It can seem almost impossible to decide between the two, as both Shopify and WordPress have their merits and pitfalls. Ultimately, which one is the right choice comes down to your specific needs and what matters most to you when building an eCommerce site. In this article, we’ll thoroughly explain the Shopify vs WordPress debate so you can make an informed decision about which one is best for your business.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system that allows online store owners complete control over their website’s customisation, hosting, and plugins. As a result of this high level of customisation and control, WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world – approximately 43% of websites in the world are powered by WordPress.

WordPress is an open-source software, meaning it’s free to use, modify and distribute. As a result, WordPress is home to a vibrant community of developers who are constantly creating new WordPress plugins and extensions, as well as WordPress themes. Most of these are free to use, and new ones are added every day, meaning WordPress is an extremely flexible way to build a website. The downside is that WordPress website owners have to pay for hosting, maintenance, and domain name registration from a third party.

It’s important to note that in this article and our website as a whole, we’re referring to WordPress.org instead of WordPress.com unless specified otherwise. WordPress.com is a pay-to-use website builder rather than an open-source content management system. If you’d like to learn about the difference between the two and the pros and cons of each, we covered it extensively in our article ‘WordPress.com vs WordPress.org – What’s The Difference?’

What Is Shopify?

Shopify is an all-in-one platform that was founded in Canada in 2006 and has since gained a reputation as one of the best eCommerce website builders around. Shopify was designed to simplify the process of creating and managing an online store by bundling everything you need into one package. This includes web hosting, security, payment processing, and even inventory management. 

Overall, Shopify is a popular option for business owners who don’t have the budget or tech knowledge to develop a custom website and are looking for a hassle-free solution for building an eCommerce site. However, the downside of Shopify is that website owners have to pay to use Shopify, and the website builder offers limited customisation options when compared to WordPress sites.

Choosing Between Shopify And WordPress

When choosing between any CMS or website builder, here are the top things to consider:

• Pricing and costs
• Ease of use
• eCommerce capabilities
• SEO and marketing power
• Level of control and customisation
• Customer support available
• Security

We’ll go over each other these considerations below and give a full comparison of Shopify vs WordPress to help you make up your mind! It’s important to take into account your specific needs and preferences – no website builder or CMS is perfect, so making a list of your priorities will help you assess which one works best for you.

Pricing and Costs

Pricing is one of the main differences between Shopify vs WordPress, and it’s a big one! Here’s how WordPress and Shopify stack up when it comes to your wallet:

Shopify Pricing And Costs

Shopify offers tiered pricing plans, each with different features and transaction fees. While the basic Shopify plan is relatively cheap at $56 AUD a month as of 2023, you’ll have to upgrade to pricier plans like Advanced Shopify for added functionalities like multiple staff accounts or third-party calculated shipping rates. You’ll also have to pay $14.95 per year for your domain name. Even taking into account what you save on third-party hosting costs, this results in a lot more money spent in the long term than WordPress. Here are the different Shopify plans:

WordPress Pricing And Costs

While the WordPress software itself is free, there’s still a variety of costs involved. These include: 

• Hosting Costs: Unlike Shopify, WordPress requires you to arrange your own web hosting. WordPress hosting costs can range from affordable shared hosting plans to more expensive dedicated hosting, depending on your website’s size and traffic.
• Themes and Plugins: While there are thousands of free themes and plugins available, premium options often come with a price tag. These can enhance your website’s functionality and design but will add to your overall expenses.
• Development and Maintenance: If you’re not tech-savvy, you might need to hire a developer for initial setup or ongoing maintenance. This can be a one-time cost for setup or an ongoing expense for regular updates and troubleshooting.
• Additional Costs: Depending on your needs, you may incur additional costs for things like premium plugins for SEO, e-commerce functionalities, enhanced security, and backup solutions.

WordPress is known for its flexibility, but this can also mean variable costs. It’s best suited for those who want more control over their website and are willing to manage and pay for the associated responsibilities that come with it.

Ease of Use

Shopify Ease Of Use

Shopify is designed with a focus on simplicity. Its user-friendly interface allows for straightforward setup of an online store, even for those with limited technical skills. The process of adding products, customising the store’s design, and managing daily operations like order processing and product updates is facilitated by intuitive tools and clear directions.

