Most anyone who knows about digital marketing will agree on the benefits of a WordPress website for St Charles businesses. This article is not going to sell the benefits of WordPress over other website platforms. I’m going to make an assumption that you know the basics and have already chosen WordPress as your content management system.
How to Successfully Launch Your WordPress Website in St Charles
The aim of this article is to help you if you have already built your new business website and are getting ready to launch it. Even if you have chosen a local St Charles WordPress website design company to do all the legwork, the tips I offer here will help you to understand what’s required to take your new site online once it has been built. If you follow the four tips below or make sure that your web design company does, your business WordPress website will be well prepared to support your digital marketing efforts from day one.
1) Choose the Right Hosting Provider
A whole article could easily be devoted to hosting-provider selection for St Charles WordPress websites and indeed, there are many articles on the topic to be found. For example, WordPress enthusiast Sourav kundu wrote a comprehensive guide for WPExplorer Blog, called How To Choose The Right WordPress Hosting.
To summarize the content of Sourav’s guide, the factors you should consider when looking for a good hosting provider are as follows:
- The amount of bandwidth and disk space you require
- How many domains you plan to ultimately have
- Whether or not you plan to use sub-domains and if so, how many
- The number of MySQL databases you need
- The price you’re prepared to pay for your St Charles WordPress website to be hosted
- The backup policies of prospective providers (the more comprehensive the backup service, the better)
- How long each prospective provider has been in business (better to go with a well-established company)
- The level of customer support you need and how well prospective providers meet that requirement
- Whether you need an easy-to-use control panel (I’d recommend that you choose a provider that offers this)
Among the many providers out there that will take your money and promise to keep your WordPress website up and running are some which provide an excellent service, others that are merely average and a few that you should stay well clear of.
The only way to find the right fit is to conduct a thorough evaluation of short-listed hosting providers and to do your background research. If this sounds onerous, remember, you’ll be relying on the hosting service to keep your site online and therefore, to keep your business visible to prospects and customers.
2) Insure Your Site With a Backup Solution
Even if you choose a great hosting company, it’s not enough to rely on the provider’s backup processes. For neglecting to implement local backup solutions for WordPress websites, St Charles business owners are at risk of paying a high price.
Blogger Noumaan Yaqoob explains why you should make your own arrangements for WordPress website backups in his post for ThemeLab, titled The Importance of Backing Up Your WordPress Site. He details some of the things which can typically go wrong with a website—things which can’t always be resolved by asking your hosting company for a restore from its backup media.
3) Ramp up Your WordPress Admin Panel Security
As a writer at the WPBeginner Blog says in an article titled 13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area, hacking attacks can and do happen to small and medium-sized companies. Before you expose your WordPress website to St Charles web users therefore, it makes sense to take measures such as those discussed in the WPBeginner article, to ensure your WordPress admin panel doesn’t present a weakness for opportunists to exploit.
To address the first three items, we strongly recommend using a Managed WordPress Hosting solution.
4) Check for 404 Errors and Fix Them
Yoast founder Joost de Valk says in a post on his company’s website (Website Maintenance: 404 error pages), that you should regularly track down and fix any 404 errors (page not found) that might occur on your WordPress website. As Joost mentions, having visitors navigate to one of your pages only to find it’s not there, will lead to frustration and certainly isn’t conducive to successful marketing.
With that in mind, the last thing you need is to actually launch your site with 404 errors present from the outset, but it can happen, especially if you are launching a large website with many pages and links. Therefore, before you launch, you or your website designer should check every link and every page to make sure none of those pesky 404s are waiting to catch you and your visitors out.
Other Preparation Tasks
The editorial staff at WPBeginner recently posted a great article called Checklist: 11 Things To Do Before Launching a WordPress Site, which covers a number of important preparation tasks in addition to the ones I’ve listed here. It’s worth giving some of those tasks a brief mention, so you can check them off or discuss them with the St Charles WordPress website designer who built your site. Some key preparation activities listed in the WPBeginner article are as follows:
- Make sure all forms to be used on your website are working
- Make sure all image content, such as photos and videos are loading properly
- Ensure initial SEO is complete, including local search engine optimization so St Charles consumers can find you.
- Install and implement analytics software, such as Google Analytics, to measure your site’s performance
A good web design company will ensure all these tasks are completed before your website goes live. For example, here at Changescape Web, we complete a comprehensive checklist to make sure our customer’s new websites are optimized and ready to capture traffic from the moment they launch.
For more information about our locally-based, St Charles WordPress website design and development services, take a few moments to visit our Websites service page or give us a call at 636.947.6200.
