Are you raring to increase leads and sales through your website? Custom WordPress website design could be the solution you’re seeking.

WordPress is the top content management system (CMS) globally – by far. With thousands of plugins and theme options, an SEO focus, and vast flexibility, you can use it to build a powerful lead-generating machine.

Learn why WordPress is the best option available for most businesses and how you can utilize it to its full potential.

What is custom website design and development?

We’ll start with the basics. By working with a professional website design and development business, you can give your customers a fresh and unique website experience.

A reputable company will sit down with you to discuss your wants and needs, learn about your business background and customers, and collaborate with you throughout the entire process. Develop a custom solution catered to your unique needs that you and your customers will love.

What’s so special about WordPress?

Today, WordPress powers 43.2% of all websites and 64.9% of the websites with a content management system (that we know of). Just to give you a little context, WordPress’s largest contender is Shopify, with only 4.4% of the market share (or 6.7% of websites with a CMS).

WordPress has proven itself year after year to be the most robust, flexible, and intuitive solution for businesses of all kinds. Here are some of the top reasons millions choose WordPress:

• Responsive (mobile friendly) website design
• Ease of use
• Security
• Blog features
• Search engine optimization (SEO) focus
• Customizable templates and layouts
• Scalability
• Thousands of plugins for additional features
• Simple backend
• Focus on user experience
• Social media integrations
• Easy to integrate with other software and tools

How much should a custom WordPress website cost?

In 2022, you can expect your custom WordPress website design to cost anywhere from less than $1,000 to over $100,000. Most likely, the price you pay will fall somewhere in between. The final cost will depend on several factors:

• The size of your site
• Who builds and designs it for you (employee, freelancer, or full-service web design company)
• The amount of customization and functionality required
• Themes and plugins
• Website hosting
• Website traffic
• Design

Don’t forget to also factor in the cost of ongoing maintenance – keeping your website up to date, safe, secure, and bug-free.

How to Optimize Your Custom WordPress Website Design to Increase Leads and Customers

Think about why you want to design a new website or redesign your current WordPress site in the first place. Likely, it has to do with generating more leads and boosting sales for your business.

Optimizing your website for lead generation is crucial to building a thriving business today. It involves making an impactful first impression, thoughtfully nurturing leads, and converting leads into satisfied customers.

Here are eight essential areas to focus on to draw users in, build trust, guide them down the buyer’s journey, and produce loyal customers and brand advocates.

1. Content and Site Architecture

The larger your website is, the more content you have and more complex your sitemap becomes. Content organization is crucial to a positive user experience and SEO.

Your web designer will create a flowchart to organize your website architecture (the hierarchical structure of your pages). It should outline your site navigation, links, and the flow of your top-level pages (Home, About, Services, Blog) down to lower-level pages (individual service pages, blog posts, etc.).

2. WordPress Themes

Your WordPress theme will dictate the general look and feel of your website. A theme will include menus, widgets, default fonts and colors, and basic layouts. Of course, your website designer can customize your theme to suit your preferences, so your theme is like the “bones” of your site.

When choosing from hundreds of theme options, consider your industry, plugin integrations, available support, scalability, SEO friendliness, responsiveness, and style. Some of the most popular themes today include:

• Hello by Elementor
• Astra
• Flatsome
• Sydney Pro
• TheGem
• Litho
• Airi Pro
• Neve
• Authority Pro
• SeedProd

3. User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)

UX and UI play a critical role in satisfying users, reaching your website goals, and growing your business. UX/UI design enhances the user experience to increase leads and customers. The main components of UI/UX design include:

• Information architecture: The structure of your information and how it guides users through your website
• Wireframing: Building a sample of your website to test its features and usability before it goes live
• Usability: How easy it is for users to navigate your site for the first time and find the information they need
• Design: How elements such as color, fonts, images, graphics, sounds, icons, and whitespace define your brand identity and affect user behavior

4. Functionality

Let’s start with the basics before getting into the weeds about which popups, plugins, tools, and widgets you want your custom WordPress website design to include. Focus on the core functionalities at first. You can begin by creating lists of “must-have” and “nice-to-have” features so you know what to prioritize first.

Consider the core purpose of your website and how you can best capture leads and customers online. Your industry and niche will play into this as well. Maybe you need email marketing tools, quote forms, a cart feature, or an online client portal.

Here are a few plugins we use daily and recommend to most businesses:

• Elementor: A drag-and-drop page builder that helps you easily build beautiful, dynamic pages quickly
• Gravity Forms: A powerful WordPress plugin for building custom forms to capture leads, collect payments, and automate workflows

5. Design

Your website designer will customize your theme to support your brand identity and attract your target audience. You may also choose to build a completely customized website from scratch without using a pre-built template (which demands a higher price tag). Either way, you have the freedom to create a site that fulfills your vision, grabs users’ attention, and pulls them deeper into your site.

Consider current trends to stand out, stay competitive, and impress your visitors. Here are a few of the top web design trends for 2022:

• Micro animations and micro-interactions
• Abstract illustrations
• Gradients
• Bold, colorful visuals
• Inclusive designs
• Black and white color schemes
• Modern minimalism
• Customized content
• Large or interactive typography
• 3D elements
• Glassmorphism

6. SEO

WordPress is a CMS that gives you built-in features and additional plugin options, like Yoast SEO, to help you optimize your website and move up in search engine rankings. The platform makes content creation easy. Build new top-level pages, secondary pages, blog articles, and more using pre-made templates.

Using the built-in blog feature, you can create or upload new content, edit and optimize, create drafts and schedule pages, add links and visuals, and see post revisions. You can also easily add meta descriptions, alt text for images, header tags, and permalink structure.

Upload pictures, videos, and graphics and edit them in WordPress directly. And use caching, file compression, and minimized HTTP requirements to increase site speed.

7. Customizations

WordPress facilitates custom development and design. Its flexibility is what draws many businesses in. Whether you need to:

• Sell products and services online,
• Share content via a powerful blogging platform,
• Create quote and contact forms, or
• Build a login portal for customers…

You can – with WordPress.

By customizing your theme with advanced features, functionality, and plugins, you can build a powerful machine that meets your highest demands and works for you 24/7.

8. Performance and Security

WordPress prides itself on being an open-source platform. This means a large community of developers regularly monitors and contributes to themes, plugins, and code to reduce bugs and security threats.

Ongoing maintenance is essential to keeping your website updated and secure. Here are the security measures we take at Port & Starboard. We highly recommend these tools for any WordPress site.

• Wordfence: Wordfence is a comprehensive security solution – a global team of security analysts, software engineers, threat researchers, and support staff that focus on securing WordPress sites. Contact them anytime and any day of the year if you encounter problems.
• CloudFront: You can optimize your website performance using Amazon CloudFront – a content delivery network (CDN) service designed for security, high performance, and developer convenience.
• ManageWP: Schedule daily backups of your website and all your data with ManageWP, so you’re prepared if something unexpected happens.

Partner with a WordPress Website Design Company

If you’re looking for a custom WordPress website design company, look no further than Port & Starboard! We live and breathe WordPress and offer web design and hosting – everything you need to run a successful business online.

We want to help you capture your target audience and give them a stellar online experience so you can hit your goals and grow your business for years to come.