WordPress Ease Of Use

WordPress, while offering more flexibility and customisation options, has a steeper learning curve. Setting up a site with WordPress means dealing with hosting, choosing themes, and integrating with third-party apps and plugins. The process can be overwhelming for beginners, especially if you want to custom-develop features or have issues that you need to troubleshoot. WordPress is great if you’re already comfortable with website development and ready to put in the elbow grease or are willing to outsource the process to experts – resulting in a more customised and powerful website overall. 

eCommerce Features: Shopify vs WordPress Comparison

Shopify eCommerce Features

It’s all in the name: Shopify is an eCommerce platform designed specifically for online retail, and that comes with a lot of benefits for Shopify users. It offers a comprehensive set of built-in eCommerce tools that are ready to use out of the box, covering everything from product management to payment processing and shipping, making it easier to set up and run an online store. 

Overall, Shopify is ideal if you’re looking for an eCommerce solution that’s straightforward to manage. However, this does come at a significant cost: Shopify charges a fee ranging between 1.4% to 2% of each transaction if you don’t use their integrated payment processing system, Shopify Payments, which can add up quickly and eat into your long-term profits.

WordPress And WooCommerce eCommerce Features

Setting up an eCommerce store in WordPress isn’t as straightforward as with Shopify, and you need to install a plugin like WooCommerce to sell products on a WordPress site. Although this may seem like an additional step tacked on to the already arduous process of creating an online store, it offers greater flexibility and control over the design and functionality of your store.  Most eCommerce sites on WordPress are run using WooCommerce, and it’s widely considered the best eCommerce plugin on the market.

WooCommerce allows you to create themes suited to your brand and industry, optimise your checkout experience and create custom product pages quickly. One of the biggest advantages is that it’s completely free and open-source. This means that you won’t have to pay any transaction fees or other hidden costs that are associated with other eCommerce platforms like Shopify.

All up, while setting up an eCommerce store on WordPress might need you to go through some extra steps compared to other platforms, installing WooCommerce offers greater flexibility, control, and cost-effectiveness in the long run. WooCommerce was created by the founders of WordPress, so you know it’s legit!

SEO And Marketing

Shopify SEO And Marketing

Shopify has built-in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features and tools that make it relatively straightforward to optimise your Shopify stores for search engines. It offers basic SEO settings like editable meta titles and descriptions, automatic sitemap generation, and mobile-friendly themes. Shopify also provides integrated tools for email marketing, social media integration, and creating discount codes. However, for more advanced SEO and marketing needs, you might need to rely on third-party apps available in the Shopify App Store.

WordPress SEO And Marketing

WordPress offers you complete control over every aspect of your website’s SEO and access to thousands of free and paid SEO plugins – this is ideal if you like taking a more hands-on approach to SEO and don’t like leaving anything that important up to chance. 

Using WordPress allows you to oversee every step of the development and design of your website, meaning you can make sure your website is as SEO-friendly as possible from the very start instead of relying on Shopify and its systems and tools. Additionally, the ability to choose a reliable hosting provider yourself and choose your hosting plan means you can get complete assurance your website is fast and reliable, both important factors for SEO.

Control And Customisation 

Shopify Control And Customisation

Shopify offers a moderate level of control and a high level of ease of use. It provides a range of themes and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows for basic customisation without needing extensive technical skills. However, there’s a limit to how much you can customise on Shopify without delving into more complex features like editing the platform’s Liquid code. Despite Shopify’s focus on eCommerce, this level of customisation isn’t the best for your online store. To stand out in the competitive environment of online shopping, it’s important your website is as custom as possible to match your branding and increase customer memorability. 

WordPress Control And Customisation

As an open-source platform, WordPress offers users unparalleled control and customisation. You can modify essentially every element of your site with complete access to the code and thousands of themes and plugins – the possibilities are almost limitless. This level of control is ideal if you have a specific vision for their site or require custom functions that simple website builders can’t offer. However, this also means that taking full advantage of WordPress’s customisation potential often requires technical knowledge or the budget to outsource development to a professional or agency.

Customer Support

Shopify Customer Support

One of the things Shopify is most known for is stellar customer support. Shopify support includes a 24/7 phone line and live chat, meaning you can get instant support, even in the middle of the night. This 24/7 support is available no matter what type of plan you’re on. Shopify also has highly active forums, thanks to the millions of Shopify sites, and a help centre with helpful FAQs to answer any questions. In the WordPress vs Shopify debate, there’s a clear winner when it comes to customer support. 

