If you’re looking for a solid website baseline, WordPress is the obvious way to go. It’s flexible, free, convenient, and supported by a massive global community. But as you can glean from the word “baseline”, you can’t just whip up a generic WordPress website and expect everyone to love it. That’s essentially the least you can do to meet standards. Most of the CMS-managed web runs on WordPress, so how can you stand out by virtue of your platform choice alone?
What really matters here is the effort you put into customizing and optimizing your WordPress site. If you’re willing to commit your time and attention to making it as good as it can be, you can forge a polished website that impresses everyone who discovers it. And in this post, we’re going to set out a few key tips for how you can get this done. Let’s get started.
Choose an Impressive Modern Theme
One of the many things that makes WordPress so great is its huge range of plugins and other integrations, and this matters right from the start. Instead of starting fresh with a blank slate and trying to reinvent the wheel, you can trust a design expert and install an impressive theme. Some WordPress themes are completely free, but those that require one-time fees — the more powerful and well-designed premium themes — still work out as bargains in the long run.
Your choice of theme will impact everything about your site, from the layout of the homepage to the functioning of the navigation. It’ll also determine how easily you tweak various elements. A top-end theme will offer you a large selection of options to help you make your website look uniquely yours (without requiring the exhaustive development that goes into fully-custom sites).
Adapt Your Content to Suit Everyone
How accessible is your website when it comes to the design of your content? Many website owners make the mistake of getting very niche with their content, assuming that anyone who visits will understand all the minor details. This isn’t typically the case, though — and when someone shows up with a vague interest but no idea of the specifics, your content can drive them away or it can welcome them and delicately explain why they should be invested.
Here are some central considerations pertaining to accessibility:
- Color choices. Many people suffer from color blindness to some extent, and using a messy mixture of colors can make your website tough to use. Sticking to a simple high-contrast color scheme will make a huge difference.
- Languages. Everyone includes people who don’t speak your language. Thankfully, it’s never been easier to translate a website. There are WordPress translate plugins (compatible with WordPress themes, naturally) that can automate most of the process for you, allowing you to reach a much wider audience.
- Terminology. Does your copy feature terms that some people won’t understand? Does it make issues seem more complicated instead of less? Dialing back the challenge will help you win over people who’d otherwise leave.
- Mobile use. Plenty of people do most of their internet browsing on mobile devices. A good WordPress theme will be mobile-responsive by default, but you still need to test your site on mobile devices and make alterations where necessary.
Optimize the General Performance
Lastly, reaching people everyone also requires your website to run extremely well. It can do everything else right, but if it loads very slowly and reacts sluggishly to input then people certainly won’t love it. Now, WordPress itself is perfectly reactive, but your hosting may not be. You need to invest in high-performance hosting that can accommodate heavy traffic.
Additionally, you need to check that your website is compact enough to work well on mobile connections. Not everyone has access to high-speed internet, so having an overly-fancy design will only lead to problems. Trim the content, compress the images, and keep things simple wherever you can. This should help you keep things streamlined.
If you can do the things we’ve set out here, you can create a WordPress site that has all the ingredients to perform well and impress everyone — though it’ll still mostly come down to creating great content and having something valuable to offer. In the end, it’s the central hook of your website that holds everything else together. If you don’t think you have enough of a hook to draw people in, go back to the drawing board.
