In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses to thrive. WordPress, with its flexibility and user-friendliness, has become the go-to platform for web development.
As a co-founder of HiCoder, a WordPress-based web development company, I've had the privilege of working on numerous client projects, one of which was for Sidhiv Pharma, a B2B chemical procurement company exporting to countries in the Middle East, Africa, and North America. This article will provide you with insights into successful WordPress web development and a checklist to ensure your website projects achieve remarkable results.
Before we dive into the checklist, let's take a moment to appreciate the power of WordPress in action. Sidhiv Pharma approached HiCoder(Former STABLX Web Development Company) with the goal of expanding its global reach and improving its online presence. With our expertise in WordPress web development and SEO, we embarked on a journey to transform their online identity.
After launching the website, our SEO experts went to work. Through a strategic mix of keyword optimization, content creation, and link building, we boosted Sidhiv Pharma's search engine rankings by performing SEO activities with which we have expertise. This resulted in increased organic traffic, improved visibility, and ultimately, a significant increase in inquiries and sales.
Today, Sidhiv Pharma's success story from being a nonvisible web page on Google to a good-looking website and ranking on Google, stands as a testament to the potential of WordPress web development when executed correctly. Now, let's move on to the checklist that can help you achieve similar success with your website projects.
Web Development Checklist at HiCoder
1. Define Clear Goals and Objectives:
Understand the client's business goals and what they want to achieve with the website. This process will lose, the products and services the client offers in detail.
This will also list the process that will take while project execution.
For example:
1. If there will be UI UX design involved
2. If there will be low fidelity design and high fidelity design involved
3. Will there be page-by-page approval and bi-weekly or monthly meeting
4. If there is enough support from their end we will have to manage
5. If the content be given from their end or our writers will be writing
2. Thoroughly Plan Your Project:
We used 2 Google sheets (Project Name - internal, Project Name - client sheet)) for this, one internal and one client version. Here is a sample hicoder project management google sheet.
As the name suggests, the client version is shared with the client, and the Internal version is shared only with team members.
You can Create on any other tool, Google Sheets is fast so we use it. Make a detailed project plan that includes timelines, milestones, and responsibilities.
3. Select the Right WordPress Theme:
Choose a theme that aligns with the client's brand and objectives. Generally, the Default Theme, Astra, and Hello theme is our favorite as it works very well with elementor.
4. Customization and Branding:
Tailor the theme to match the client's branding and unique requirements by adding the client logo. In Sidhiv Pharma's case, we didn't have a proper logo so we had to design one and design the whole color palette and font palette to execute. Having everything in control allowed us to execute it in our way.
5. Responsive Design:
Ensure the website is mobile-friendly and responsive across all devices. This is something Google has been caring about a lot as mobile users have increased after Android mobile users scaled. This is nonnegotiable and it's mandatory to optimize.
Remember: Elementor doesn't solve all the problems, having a team member to test the application for responsiveness solves most of the issues visible and the web dev team fixed them.
5. SEO Integration:
Implement on-page SEO best practices to improve search engine rankings. Rankmath is our favourite and we rarely choose yoast. Simply because we get the schema and a lot of other features that add value in the long term.
6. User-Friendly Navigation:
Create an intuitive navigation structure for easy user access to information. One should definitely do this test assuming you are a customer. If you can ask your existing customer to browse while you see their behavior to find confusion and issues, that's even better. We have done this in a couple of cases and found many issues that we as web developers could not think of. Use Microsoft Clarity if needed.
Pro Tip: If the website is targeted to middle-aged people, avoid minimal design and use more text on buttons.
7. Quality Content Creation:
Develop engaging and informative content that resonates with the target audience. Not using AI content has been our priority to avoid any SEO issues in the future. We hired a professor who taught chemicals and had little knowledge of the usage of chemicals in manufacturing. He did the content that fulfilled the EEAT parameters Google defines today.
8. Optimize Website Speed:
Minimize load times by optimizing images, scripts, and server settings. GT Metrix is the perfect free tool for this but you can get the paid tool as well.
If you have enough resources I would recommend you to use Screaming Frog as it helps with a lot of technical issues and presents the data in a formatted way. The formatted report can be used to highlight the issue and allocate it to the web developer.
9. Security Measures:
Implement security plugins and best practices to protect the website from threats. Wordfence is the way to go and sometimes iTheme security. We maintain a backup file of the settings we optimized long ago. It helps us save time as we just import those settings on a new site.
10. Testing and Quality Assurance:
Thoroughly test the website for functionality, compatibility, and performance. From general use flow to information availability, design trust, and backup support, we did everything that could create trust for a user.
11. Client Training and Documentation:
Provide training to the client on how to use and manage their WordPress website. For this, we generally create a 40-minute video through which we let their team understand the process of publishing an article and do general management. This is for the clients who do not want to take our website management package but just want to take server maintenance and engineering maintenance.
12. Feedback and Revisions:
Collaborate with the client to make necessary revisions based on their feedback. This happens through the development process itself.
We do the very first meeting after the first amount is paid and we prepare a PRD (Project requirement report), Website Architecture, and much more.
13. Launch and Promotion:
Deploy the website and promote it through various channels, including social media and email marketing. We generally use Digital Ocean and AWS to deploy our sites.
This happens once the client has paid 90% of the budget and we hand over the credentials after a production test.
We also run a setup with our central system through which we monitor client websites. This is done to save time as we cannot go and see each and every website manually.
14. Ongoing Maintenance:
Offer ongoing support which includes mini changes, contact changes, event page changes, server maintenance, and plugin, package, and framework updates to keep the website secure and up-to-date.
For this, we charge separately and we do pay our engineers. This price is often fixed but changes for large sites as it takes more engineering resources to manage.
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