WordPress Customer Support 

Open-source platforms like WordPress don’t offer any formal support service. However, there are 810 million WordPress websites out there, meaning there’s an incredibly vibrant community of WordPress users and experts offering up a wealth of information and WordPress training. While this isn’t the same as a dedicated phone line for 24/7 support, any information you need to know regarding WordPress eCommerce, the different versions of WordPress, or updating a WordPress plugin is definitely out there.

Security and Compliance

Shopify Security And Compliance

As a hosted platform, Shopify takes care of almost everything concerning the security of your website, including security updates and maintenance, as well as providing SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates for all its websites. This ensures that all customer data is encrypted during transactions. It’s also important to note that Shopify has to comply with PCI (Payment Card Industry) standards, which is essential for safely processing credit cards. 

WordPress’ Security And Compliance 

In contrast, security in WordPress is more hands-on. While the platform itself is secure, being open-source means that the responsibility of maintaining security largely falls on the user. This includes implementing your own SSL certificates, choosing secure payment gateways, and ensuring regular updates of the WordPress core, themes, and plugins. Additionally, the vast array of plugins means you’ll need to be cautious about what you install to avoid vulnerabilities. 

Essentially, choosing WordPress means you need to take a proactive approach to security. This either requires some technical know-how on your part or the assistance of a professional.

Shopify Vs WordPress: Final Thoughts

If you’re still wondering whether to choose Shopify or WordPress, let’s break it down:

If you’re just starting out or if you need a simple, straightforward solution without much technical hassle, Shopify might be the better option. It’s tailor-made for ease of use, offering an all-in-one package that takes care of everything from hosting to security. This user-friendly approach allows you to focus more on running your business and less on the nitty-gritty of website management.
Overall, it’s a solid choice if you don’t yet have the technical skills or the budget for a custom-built website. 

On the other hand, if you highly value customisation, flexibility, and having control over every aspect of your site, then creating an eCommerce site with WordPress and using WooCommerce is a better option. WordPress offers an unparalleled level of customisation, which can be a significant advantage for those looking to create a unique online presence. It’s well-suited for businesses that have specific requirements or those who plan to scale up significantly and need a platform that can grow and adapt with them.

In the end, the choice comes down to your individual business needs and what you want to get out of your website. They’re both great options on the whole – just make sure you take the time to do your research and make a clear list of your priorities before jumping in.

Web Design Canberra 

Our experienced team of web designers knows how to balance beauty and function perfectly. The key tenants of our website design process are:

• Fully responsive: A  responsive design is guaranteed when you work with us. All of the websites we deliver are fully functional on mobile devices, not just desktops.
• Completely custom websites: We design websites that reflect your brand, and we never use premade templates, so your website looks completely distinctive.
• Search engine optimisation friendly: Web design can affect your search ranking. That’s why we use the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), which allows us to ensure your website is search engine optimised every step of the design process.

The end result of following these principles are websites that are not only visually stunning but align with your branding and help your business drive forward its goals. It’s this dedication and professionalism that has earned us a reputation as one of the highest recommended companies offering website design Canberra has to offer.

WordPress Web Development Services

Since 2008, we’ve built WordPress websites for both large and small businesses across Australia. Thanks to this experience, we’ve been able to fine-tune our website development process down to an art along the way. We develop awesome websites that work beautifully across all devices with a user-friendly layout that loads quickly.

Crucially, our websites are also intuitive to use and easy to manage and edit. During website development, we make it a priority to build a user-friendly backend that makes it easier for our clients to regularly update and maintain their sites without hassle. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) That Offers A Competitive Advantage

Also called Search Engine Marketing, our SEO campaigns are designed to help your website appear higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) on Google so you can connect with more potential customers. Our team understands that an efficient, well-thought-out strategy does more than just include keywords in your content. Instead, our efforts look at your website holistically, from the structure of your site to the user experience and page speed. The end result of this technical and content-based approach is long-term, steady SEO success that boosts your website’s overall visibility.

Affordable WordPress Website Maintenance & Management

Our website maintenance services offer you peace of mind that your website is consistently secure, fast and up to date for a fair price. Our team gathers their WordPress expertise to ensure your website works as a 24/7 asset to promote your business and has a high level of security and all the latest updates. This means you can sit back and focus on the other aspects of your business, knowing your website is in good hands. 

