Building a custom website is a major step business owners need to take to increase brand awareness and acquire new customers. However, since not every company manager has a technology background, a website must be easy to manage and update.
For stability and maintenance convenience, most business owners choose WordPress as the backbone for their future website. Statistically, the content management system empowers 35% of all existing websites. It is the biggest CMS out there, with a considerable community and over 55,000 plugins to leverage upon. WordPress is known for its ease of use and scalability. The platform supports multiple high-traffic websites – TheNextWeb, The New Yorker, and many more.
Anything is possible on WordPress. The CMS is fairly intuitive – you can build a blog on your own. Another way to build a website is by hiring a freelancer or a development agency.
What Are WordPress Development Agencies?
A WordPress agency is a team of tech specialists – developers, designers, testers – dedicated to building and maintaining websites as they scale. Hiring a team to handle WordPress development services is faster than developing a website on your own. You can add more features to the site, but it would also be more expensive than building a blog on your own.
A WordPress development company should be on stand-by even after the website is live. A WordPress development agency monitors and improves a website’s performance, assists when it has to be updated and educates the team on content management.
The best WordPress development agency usually offers businesses from multiple domains the following services:
- WordPress Development and Growth;
- UX/UI WordPress Design and Development;
- Hosting assistance;
- Consulting and market research;
- Website maintenance;
- Marketing assistance.
Where Can I Find a Good WordPress Consultant?
As a business owner, you might be wondering where to find a WordPress developer who will build a high-quality website and oversee its maintenance. Depending on your budget and needs, there are two currents to explore – freelancers and WordPress development agencies. Let’s examine the pros and cons of each approach.
Hiring a Freelance WordPress Developer
You can find a professional who takes on freelance projects as part-time work or after-college practice. Usually, working with a freelance WordPress developer is cheaper than hiring an agency, and a professional will be skilled enough for bug-fixing an existing WordPress site. On the other hand, you will have no guarantee that a contractor will not dump you halfway, not to mention that his development skill set might be rather narrow.
Pros:
- More flexibility;
- Cheaper development process.
Cons:
- Low dedication;
- No guarantees;
- Narrow skillset;
- Confidentiality challenges;
- Less control over the project.
Places for hiring freelance WordPress developers:
- WordPress Jobs;
- Upwork;
- Toptal;
- StackOverflow Careers.
Onboarding a WordPress Development Agency
Choosing a committed development agency is another way to go about building a WordPress website. By reaching out to a team of developers experienced in laying out and designing websites, you can be confident that your corporate website incorporates best practices. You can also reach out to an agency for the technical optimization of an existing WordPress site.
A WordPress development agency will work out the contractual details to prove its commitment to the project. You will be confident that the project will be completed successfully and overseen once it’s live.
Pros:
- End-to-end collaboration;
- You will have a say in project management;
- Highly skilled team;
- Contractually stated project requirements.
Cons:
- Higher collaboration cost;
- Hard to find a local agency in areas that are not densely populated.
Places to look for WordPress development agencies:
- Google queries;
- Lists with industry leaders;
- Lists of top companies in your area.
Reasons You Might Want to Outsource WordPress Development
Right now, there’s a significant talent war in tech. Large-scale companies are struggling to lure in talent and offer skilled developers high bids and full social packages. That’s why it’s tough for small business owners to find qualified WordPress developers in top business hubs, such as the US, Germany, France, UK, and a few others.
Outsourcing WordPress development is a smart way to get access to a broader talent pool and build an optimized conversion website. Other than that, here are the benefits business owners get to reap from hiring a dedicated outsourced team:
- No maintenance costs – Running an in-house team comes with high operating costs. A business manager has to pay rent, electricity bills and employee salaries as well as invest in talent management software and custom plugins. When outsourcing, you don’t have to deal with financing a team – a vendor is responsible for providing developers with working space, education and workplace benefits.
- Higher flexibility – If a WordPress project scales, you will need more talent to maintain the website and the server. For in-house teams, wanting to design more custom themes would mean bringing new hires – here comes a tedious process of candidate screening, job interviews and employee onboarding. Outsourcing is easier to scale or narrow down. In case you want to upscale or shut down a project, expanding or terminating the contractual agreement with the vendor is all it takes; that’s much more flexibility than working with an in-house department.
- Lower development costs – If you look for a WordPress development team in regions with lower mean salaries, you stand a chance of cutting down development costs significantly. Thus, there is no need for business managers to give up on website features or Premium Themes to save money – outsourcing allows them to get access to highly professional, yet considerably cheaper, talent.
