According to the latest statistics, 810 million websites are built on WordPress.
So, saying that you’ll face fierce competition when launching a new WordPress website would be an understatement.
WordPress offers everything you need to build a website by yourself, from themes to plugins and block theme builders. Even so, the final result is often generic and similar to hundreds of thousands of websites designed with those same tools.
The solution to this problem lies in customization and white-label WordPress development. WordPress provides room for unlimited web development, and it’s up to you to discover ways to use this content management system to take your website to the next level.
In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the benefits of using white-label WordPress development services and suggest valuable design hacks that will make your site stand out.
The Perks of White Label WordPress Development
Building a new website is like starting a new painting. You have an empty canvas in front of you and the freedom to turn your idea into something tangible.
Everything starts with an idea, but turning that idea into a website that attracts heaps of visitors daily isn’t always easy. Even if you hire a WordPress developer, you still need to know how you want your website to look and which functionalities it should have.
Creating a white-label WordPress site gives you an opportunity to paint your masterpiece, as you have the power to decide how each website element will look.
Let’s go through some of the benefits of white-label WordPress development:
- Removing WordPress branding and introducing your company’s branding to the site’s frontend and backend.
- Control over all website’s elements.
- You can manage your agency’s resources more efficiently by outsourcing website creation to a white-label WordPress development service.
- By hiring a WordPress developer, you’ll benefit from their skills and technical knowledge.
15 Hacks to Take Your Website to the Next Level
1. Look at What the Competition is Doing
Good artists imitate, and great artists steal. This Pablo Picasso quote is an excellent starting point for WordPress website development. Don’t be afraid to study your competition and incorporate whatever you like into the website you’re building.
Look at their homepages, test how easy it is to navigate their websites or find a specific product, and then think about how to use these solutions to build a website that attracts your target audience.
Learn as much as you can about the industry leaders in the niche you’re entering and use that knowledge to create a website that will challenge their position.
2. Follow the KISS Principle
Keep it simple and stupid is a variation of the ‘less is more’ design principle. Although it may seem that way, complexity isn’t your friend when creating a new WordPress website.
Try putting yourself into the shoes of a first-time website visitor. You’re entering an unknown space looking for particular information. You’ll likely leave if you start feeling lost or if finding the information you’re searching for takes too long.
Minimizing the number of elements on each page, ensuring that a visitor can easily move from one website section to another, and giving visitors an easy way to get back to the homepage will improve the quality of their experience and encourage them to return to your site.
3. Learn the Rules of Visual Hierarchy
One of the reasons agencies and digital entrepreneurs hire WordPress developers is that they often lack the skills and knowledge required to build a visually appealing website.
An experienced WordPress developer should be familiar with visual hierarchy rules and know how to implement them into their website design. These rules govern how website elements are arranged in order of their importance.
Visual hierarchy relies on scale, as the most essential elements are the largest, while less critical elements are medium or small. In addition, you can use color and contrast and groping principles to achieve visual hierarchy.
4. Don’t Overcomplicate the Navigation Bar
A website’s navigation menu lets visitors quickly get to a page they want to see. This menu helps them find their way around the website by giving them instant access to your site’s blog, product categories, or any other important website section.
An overly complex navigation menu will probably confuse visitors and cause them to spend less time on your website. Dedicating time to creating an intuitive and strategically placed navigation menu can help you build a professional-looking site that ranks well on search engines.
5. Search for the Aesthetic Your Target Audience Will Love
Understanding what your ideal website visitor might like or dislike will enable you to create an experience they enjoy. It can also help you choose an aesthetic for your website.
The aesthetic you pick should reflect your brand but also appeal to the audience your website is trying to reach.
The experimental and bold design might work perfectly if making a website for an online concept store, but it might backfire if you’re building an online real estate marketplace.
Hence, the site’s aesthetic should be attuned to its primary purpose and the taste of the audience it should attract.
6. Give Website Visitors All the Information They Need
Don’t give your audience a reason to leave your website. Provide them with the information they’re looking for to decide whether they want to buy a product on your website or solve a specific problem.
Aside from establishing authority, offering detailed information about relevant topics also incentivizes visitors to spend more time on your website.
You must accept text as a website’s visual component to achieve this goal since most Internet users don’t want to read through large blocks of text.
Instead, you should learn to use titles, headings, and paragraphs as visual elements that guide the reader toward the information they need.