Web Hosting Tailored To Our Canberra Clients

We offer highly reliable website hosting with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, unlimited bandwidth and free SSL certificates. Additionally, our web hosting servers are located in Canberra – this means faster loading times for your target audience and, ultimately, a better user experience and higher SERP ranking.

Looking For Reliable Canberra Website Services?

If you’re in the market for a Canberra agency that you can rely on to do a great job, no matter your requirements, send us an enquiry today for an obligation-free quote. We offer site hosting, maintenance, development and design services for small and established businesses, and we’re flexible working with a range of budgets. We also offer digital marketing services, including Google Ads, social media, and email marketing.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of website loading speed and provide practical tips to test and improve it.

Why Is Website Loading Speed Important?

One of the most essential metrics for site performance is page load time. In many ways, your website’s speed is also a business metric – the faster your website loads, the more of a competitive advantage you’ll have online. 

Some reasons why website loading speed is important include:

1. A Fast Website Means Better SEO
2. First Impressions Count
3. Better UX, Better Conversion rates
4. Reduced Bounce Rate

A Fast Website Means Better SEO

Loading performance data is an essential part of Google’s core web vitals. These core web vitals are a set of metrics that measure the real-world experience of users. Google highly favours websites that provide a positive user experience and uses core web vitals, like web page loading time, as one of the many factors it uses to rank websites on the search engine results page (SERP).

Web pages that load quickly are more likely to rank higher in search results, which helps to improve the visibility of your site and attract more organic traffic. This can ultimately enhance your online presence and business success.

First Impressions Count

Internet users today have very little patience for slow load times. If your web pages take too long to load, users will click off before waiting around to see your content and what your business has to offer them. The statistics back this up – 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to a study from Kissmetrics.

If they do wait around, slow page load times might leave a sour taste in their mouth. A fast, fully responsive, well-designed website is the best way to leave a positive impression on users and keep them engaged.

Better UX, Better Conversion rates

Website speed and UX are closely tied. The faster your website loads, the more smooth and enjoyable the experience is for visitors. If people who visit your website find it easy to navigate, can access information quickly, and interact with your site with no delays, they’ll be much happier users.

A happy user is more likely to engage with your content, learn more about what you offer, and ultimately become a customer. Whether your goal is to sell products, generate leads, or encourage certain actions, faster load times can positively impact your conversion rate.

Reduced Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after only visiting one page. According to a test run by Pingdom, a website speed-testing tool, web pages that only took 2 seconds to load had a bounce rate of only 6%, whereas an 8-second web page load time brought the bounce rate up 59%.

This further backs up that a quick site leads to higher conversion rates. If users aren’t sticking around because your site’s speed isn’t up to standards, they’ll move on to the next. This is why page speed is especially important if you’re running an e-commerce website that accounts for the majority of your revenue.

How Fast Your Web Page Load Time Should Be

According to a 2023 study from Tooltester, the average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile websites. This is a good benchmark to aim for when it comes to page load speed – however, asking how fast a web page should load is like asking how fast you should run to win a 100-metre sprint. The answer is, faster than your competitors!

While many sources around the web say Google’s ideal page speed is under 2 seconds, we haven’t found anything that substantiates Google saying this. In our experience, Australian websites should aim to load in under 5 seconds, ideally in around 3 seconds.

How Is Web Page Speed Measured?

First, it’s important to explain what website speed is. Generally, website speed refers to the time it takes for a web page to load completely and become interactive for visitors once they have clicked on a link or entered a website’s URL.

However, website speed is more intricate than that. Page load time is only one metric that contributes to a bigger picture. Here are the other factors web developers use to determine a website’s speed:

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from the web server. It indicates how quickly the server responds when a user sends a request.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time it takes for the first content element, such as text or images, to be displayed on a web page. It’s an essential metric for assessing the perceived loading speed.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the loading time of the largest content element on a page. This could be an image, video, or other significant content. It indicates when the most critical part of the page becomes visible to the user.

Time to Interactive (TTI) measures when a web page becomes fully interactive, allowing users to interact with all elements and features without delays.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) assesses how stable the content layout is during loading. A lower CLS score means less visual instability during the loading process.

