eCommerce is an essential avenue to increasing profits. Your website design plays a huge role in the way potential customers perceive your business, which is why it is so important to implement features that improve UX. A good eCommerce encounter leads directly to higher profits.
WordPress is by far the most popular platform and is constantly growing and developing in response. This means you have a vast array of features available to enhance your site, but so many options can be overwhelming. Luckily, we have used our skills as managed WordPress hosting experts to help you narrow it down and have compiled a list of 10 of our favorite WordPress features to help bring you more business.
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Arguably the most important feature for your WordPress site is security. Customers should trust that while visiting your site, their personal information is secure. Security breaches could mean death to your business.
Part of choosing the right plugins is making sure that they are actively being managed and updated to prevent vulnerabilities. Any plugins offered outside the official WordPress plugin repository should be closely vetted before choosing to add them to your site. However, to the untrained eye, this can be a difficult task.
Our expert opinion as managed WordPress hosts is to stick with the official WordPress plugin repository to avoid any security issues. Anything offered here is a safe bet and removes any worries about security compliance.
To pump up security, even more, you can also download a firewall plugin to help maintain the highest level of security consistently, keeping your user's information safe and sound at all times.
Contact forms are extremely important to any online business. This is essentially the first channel of communication between your visitors and you, serving as the best way to receive feedback or questions from potential customers. This way, you are available to your customers without exposing your personal information on your site.
Contact forms can look any number of ways but should not be overly complicated, with limited fields for the user to fill out. Providing a space for users to enter their email addresses is also a great way to generate leads.
Choosing the right contact form plugin is different for everyone. There are many popular plugins for beginners that provide premade contact-form templates. This is the easiest option and gets the job done. If you are a designer and wish to build a contact form from scratch, there are also many plugins that allow you to do so.
Email marketing, when done right, is a great way to generate sales and build new and existing customer relationships. Customers are more likely to work with businesses that they know and trust, which is why this can be a great feature to increase sales.
WordPress email marketing plugins provide tools to help you build personalized email campaigns, tailored to different customers' interests. There are plugins available that ensure your emails stay within the bounds of anti-spam laws.
Finding the right email marketing tool for you can help push your WordPress business site to the next level by utilizing customer insights with methods proven to be successful.
Call to action blocks prompt users to take action in real-time while scrolling on your website, making their experience in moving from action A to B as smooth as possible. Good CTA's will use clear wording and design, making it easy for customers to do things like subscribe to emails or be rerouted to your blog.
Whatever the call to action may be, the user is more likely to engage if the option is presented to them with the simple click of a button. Today, CTA's are almost expected and if your WordPress site lacks one, you be losing out on potential customers that need a little extra push.
In order to improve your business, you will need to have a good understanding of your analytics. Otherwise, you are left clueless as to what is working and what isn't. When it comes to creating effective business strategies, gathering data about how your customers are responding to your products is crucial. Engaging with your customers is a lot easier when you know what generates traffic.
WordPress analytics features allow you to gather a multitude of important business information in one place. Not only are you provided with real-time insights, but many plugins make your analytics easy to understand, allowing you to make the most out of your site.
Another great way to boost sales is by adding either a testimonials or reviews feature to your WordPress website. This not only allows customers an opportunity to leave feedback, which can provide a better understanding of where to improve, but testimonials and reviews also help to build a social presence.
Many potential customers rely on reviews when making decisions about whether or not they find a business trustworthy. Positive testimonials from previous customers can give new customers an idea of what to expect from you. The more good reviews, the better likelihood that a customer will choose you over competitors.
While at first glance case studies may seem similar to reviews and testimonials, and in a way they are; case studies provide a more detailed and complete account of your business and how it has affected a specific client over time. This often provides a clearer picture of things like your business objectives and how these are translated into the final product than provided by testimonials or reviews.
Many WordPress case study features are able to translate these case studies into quantifiable data that can then be displayed on your site. This data will help potential customers get an idea of what kind of results to expect from your business. Customers are likely to trust the experience of fellow customers and positive results are proven to improve business.
SEO plugins can be a great way to refine your business site on WordPress. There are a number of plugins available, each with unique features from competitor research to keyword title and meta-description optimization. Focusing on SEO is a surefire way to boost your ranking in the search results of potential customers. Generating more traffic to your site is one of the fastest ways to surge sales.
WordPress provides you with the basic tools for building your online business, with eCommerce plugins you will find features that can take your site from good to great. Added opportunities for customization will help customers find exactly what they are looking for.
eCommerce plugins also make customer relations a breeze by removing potential payment issues and issuing refunds much more simple. As mentioned previously, the better the user experience, the more the customer is likely to choose your business.
There is nothing more stressful than the thought of having to rebuild your WordPress site after hours of hard work. Your site is an asset to your business and it is important to ensure that it is protected. Backup features remove this fear and make sure that your site is secure, no matter what. Certain plugins perform automatic backups at intervals of your choosing so you will automatically stay up to date with your backups.
Updating your WordPress site is crucial to stay on top of your game, but you can experiment freely with different options and be confident that a recent version of your site is safe in the cloud.