7. Create Unique Visual Content
Website developers often rely on stock images and video because they don’t have the time or resources to create unique visual content for each WordPress site they build.
A visual content creation strategy can help you create a unique website that celebrates your team’s diversity or showcases the company’s products.
On the other hand, creating a video header, photo carousel or using animated 3D website backgrounds can drag your website’s speed down and affect its SEO rankings. You can overcome these obstacles by adopting the best video and photo optimization practices.
8. Use Color Schemes Strategically
Color schemes are some of the best tools you can use to create a certain website aesthetic. They are a means of communication that can assist you in establishing your site’s and brand’s identity.
Rather than opting for a standard color palette, you should create a color scheme that makes your site look unique and matches your brand and its products.
Color can highlight important website sections, direct visitors toward the content you want them to see, and make your website memorable.
You can choose from complementary, monochromatic, analogous, and countless other color schemes depending on the message you want to convey to the site’s visitors.
9. Emphasize Typography
As noted earlier, text is a visual element in website development. Hence, selecting an unusual or unique font is a web design hack that can elevate a website to the next level.
The Google Fonts plugin for WordPress features over a thousand fonts you can use for headers, titles, footers, or any other part of your website that contains text.
You shouldn’t use more than two fonts on a WordPress website, one for the titles and headings and the other for the copy body. Moreover, the fonts you choose should be easy to read, so you should avoid using decorative fonts unless they’re readable and fit the site’s overall aesthetics.
10. Embrace the Power of White Space
Don’t clutter a page by placing different page elements too close to each other.
Give each element on a webpage the space to breathe.
You can maximize the power of white space by leaving enough room around each picture and video you upload to your site or breaking text into two- or three-line paragraphs. Doing so will make your content easily digestible and increase its engagement rates.
You can also use white space to highlight key bits of information in blog posts or make floating action, ghost, or text buttons more visible.
11. Experiment with Motivational Design
Gamification or motivational design isn’t a new web development technique, but it is still among the most effective ways to boost a site’s engagement metrics.
Introducing game elements like points, levels, rewards, or daily quests motivates visitors to spend more time on your website. It also improves the quality of their experience on your site by creating an environment for them to interact with your website’s content.
Still, discovering creative ways to incorporate motivational design into your website is challenging because the best approach to gamification depends on the site’s content and your company’s goals, among other factors.
12. Don’t Underestimate the Importance of SEO Optimization
It’s hard to overstate how important your site’s search rankings are for its success.
Your website’s design has a significant impact on its SEO because visitors won’t spend much time on a website that looks dated or if they find it difficult to navigate to a page they want to visit.
Aside from focusing on human interaction, you should also ensure that web crawlers can easily index each of your site’s pages to increase its chances of landing on the first page of search results.
Minimizing JavaScript and Flash elements on your site and maximizing its speed are among the SEO optimization techniques that can help it reach its target audience.
13. Make Sure Your Website is Responsive
In the age of smartphones and tablets, responsive website design is no longer optional. Failing to optimize your site for mobile can cost you thousands of daily visitors.
Designing a responsive website will ensure visitors have an excellent experience regardless of the device they use to access it.
In addition, you can add a caching plugin to your website to increase its loading speed by a few seconds and boost the number of visitors who access it from mobile devices.
Additionally, you can utilize Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) plugins to ensure each page loads instantly on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
14. Implement CTAs Wherever You Can
It’s hardly a secret that a Call-to-Action button is an important web design element. Still, you’re unlikely to achieve the desired effect and get website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or buy your company’s product by sprinkling them randomly across your website.
Placing CTA buttons strategically at the top of a page, at the bottom of a blog post, or in the welcome popup message will make it easier for a visitor to take an action you want them to take.
Defining the button’s shape, choosing a color that contrasts with the rest of the page, and ensuring that the text is easy to read are among the design techniques you can use to draw a visitor’s attention to the CTA button.
15. Test Everything and Then Test Again
Rushing to launch a website before testing if all its elements are working is a recipe for disaster. Your prelaunch checklist should include testing the site’s navigation, loading speed, search features, visual consistency, and everything else that might not work properly after you go live.
Once your WordPress site is up and running, you can start A/B testing all new content you publish.
Aside from showing you how website visitors respond to different versions of a specific piece of content, A/B testing can also help you understand your audience and the type of content they want to see on your site.
