Creating an income stream from a WordPress website takes dedication and patience. For the first few months, you may not see any returns at all. Search engines need time to find your site before it will show up on rankings.
There’s a lot of groundwork that goes into website design, keyword research, content creation, and social media marketing. If you’re doing this solo, you’ll need to figure out how to do everything yourself. However, if you have some capital to invest, you can outsource to professionals.
If you think it’s time to take the plunge and start a WordPress business, you’ll need a solid business plan. Before a website can become a full-time gig, there needs to be enough money coming through to cover your living expenses.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the steps you need to take to turn your WordPress side hustle into a full-time business.
Don’t Rush to Start Your Business
The first thing you need to do is take your time. Rushing full-time into a business without a plan B can be disastrous. You need to have a plan in place and be able to dedicate the time necessary to make it work. This includes setting aside time for updates, website maintenance, branding, and marketing.
You can do all of this around your other commitments, as creating and scaling a website — or freelance dev business — is not time-sensitive. There’s a risk of decreased quality if you rush into it, leading to a high bounce rate, poor search rankings, and a negative customer reputation.
Always Keep Your Website Up to Date
If WordPress and the plugins you use are outdated, it can slow down your website. A slow-loading website is bad because it will lead to a higher bounce rate among users. 50% of visitors will abandon a website that doesn’t load within 6 seconds.
It’s easy to check if your website is updated. When in the admin area of your website, click on the “updates” button on the left-hand menu. Anything that needs to be updated will be listed here. You can also set your website to update as new versions of WordPress are released automatically.
By default, WordPress should check for updates every 12 hours. But major updates can impact your site’s layout and break plugins, so use a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus before implementing them manually.
You’ll also want to make sure all of your branding is updated, including your logo, fonts, and colors. The last thing you want is for potential customers to visit your site and be confused by outdated branding on some pages.
Make Sure Your Website Is Compliant
If you haven’t already added pages for privacy policies, terms and conditions, and a contact page, you should include these. Since websites typically operate worldwide, you need to comply with things like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Depending on which industry/niche your WordPress website operates in, there will be additional regulatory compliance
[…]
This article was written by Kyla and originally published on WPExplorer.