The above factors are what web developers and website owners work to optimise when trying to improve a website’s performance and page speed.

How To Do A Website Speed Test

Before we get into how to improve your site’s performance and speed, the first step is to see what your page load time is currently through website speed tests. A website speed test will help you see if there’s room for improvement and find any bottlenecks or issues that might negatively affect your loading speed.

Free Online Tools

There are lots of free and paid tools available that let you measure your website speed and website performance trends. Pingdom website speed test is one of our favourites. It allows you to test your site’s load time from three different locations, gives your site’s performance a score and highlights areas for improvement. You can select ‘Advanced Configuration’ to customise your test to your website’s needs.

If you want to try a few different tools, check out our list of our three favourite website speed tests. We go over the pros and cons of each website speed test so you can decide for yourself which works best for your needs.

Test More Than Just Page Speed

It’s important to not just test the speed of one single web page on the desktop version of your site, as this doesn’t paint the full picture of your website’s performance trends. Here are four essential tests you need to run as well:

Cross-Browser Speed Tests

Different web browsers may render your website differently, which can affect loading times. For example, your page load time might be respectable on Google Chrome but dismal on Microsoft Edge or Safari. Testing your website speed across different browsers and the latest browser versions can help you ensure a consistent user experience for all users.

Cross-Device Speed Tests

According to Statista, as of November 2023, over 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website takes a long time to fully load on mobile devices, you risk alienating over half the people who visit your website. Make sure you run a speed test for all different devices to make sure your load time is up to scratch across the board!

Individual Page Load Time Tests

Don’t forget to conduct a speed test of the individual web pages on your site. While your landing page might load in under 3 seconds, vital pages like your ‘book now’ or ‘shop’ pages might have a much slower page speed because of added functionalities. This is essential to check, as these pages often impact conversion rates the most!

Website Speed By User Location

Different users might experience a very different load speed based on their location. Testing your website’s performance from various locations will help you optimise it for the locations that matter the most. You can do this by choosing a speed test that allows you to choose different server locations.

Consider Ongoing Monitoring Services

It’s not enough to do a website speed test just once. Your page load time can change at any point due to server issues or increased traffic. You should conduct website monitoring regularly to ensure consistency and do a range of different tests to ensure your core web vitals are always strong.

Common Reasons Why You Have A Slow Website

There are a lot of reasons why your site might have a slow load speed, but these are the most common reasons for slow page speed:

High Traffic

Experiencing a sudden surge in user visits can create a lot of stress on your server, leading to slow page loading times or even crashes. This is why it’s essential to have a hosting plan that can accommodate traffic spikes to prevent speed drops.

When considering your hosting plan, it’s vital to consider the amount of traffic your website expects to receive and the resources required for optimal performance during peak traffic times. A scalable hosting plan that can adjust to traffic fluctuations may be a wise investment to ensure that your website remains fast and accessible even under strain.

Too Many Images

Too many large image files can significantly reduce page performance. A simple configuration you can make to improve page load speed is compressing images as much as you can without compromising quality.

Make sure you’re not overdoing it with too much imagery, either. Sometimes, less is more, and ensuring your page’s content doesn’t have too many images will make your site faster.

Too Many Plugins

Too many site plugins can also slow down your average page load time. This is especially true if you have a WordPress website – the huge availability of free plugins makes it easy to go overboard.

While plugins are great for adding useful functions to your website, if you want to reduce page load times, it’s worthwhile minimising the number of plugins you have installed and only keeping the essential.

Poor Server Response Time

Even if you’re doing everything right on your end, the buck often stops at your web host when it comes to page speed and overall site performance. This can occur due to inadequate server resources or technical issues on the server side, resulting in slow server response times.

Consider upgrading to a more powerful server or hosting plan if this happens. Moreover, ensure that your server configurations are optimised to meet the specific needs of your website. This will enable you to eliminate bottlenecks and improve website performance.

Unsuitable Server Location

If your web host’s servers are too far away from the majority of users accessing your site, it can lead to increased latency and slower loading times for users in different regions. Make sure your web host has servers close to your target audience to prevent this and improve site response time. This is one of the most important things to look for when choosing a web host if you want a fast-loading site.

