Building a Website Without WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) used on websites today, with 27% of the market share according to Statista. It’s a choice that more and more businesses are making as it provides a simple, robust solution that can be customized to suit any business’ needs.

While there’s no denying the power of WordPress, it’s not perfect for every business and creator. If you’re looking to build a website without using WordPress, here are some tried and tested methodologies that can help.

Use A Blank Canvas

It’s amazing how much a simple design can achieve. You don’t necessarily need a ton of design skills to create a pleasing website if you know what styles you like and dislike. A good place to start is with a completely blank canvas. You can then add in the content and design elements you need to make it functional and pretty.

A completely blank canvas allows you to start from scratch and build your website how you see fit. You won’t be tied to any specific template, which means you can adjust the CSS and layout to suit your needs. You don’t have to be bogged down by design choices either as you can always go back and change things if you feel the need. This is one of the great things about building a website from ground up – with a little help from technology of course!

Don’t Forget About Software Developers

Even if you’ve spent a long time perfecting your website’s design, it won’t matter if you run into technical difficulties along the way. The best plan is always to have a group of software developers on hand to help you out.

You can’t anticipate every problem that may arise during the building process, which is why it’s best to be prepared for the unforeseen. Having a few back-up developers on standby is crucial as it can take a lot of time to troubleshoot technical issues and make necessary adjustments. Backing up and maintaining a stable connection with your web host is also critical, as the slightest hiccup can lead to massive downtime and potentially lost sales or traffic.

The Importance Of Testing

Even the most skilled designers and developers make mistakes. This is why it’s important to test your website’s design and functionality as much as possible before you launch it to the public. There are several different ways to test your website’s various functions and bugs including using software like WebStorm or Jetpack, checking out your site in different browsers, and using different devices like tablets or smartphones to access your site.

Testing is also a vital part of the process as it helps you find the bugs in your code before you release it to the public. Once you’ve found and fixed the bugs, you can feel confident that your site will perform as expected by your users. Testing also allows you to find and address any security flaws that may exist in your site. If you’d like to learn more about testing, here are some great books that can help you out:

  • Web Testing Tools: Effective Tools For Checking Out Your Website’s Performance
  • Testing Your Website: A Step-by-Step Guide For Finding Out What’s Wrong And How To Fix It
  • Testing Web Pages: Finding Out What Works And What Doesn’t On Your Website
  • Testing Your Website: Tools For Analyzing Sales Performance, Traffic, And Conversion
  • Optimizing A Website: Using Testing And Analysis To Find Out What Works Best

In addition to testing your website’s design and functionality, it’s also important to examine its performance from a marketing standpoint. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your website and identify areas where you can improve. For example, you may notice that a lot of your site’s traffic comes from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By integrating these social media platforms like buttons or sharing articles on your site, you can encourage your visitors to like or follow you on social media platforms.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

According to HubSpot Blogs research, 80% of consumers now visit websites from a mobile device. In today’s ever-changing digital landscape, it’s important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.

Designing a mobile-friendly site doesn’t mean that you need to be bursting at the seams with pixels, as the research conducted by HubSpot Blogs found that only 49% of consumers see small websites as “ugly.” When it comes to mobile friendliness, leading website design experts recommend focusing on three key areas:

  • Responsive web design
  • Speed
  • Usability

Each of these areas plays a crucial role in establishing a good user experience on a mobile device. When designing a mobile-friendly site, it’s important to create content that is easy to scan, use, and, above all, enjoyable on a small screen.

One of the best things about a completely blank canvas is that you can start from scratch, ensuring that your website looks great on any device. When it comes to building a mobile-friendly site, you don’t necessarily need to be limited by a particular template or CMS. Simply follow the above guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to creating a mobile-friendly online store.

Make Sure Your Website Has All The Right Metadata

An error in the metadata (aka. structural information) of a webpage can lead to all kinds of problems. For instance, if the metadata of a product page doesn’t match up with the product’s attributes or vice versa, it can cause all kinds of problems from incorrect item searches to missing product descriptions and images.

Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this problem. All you need to do is make sure that the metadata of your website is properly and completely matched up to the page content. A nice tool that can help you with this is Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is a powerful keyword research tool that can identify the terms and phrases that you should be targeting and the content of your website that can best match those words and phrases. Simply follow the provided instructions to crawl and harvest the metadata of your website for analysis.

Make Sure Your Website Has Vibrant Content

If you’re providing vibrant content for your website, you’ll certainly draw in the interest of the readers. However, it’s not always easy to ensure that your content is interesting, intelligent, and full of value. You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to discover the trends and topics that your audience interacts with most frequently. With a little bit of luck, you can then create content that speaks to your audience’s interests. If you need some inspiration, here are a few interesting trends as of late as identified by BuzzSumo:

  • eCommerce Platforms
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Marketing Automation (MA)
  • AI
  • ML (Machine Learning)
  • VR/AR/Mixed Reality (MR)
  • Data Mining
  • Big Data

What we have here is a list of the most prominent topics that resonate with your target audience. If you can provide content that covers most of these topics with a little bit of creativity, you’ll be able to keep your audience engaged.

To keep your audience engaged, you should always look for ways to provide content that is both interesting and useful. To achieve this, you can utilize platforms like Medium to distribute and highlight your work. With over 200 million monthly active users, you’ll certainly find a community that appreciates your work. If you’d like to create content that consistently draws in a substantial audience, consider using platforms like YouTube to do so.

Make Sure Your Website Is Secure

A secure website is an important aspect of any business’s online profile. By adding an SSL certificate to your site’s hosting, you can provide a bit of an added layer of security for your website by encrypting data that is transmitted between your server and customers’ browser. This additional layer of security can be particularly beneficial for eCommerce websites as hackers have demonstrated that they are often willing to target and infiltrate eCommerce servers.

To learn more, visit sites like Norton Secure or McAfee Secure, which provide free SSL certificates that can be easily integrated into your site’s hosting.

When choosing a web host for your site, be sure to consider the security measures that they provide. If you’d like to learn more, here are a few articles that can help you out: