket and begin working on its development.
Abundant Themes
🌈 There are over 9,000 free themes and 31,000 WordPress themes in total. Your theme will be the face of your website, so choose a theme that represents your business at the best and gives your users an intuitive experience.
Abundant Plugins
🔌 WordPress, with its pre-built functionality, can elevate the capabilities of your website to new heights. And with additional tools, such as plugins, can take the functionality to an even higher level.
There are abundant options available when it comes to enhancing the functionality of your WordPress website through the use of plugins. WordPress plugin repository has over 50,000 WordPress plugins to meet the specific needs of your website. Choose wisely!
You can use different sets of plugins depending upon the business you run. Like WooCommerce for building your e-commerce online store, Product Notices for WooCommerce for displaying notices , Yoast SEO for search engine optimization, Google Analytics for analyzing site performance, and a lot more plugins to explore.
A quick guide to make a professional website for small businesses with WordPress
Choose a domain name
This is the first thing needed for creating a website. Pro tip, keep the domain name easy and simple.
Purchase a Web hosting service
The host is the location where all of your website’s data is stored. They work as a virtual drive where you can upload your files, like images, videos, and other files.
Confused about choosing which hosting might suit your needs? No problem. This will help you make an apt and strong choice: Choosing between Self vs Managed WordPress hosting: Detailed Comparison and Insights.
Download and install WordPress
Hop on to the official WordPress website and install the latest version of WordPress. Unpack the WordPress files to your hosting service space and set up mySQL database. Then type in your website’s URL on your browser and fill up the information it asks, and boom💥, your site is ready.
Choose the required theme and plugin
As mentioned above, there are plenty of options when it comes to themes and plugins. Choose the ones that fulfill your requirements and suit your business.
Create content till your heart’s content
Start creating quality content related to your business on the website. Your customers will have a number of questions related to your business, service or product. You can answer them through your blogs on a regular basis. This helps your site with ranking and indexing.
Conclusion
The versatile and easy to use WordPress will help you make your online presence on the internet for free. All you have to do is create various strategies to grow it.
So, what are you waiting for? Give your business the online boost it deserves. All the best!