As the largest content management system, WordPress gives you a great opportunity to launch an online business with minimum investments. WordPress now powers 30% of all websites, and it owes most of the popularity to the wide range of free features.
Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs confuse minimum investments with zero budget, which completely ruins their attempts to run a profitable online business. You should be smarter than that, and analyze where to save money and where to opt for free solutions. In this post, we will show you seven reasons not to save money on your WordPress website.
1. It’s a Primary Promotion Channel
One thing you should keep in mind is that customers tend to look for businesses through search engines, mostly Google. This means your website will be the first thing where they can learn about you, so you can’t afford to make it look cheap or poorly designed.
If you still don’t believe us, just take a look at your biggest competitors. What do you think about their websites? Are they low-quality or beautiful and appealing? Don’t expect to find your place in the market sun if you slip on the first step.
2. Theme Design
WordPress offers a plethora of free themes that you can use to build a website. But there is catch here, according to Joel Hudson, a WordPress developer at UK Careers Booster: “Free themes are rarely ever special or pretty, while you certainly won’t be able to find one that suits your branding style. For this reason, you should definitely consider hiring a WordPress designer who will create a unique theme and make your website look stylish and exclusive.”
But if you are going to use a free one, don’t forget to check how fast do they perform.
3. Hosting
Website hosting is absolutely critical to the success of your online business. As a matter of fact, it could make or break your attempts to run a serious organization, so you better hide from the free hosting solution whenever you see one.
First of all, shared hosting will make the site slower. In the world where users expect a page to load in less than two seconds, you can’t save money on unreliable hosting providers.
At the same time, you have to pay attention to the scaling process. What happens if your business suddenly starts attracting much more customers? Can your hosting platform support an unexpected spike in traffic? You should think about all these issues before choosing a free solution. That’s why we suggest checking premium hosting services like Kinsta, which we recently reviewed, that will make your site stay top-notch all the time.
4. Plugins
WordPress has more than 55 thousand plugins, thus helping users to manage their websites more efficiently. However, most tools come in two versions: free and premium. While the former provide you with basic features only, paid versions offer additional services to improve website functioning.
For instance, the free version of UnderConstructionPage plugin provides webmasters with only a handful of features, while its paid plans contain dozens of valuable additions. Both versions serve the same purpose, but the latter is way more stable and productive.
5. SEO Tools
You can administer a website with the search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, but it will keep you far away from the first page of Google search results. In other words, your website will not exist in the eyes of the typical user.
While you can find some free tools to help you out in this field like Google Analytics or Trends it is necessary to invest in additional software. For example, SEMrush or Woorank are extremely useful SEO tools that can help you to improve ranking quickly. The two tools will cost you a few hundred dollars per year, but you can gain much more by using them.
6. Mobile Optimization
Mobile devices generate over 50% of the global Internet traffic. What does it tell you? Well, it’s a clear sign that you have to invest some budget into mobile optimization, making your website user-friendly across all devices. Free WordPress features can never make your website as responsive as paid solutions, so don’t regret spending some money in the process.
7. Investing Is Earning
The last reason to stop saving money on WordPress websites is rather logical. Whenever you invest money into something, you expect some profit in return. For instance, hiring a good WordPress developer to help speed up your e-commerce store can result in a big increase in sales. Give to get is the basic financial logic that equally applies to all areas of life and business, including website construction. Therefore, spending money on your WordPress site will only make it better and more productive, thus helping you to earn money in the long-term perspective.
Conclusion
Starting a private business requires a lot of work and investments, so you have to utilize every free tool at your disposal. However, your WordPress website should not be one of the things that you want to save money on.
We showed you here seven reasons to spend part of the budget on the WordPress website. We hope this article inspires you to invest in website development, but feel free to leave a comment if you still think free tools are better – we will be glad to see your explanation!