WordPress websites: harness the power for your business

Let’s look at some of the lesser known but powerful features of WordPress. The open-source project behind WordPress has been pushing along for 15 years now, it’s arguably the most mature content management system for the web. It really does pack a punch and that’s good for you when you choose to use it to power your business’ website.

The latest technology is always more expensive. The latest (read: monster sized) flat screen TV costs a lot more than last year’s model. The current iPhone is expensive while you can pick up the previous model for a lost less. As well as the paying the price for the latest, what you get is also a factor. Back in the day only the more expensive cars had bells and whistles like electric windows and heated seats. Now these features are available in cars across the price range.

Such is the situation with WordPress. Its capabilities have grown in every direction. In this article we’ll  look at some of the more advanced situations and probably lessor known, where it excels. Before we do though, I want to make this point. Because of its maturity, much of this power is cheap to access. Small and mid sized businesses can now access the same kind of advanced features that only a few years ago would have been well outside of their budgets.

WordPress powered eCommerce systems

There are a number of eCommerce solutions for WordPress. Generally they work via a plugin that adds the shopping functionality to the website. While WooCommerce is the largest of the WordPress ecommerce tools, it’s not the only one. Easy Digital Downloads is also well established in the ecosystem, it’s niche is powering stores that focus on delivery of digital goods (think: software, access to content etc.. ).

WooCommerce has been downloaded over 39 millions times. It powers around 28% of all online stores in 2018. The type of stores running Woo vary too. Simple shops that sell 3 books to large installations that sell thousands of products, ship them globally and integrate to backend inventory systems.

There’s also a lot more to eCommerce on the web, a growing use case is membership sites. Selling access to content. Our work with SuperFastDiets.com is a great example of a WordPress membership site, powered by WooCommerce. We use it to charge users on a recurring 2 week schedule and provide access to the membership content in the site. Several thousand users, all powered by WordPress and WooCommerce.

Personalisation of content

This is an area that really is becoming accessible to more and more businesses. And it’s a powerful feature that helps your website convert. Not everyone is coming to your site for the same reason. As WordPress developers, the more we can help you serve up an experience, personalised for your users the better results you’ll see.

Personalisation can mean lots of things. It can start with something simple like showing difference content based on visitor location. We helped Peter Trends Bridal achieve this when they were launching into the United States. Not all of their bridal gowns were available in the US. Based on the visitors location we’re able to customise the menus and the products available in the site.

You can personalise the visitor experience by showing them content or options based on their previous browsing history or based on their previous purchase. You can even customise their experience based on how they arrived at your website.

In more sophisticated setups you can connect your website to marketing automation systems like Active Campaign or InfusionSoft. Then you can trigger other events like an email message based on their activity on your website. This area is a great example of very sophisticated marketing that is now much more accessible to small business. Not too long ago this kind of functionality would simply have been too expensive to implement.

Integration with everything else you do

This is one of the areas that we love to show our clients. If you sell something on your website, why not have it automatically create an invoice in your accounting system? Someone fills in an enquiry form, send it to your cRM system. A user expresses an interest in a product, send them an email campaign over the next few days to educate them on the product.

WordPress excels and connecting to everything else you use. Accounting, cRM, email, marketing automation systems. Automate and save time!

Once again, in the past this kind of interoperability would have cost a lot of money. Not any more. Most of this can be done with a couple of WordPress plugins and a bit of configuration.

Scale and speed

This area is advancing rapidly in the WordPress ecosystem. Gone are the days where you’d host your website on one server in one location. The hosting industry has well and truely embraced WordPress. On a modest budget you can now run your website on infrastructure that has true global reach. You can scale up your site to support thousands of visitor an hour.

Here at The DMA web help hundreds of our clients by hosting and managing their WordPress sites on the very latest hosting technology.