Stand out from the crowd by harnessing the full potential of WordPress.
You’re in good company if you use WordPress for your small business website. Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites and celebrities are using WordPress. In fact, recent stats show that WordPress is actually powering 26.4 per cent of the Web.
But are you using it to its full potential?
While you may have your content solutions bedded down, there are plugins and inherent features that go beyond basic CMS. There are over 45,000 feature plugins available to extend website capabilities to include the likes of online reservations, ticket sales and discussion forums. In the past nine months alone, at GoDaddy we’ve seen website builder plugins grow in usage by 60 per cent across millions of GoDaddy-hosted WordPress websites. To make the most of you WordPress site we decided to recap some of the tricks of the trade and lesser-known features that will help make you a WordPress wonder!
- Turn your WordPress site into an e-commerce powerhouse
The incredible success of WooCommerce has firmly established WordPress as a legitimate e-commerce solution for companies of virtually any size. With this plugin you can easily set up your website as an online store for your products. Setting up WooCommerce is relatively straightforward and can take your business to the next level! With WooCommerce on WordPress, you can also automatically utilise your page template to create its product page, account page, shopping cart and checkout page.
- Have your website take out some of the legwork of invoicing
While payday is great, when you run your own services business it comes with the added complexities of invoicing. The Advanced Client Manager plugin can streamline the process and bring the joy back to payday. The plugin lets you create and send professional invoices right from your WordPress dashboard; meaning you can track all your invoices from one place. Clients can then pay your invoices easily using PayPal keeping things simple for everyone.
- Build your community
While it’s important to maintain a strong presence on social media, your website can also be used as a community hub thanks to WordPress. The forum plugin bbPress integrates smoothly with your theme and gives you a stripped down set of community options with the click of just a few buttons. If you have more time to dabble in community building, BuddyPress provides a full suite of social networking functionality that can be added to any WordPress site.
- Reach the right inboxes
Once you’ve built your company’s following, its important to make the most of staying connected. With email signup form integrated with GoDaddy email marketing, you can create mailing lists with a built-in email signup form. This means you can easily send promotional campaigns and newsletters to reach the right people and essentially drive sales.
- Make things right with the right customer service
Online customer support can be challenging. By picking the right tools, you can make the difference between a smooth-running aspect of your business and an ongoing nightmare for all concerned. Dedicated customer support themes and plugins such as those offered by Hero Themes enable you to quickly put together slick and serviceable customer-facing FAQs and knowledge bases.
Much like your small business, with WordPress your website is what you make of it. By choosing the right tools and plugins, you can make your website more robust as your business expands. With over 45,000 feature plugins to explore, the benefits to your business website are massive.
Tara Commerford, Country Manager – Australia & New Zealand, GoDaddy