Too Many Ads

Excessive or poorly optimised ads significantly impact your website’s performance and page size, causing slower loading times. You should limit the number of ads on your site if possible, optimise ad sizes, and use asynchronous loading for ads to prevent them from obstructing the rendering of the page.

Asynchronous loading refers to the process where ads load in the background, meaning users don’t have to wait for the ads to load for the page to fully load. This can improve page speed and overall user experience.

Code Density

If you’ve already fixed the above issues and still have a slow page speed and input delay, bloated or inefficient code might be the culprit. To fix this, you should regularly review and clean up your website’s code by removing unnecessary elements and ‘minifying’ the code.

You can do this by eliminating unnecessary spaces, line breaks, and comments from your HTML files, CSS files or Javascript files. Doing so will reduce their size and improve website performance. There are plenty of online tools available and build processes that can automatically minify code during development to prevent this issue!

Outdated Content Management System (CMS)

Not updating your CMS regularly can impact how your site performs, including page speed. If you’re using an outdated version of your CMS or haven’t run updates recently, you could be missing out on crucial security patches and performance optimisations. These performance updates can enhance code efficiency, database queries, and overall resource utilisation, significantly improving page speed.

By keeping your CMS updated, you can ensure that your website takes advantage of the latest speed, security, and performance advancements!

How To Improve Your Website Load Time

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of why a fast-loading website is so important and the most common reasons for slow speeds, here are some more improvements you can make to improve your site speed:

Optimise with Google PageSpeed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights is your best friend if you’re trying to increase your website’s speed. It provides a comprehensive analysis of your website performance data and core web vitals and diagnoses any performance issues. Crucially, Google Pagespeed Insights also gives you a list of recommended improvements to make.

Implementing these recommended improvements is a great first step to improving your core web vitals and your site’s speed!

Revisit Your Website Host and Plan

As we mentioned above, your web host could be to blame for slow page load time. Your web host can also affect SEO and a range of other website performance metrics. 

That’s why choosing a web host with an uptime guarantee, hosting plans that can scale with your needs, and high-quality servers is imperative. Overall, a reliable web host can improve page load times, enhance user experience, and boost your website’s SERP ranking.

Use A Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that delivers website content to users based on their geographic location. CDNs are used to improve website speed and browsing experience by providing faster and more reliable content delivery, along with security and other performance benefits.

CDNs have multiple servers worldwide, and when a user accesses your website, their request is redirected to the closest server in the CDN rather than the origin server where the website is hosted. The result is much faster website loading speeds for users far from the origin server.

CDNs also use load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple servers. This ensures that no single server is overloaded, optimising resource utilisation and maintaining consistent website performance even during high-traffic periods.

If you’re running a website that needs to reach users across the globe and support high traffic levels, using a CDN is essential to ensure your website performs well.

Looking To Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance?

Futuretheory is a Canberra digital marketing agency specialising in websites, marketing and design. We understand the positive impact of fast loading times on a website’s user experience and increasing conversions, and we always make it a top priority when we’re developing, designing or hosting websites for our clients.

Over the past 15 years, we’ve developed an extensive knowledge of best website practices and have passed the benefits down to over 100 clients across Australia, helping them grow their online presence through strategy-driven, data-backed website solutions.

If we sound like the agency for you, contact us for an obligation-free quote. You can also browse through our work to see how we’ve helped other businesses in a wide range of fields.

As a prospective website owner, it’s natural to be in two minds about which option best suits your needs. Each WordPress platform offers unique features and capabilities and caters to different preferences and requirements. In this article, we’ll explain the debate regarding WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org, and break down the pros and cons of each platform. The goal is to help you make an informed decision about which one to choose for your website!

How WordPress.com Websites Work

WordPress.com is a user-friendly website builder that runs on WordPress software, designed to simplify the technical aspects of creating and managing websites, especially for beginners. Automattic, led by WordPress.org co-founder Matt Mullenweg, owns WordPress.com. Despite overlapping leadership, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two completely separate entities with different offerings for users.

Through WordPress.com, users can access hosting, domain name registration, security, and backup services all in one place, saving them a lot of time and effort. However, while the platform is easy to use, it has limitations when it comes to customisation options and control. WordPress.com also has a tiered pricing system, meaning you need to upgrade to more costly plans for added features.