- Opportunity to focus on the core activity of your business – If you are running an in-house team, your attention is divided between multiple departments, instead of giving it to improving the quality of the primary revenue-driving activity. Outsourcing allows business managers to focus on providing end customers with higher product or service quality, while a dedicated team handles all promotion and high-performance assurance processes.
Types of WordPress Development Services
WordPress development encompasses a wide range of services. Before hiring a team, ensure the professionals can handle the tasks you need. Here are the main types of WordPress web development services.
WordPress development
Building the website is the core service all development companies offer. Setting up the site and configuring the admin panel so that it’s fully manageable is crucial for stellar website performance and error-free maintenance.
Here are the steps of WordPress blog development service:
- Determining the technical specs of the website – WP version, multisite support, etc;
- Setting up the development and staging environment;
- Testing and bug tracking;
- Continuous documentation.
Being considerate about WordPress development helped Daniel, a consulting firm owner, get more people to fill in contact forms. Here’s how following WP development practices improved his website.
WordPress Maintenance
A decent WordPress development company should be offering WordPress website maintenance services as well as development services. By paying attention to website maintenance, you improve the quality of user experience and help customers enjoy the interactions with the brand.
A high-performing website will also help stand out among competitors whose webpages are bulky and slow to load.
Keeping tabs on the latest development and design trends helps make the website more relevant to visitors – this means increasing mobile responsivity, opting for a minimalist design, and removing redundant features from the site.
WordPress website maintenance services include:
- Updating the core of the website, the theme, and patches;
- Backing the website up regularly;
- Database management;
- Security monitoring.
WordPress Design
Although not all WordPress development agencies offer design services, you certainly want to stick with those that do. Laying out and creating a custom WordPress theme is a complex process that consists of the following steps:
- Ideation and conceptualizing;
- Building a sitemap;
- Wireframing;
- Custom WordPress theme development;
- Testing the interface;
- Launching the UI;
- Maintaining the design.
UX and UI design are essential to the success of your business – find out why and how to build a conversion-boosting interface for your website.
WordPress SEO
The CMS offers a wide range of search engine optimization tools. However, getting the hang of these on your own is a challenge. That’s why it’s better to use professional help to get high-quality traffic and convert visitors into customers.
Optimizing the website’s performance helps customers move between pages easily and check out faster. SEO activities contribute to higher customer satisfaction rates and help business owners attract people who have already made a buying decision and are looking for the right company to get a product or a service.
If you reach out to a WordPress development agency for SEO support, these are the services a team with high WordPress expertise should be ready to offer:
- SEO audit;
- Website performance optimization;
- Content optimization;
- Creating an SEO strategy for the team to follow;
- Tracking the website’s search engine rankings;
- Managing backlinks.
SEO is crucial to make sure people know about your business. Find out how to find the right SEO team and what the best practices to follow are.
WordPress Marketing
Finally, top-tier WordPress development companies offer clients full marketing assistance – this includes social media management, PPC campaign setup, content marketing assistance, and other marketing services.
By marketing the website, you will get to know the audience better and learn how to use the weaknesses of your competitors to encourage page visitors to choose your products instead. Running advertising and awareness campaigns help businesses get more trust from target audiences. Through brand awareness and marketing campaigns, you communicate your values to the audience and increase customers’ desire to be a part of your vision.
Here are the most common WordPress marketing services:
- Becoming an affiliate;
- Creating and running a content marketing strategy;
- Advertise on Google AdWords and social media;
- Tracking KPI and progress;
- Converting website visitors into customers.
WordPress Web Design Agency
If you decided to hire a WordPress website company to handle WordPress development, make sure to research the market before you settle on a team. Here’s a checklist of must-have practices a suitable WordPress design company should follow.
- They have skilled WordPress developers – Business owners should be able to trust a WordPress web design company. It means that developers should have years of working WordPress development experience and be familiar with the best development practices.
- Continuous partnership – Working with a WordPress development company is work in-progress that should last for years after the website is live. When looking for a team, choose vendors who offer full SEO, marketing, security, and development maintenance.
- Full confidentiality – A WordPress design agency should not share development practices or the details of your project with anybody. Emphasize your right to protect the practices and the vision of the project as intellectual property and include security into a list of contractual obligations.
- Collaboration on your terms – To synchronize the development process with the way the core business operates, a WordPress website design company has to take on the project management framework your team uses. Every meeting and a conference call should run on your terms as well.
Conclusion
Investing in a better website is a move with a high return on investment. Implementing best SEO, marketing, development, and design practices help attract new customers and maintain a connection with regular clients.
If you want to find out how to improve your WordPress website, you can evaluate your website development practices for free here. You will find out what you are doing right and wrong and how to improve the website’s performance – there’s no charge for the assessment.
