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Having a professional WordPress website created
Overview
Written by Finn Ruijter, 03 April 2020

Outsource WordPress website to an Internet agency? 5 insights!

When it’s time for a new WordPress website, you want to make the right decisions. For example, you need to choose an Internet agency that suits your requirements and needs. It’s quite an investment and you want to be able to use it for years to come.

That your choice falls on this management system (cms) is not surprising: WordPress is the market leader and, thanks to its open-source nature, constantly improved and expanded. It makes it easy for a team to maintain a website because it is user-friendly. Also, WordPress sites already rank pretty well by default in search engines like Google. Interested? Discover the benefits of WordPress for your organization.

But what should you look for when looking for a WordPress agency? In this blog post, you will discover what factors are important for companies and institutions that want to outsource the development of a professional website.

Insight 1: A website briefing is indispensable

A website briefing is a document that tells you more about your company, your vision, the reason for the new website and the expectations you have for the project. For the larger projects (more than say €10,000), briefings are indispensable. A briefing helps the Internet agency get into your skin and translate your challenges into a website that achieves your goals. Check out 6 tips for writing the perfect website brief here.

Insight 2: Customization fits better

The vast majority of WordPress agencies take a default theme (the visual shell) and customize it to your needs as far as possible. Themes were created by an outside party with the goal of reselling them as often as possible.

Despite all the developer’s good intentions, such a theme also has a host of limitations. If you are developing a large website, expecting a solid future-proof foundation or have special requirements, you will be told several times that something cannot be done and needs to be just a little bit different.

How different is it with a customized WordPress website, created by an Internet agency that listens carefully to your needs and requirements. With customization, almost anything is possible – including links to your systems or software. With a custom website, you’ll be ready for the future, and a maintenance package will keep your website compatible with newer versions of WordPress.

Insight 3: A fast website ranks higher

The nice thing about WordPress is its versatility. Plugins allow you to add all kinds of functionality to your site that a theme or the WordPress backend does not offer by default. So the temptation is to install one plugin after another.

But be aware that plugins make your WordPress site slower. Uncompressed images have the same effect. If you have a fast Internet connection, chances are you won’t notice much of that loading time. But people with a slower connection or mobile users with a weaker signal from the mast or Wi-Fi point may suffer.

One of the more important factors that Google considers when ranking websites is that loading speed. And with the recent news that Google’s Chrome web browser is going to flag slow websites, the importance of a fast website is once again underscored.

A good Internet agency can not only design beautiful websites, but also thinks about loading speed. For that, technical knowledge is not enough; it also requires a super fast server with low latency.

Insight 4: Measuring is knowing

Whether it’s making the website faster, attracting more leads or scoring more online sales, you won’t really know what effect your actions are having until you can produce numbers for it. Instead of relying on your intuition and wet fingers, concrete numbers help you make certain choices.

It is therefore essential that you have good statistics once the website is delivered. We do not mean that the Google Analytics tracker has been added to the website. That is a basic requirement. Rather, we mean a complete configuration of the Google Marketing Platform for your website. But you should also run regular A/B tests to see exactly what triggers your visitors. After all, you can make assumptions about that, but reality may surprise you.

Insight 5: A new website is just the beginning

When outsourcing a WordPress website, you don’t want to find a party that just delivers a site and then leaves with nothing. No, a new website is just a starting point. Online trends and techniques are constantly changing, and to keep your conversion rate high, you need to keep testing and adapting.

Ideally, you will find a party who will not only create your website, but also optimize it. Such an agency knows your company, the target audience and your ambitions and can build on technology it has previously deployed or developed.

Each Internet agency has its own way of working. Choose an Internet agency that suits you. You do this, for example, by comparing different practices of Internet agencies.

It starts with a clear briefing

You read it: a website is never completely finished right away. It is a project that you are constantly scraping. What you learn from and improve upon. You do save a lot of time by giving good instructions to the Internet agency from the beginning. You do this through a website briefing. In a previous blog post, we told you what issues should not be missing from a briefing.