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Benefits of a WordPress Website

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Website is key to your business online, be it for online selling or just branding purpose, you need to have an impactful website. Besides being full of features and high on feel good factor for users, it should be easily manageable, as todays online marketing dynamics require you to feed your website with new content. And wordpress is the answer to all your website woes.

It is power packed with features, easy to scale and yet easy to manage. It is the best CMS out there, right from easy installation to migration, and flexible to change design keeping your content intact. Here are some of its benefits and why you should switch to wordpress today:

  1. Very easy to install, you just need basic computer skills to install it and run it.
  2. Equally good for running a blog or a website or BOTH.
  3. Inbuilt blogging feature available. You can easily add blog posts, and put them in categories, and use tags.
  4. WordPress is single handedly best platform for blogging. Posts can be imported and exported out of it.
  5. Very easy to load content, just like creating a word doc (with some basic HTML skills you can do wonders with it).
  6. Contact Forms, Sliders, etc. can be added just like that without any HTML or any other technical knowledge.
  7. Supports multimedia (Audi, Video, PPT, PDF, etc.)
  8. Flexible navigation menus. You can add whatever you want.
  9. Widely available free as well as premium themes to suit your design preferences and with different layouts. More than 2000 free themes available.
  10. Responsive themes are also available.
  11. Theme customization is easy for someone with basic HTML skills.
  12. Easy to add custom ad codes, affiliate codes or any other codes to monetize website.
  13. Easy to implement ecommerce to start selling online with easily available plugins.
  14. Plugin available for almost every feature that you want to be added (you might have to customize them to achieve something complex if you are aiming for that). There are more than 10,000 plugins available.
  15. Regular updates of WordPress, Themes and Plugins just improves the overall experience with new features coming in.
  16. WordPress comes with unparalleled support through it support forums where experts and developers participate to resolve your query and providing customization tips.
  17. SEO friendly features readily available. Easy to use SEO plugins are also available.
  18. Easy to implement membership areas.
  19. You can password protect the pages that can be accessed only by selected few.
  20. There are security plugins available to make it secure and protect from spammers, hackers and attackers.
  21. The wordpress website usually loads faster, and you can improve speed using caching plugins and Content Delivery Networks.
  22. Social Media Friendly, Readily available plugins to implement social media sharing.
  23. You can create users and assign roles (author, contributor, subscriber)
  24. Can be easily integrated with almost all third party tools (optin, email marketing tools, etc.)
  25. Taking backups is easy.
  26. ITS FREE!!! (There are ofcourse premium themes and plugins but the platform is free. There are lots of free themes and plugins available, enough to get a website up and running).

How to choose a hosting provider and the hosting package?

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Hosting is an expensive and very important part of your website and its reputation. It affects website availability, load time and search engine rankings. So it is important to take care of certain things while purchasing hosting space for your website. You need to choose a reliable hosting provider, and a suitable hosting package that cater to your requirements. It should neither be unnecessarily expensive for you nor it should be intolerably low on features and performance.

The web servers can be most easily classified as Windows based or Linux based. Usually, websites that uses PHP files need linux based web servers, while the ones using ASP need Windows server, but there are other factors to be taken into consideration. Your web developer will be able to tell you which one you need to host your websites.

Things to know before choosing a hosting provider:

  • Hosting provider should be reliable, easy to reach and available (preferably 24/7)
  • The hosting provider must have good feedback and impressive history in terms of good service and server reliability
  • The web server should be located within your targeted audience’s location. It helps in getting better search engine rankings if you are targeting a local market.
  • Understand the terms of services with your hosting provider, for example, will they be able to restore files and database in case of accidental deletion.
  • Will their control panel (CPanel) will have auto install options for scripts like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Zen, etc. Most hosting providers provide this.
  • What FTP softwares (Filezilla, CuteFTP, etc.) can be used to access the files on the server.
  • How safe is the server to use online transactions and payment gateways?

Choosing Hosting Package:

  • Estimate your space requirement, and choose accordingly. Consult your web developer on how much space you will be needing to host files.
  • Also take into account the space you need to host your emails.
  • Take into account the monthly bandwidth provided by the provider. Prefer buying the package with unlimited bandwidth. If at all the bandwidth limit exceeds, is there a possibility to upgrade, if yes what extra does your provider charges for it.
  • Similarly, for the hosting space, how much extra you have to pay in case you wish to upgrade the package.
  • Check how many free email accounts the package provides
  • If you are choosing to host your emails elsewhere (like Google Apps, etc.) then you can choose package that comes without emails
  • If you are migrating your website from one hosting provider to another you can ask for free migration of files, DB and emails.
  • Few hosting providers (Net4) charge extra for Database, please be careful and sure before ordering.
  • Check how many Database are provided with the package.

If you intend to host several websites, opt for a package that allows hosting multiple domains, check the package details.