Before you even read this post, I bet you got a little nauseous thinking about WordPress. If you’re raising your hand, I’m literally walking over to your table to tell you to stop!
In all seriousness, WordPress can feel incredibly overwhelming but, at the end of the day, it’s actually incredibly useful and easy once you understand what you need to understand.
Being a studio that works on several different website platforms, I’ve found the questions to be about the same and the confusion level to be right up there with them. And, I understand that. Here are three things I need you to know before choosing WordPress (and some of them are applicable to other platforms as well!):
1: Whatever your long-term goal, WordPress has a functionality for you. So, if you sell a service now but may want to sell courses later, you can do that. If you’re only ecommerce and never plan to have much else, I usually push you in the Shopify direction for 1,000,001 reasons; however, WordPress does allow for all of that functionality: e-commerce, memberships, services, blog – you name it.
2: It’s great for SEO! And honestly, Yoast SEO (a totally free plugin) is one of my favorites to take advantage of. With every blog post and product and page, you’re able to ensure your search engine optimization is up to par and working for you, not against you.
3: You need to make sure you’re optimizing your website so it doesn’t slow down. And this is where the right hosting provider can also come into play. You want to ensure you’re utilizing cache plugins like WP Cache, optimizing your images with plugins like ShortPixel Image Optimizer, and make sure you have plenty of space within your hosting plan. From time to time, you’ll want to check and see how quickly your website is loading (so you don’t lose clients or customers!) by using a free checker like Pingdom. I love it because it tells you exactly what is making your website so slow.
Is wordpress confusing? In the beginning, yes. BUT – only if you’re focusing on things like, PHP, FTP, coding, and so on and so forth. If you truly do not need to know how to set the website up, you only need to understand how to add blog posts & pages and update plugins – that’s it.
Have a burning wordpress or website question for us? Comment below or send me a DM on instagram @kaitlinfontenot.