How WordPress.org Websites Work 

WordPress.org is an open-source content management system. Unlike its .com counterpart, WordPress.org allows users to choose their own hosting provider or host their WordPress site themselves. This is why WordPress.org is often referred to as self-hosted WordPress. While installing the WordPress software is free, you will have to spend money on both hosting and a domain.

Because WordPress.org is an open-source software, it’s free to use, modify, and distribute. As a result, there’s a vibrant community of developers centred around WordPress.org that continuously develop new plugins, themes and templates. This means WordPress.org offers users a higher level of customisation with never-ending possibilities. 

Key Differences Between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org 

Now that you have a basic understanding of the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what each platform offers and what factors to consider when making a decision. Let’s dive deeper into some of the most essential things you should keep in mind before choosing between the two options:

Hosting Your Website

WordPress.com Hosting

If you use WordPress.com for your website, managed WordPress hosting is built in. This means that WordPress.com stores your website’s content on its infrastructure, and you’re essentially renting space on the platform. This means that you won’t have complete control over the server resources, and you’ll be limited to the features and functionality that WordPress.com provides. 

However, the upside to this arrangement is that you won’t have to worry about maintaining the servers or dealing with technical issues, as WordPress.com takes care of all of that for you. It’s a trade-off between convenience and control, so it’s essential to consider your needs and priorities when making this decision.

WordPress.org Hosting

In contrast, WordPress.org allows you to have a self-hosted WordPress site. You have the freedom to choose your hosting provider and manage your hosting environment, and you have full ownership and control over your website and its hosting. Your website’s files, database, and all aspects of the hosting infrastructure belong to you. If you need guidance choosing a web host, check out our article that explains the basics and what to consider when looking for a web host.

While this level of control is great for some, it also means that you need to be more technically savvy and prepared to handle the day-to-day management of your website. This can include tasks like managing backups, installing software updates, and troubleshooting technical issues. However, the benefit of having complete control over your website and hosting environment can make the extra effort well worth it.

Customisation and Control 

WordPress.com Customisation and Control

Customisation: WordPress.com offers a range of pre-designed templates (themes) that you can choose for your website. While you can customise these themes to some extent, your options are more limited than WordPress.org. This means the websites made on WordPress.org are less tailored to your business, but the website development process is a lot easier. 

Control: In terms of control, WordPress.com has certain restrictions. Advanced customisations – such as modifying the website’s code or using custom themes and plugins – are generally reserved for users on the Business plan or higher. This means that your ability to tweak your site is limited unless you’re willing to invest in a more expensive plan.

WordPress.org Customisation and Control 

Customisation: With WordPress.org, you have the freedom to customise your website extensively. You can install custom themes and plugins, modify the website’s code, and create a completely unique online presence. Thousands of free and premium themes and plugins are available, with more being added by the WordPress community daily. As a result, the customisation options are limitless. To narrow down the options, here are some of our favourite WordPress plugins.

Control: The level of control with WordPress.org is unparalleled. Since you have complete access to your website’s code and server settings, you can fine-tune every aspect of your site. This level of control is ideal for developers and businesses that require a highly tailored web presence.

WordPress Plugins and Themes

WordPress.com Plugins and Themes

Plugins: WordPress.com offers a more restricted environment for plugins, and users on the free or lower-tier plans have limited or no access to plugins. You can install third-party plugins if you upgrade to the Business Plan, but the selection is still more limited than WordPress.org, and you can’t upload custom plugins.

Themes: While several themes are available for WordPress.com, your ability to customise them is limited. If you upgrade to a premium or business plan you can gain access to premium themes that you can modify somewhat, but you’re otherwise limited to the restrictive free themes.

WordPress.org Plugins and Themes 

Plugins: WordPress.org provides access to a vast library of plugins, most of which are free. This extensive plugin ecosystem allows you to add features like e-commerce, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and contact forms to your site without having to pay an arm and a leg.

Themes: WordPress.org also offers thousands of themes, both free and paid. You can also upload and activate custom themes, enabling you to create a website with a unique and tailored design. The level of theme customisation is virtually unlimited, allowing for complete control over your site’s appearance.

WordPress.org or WordPress.com – Which Costs Less?

WordPress.com Pricing

WordPress.com plans run on a subscription model with four different tiers, and they all vary greatly in pricing and features. 

Free:You can use WordPress.com for free but with extremely limited features. The free plan includes an SSL certificate – check out our article on why SSL certificates are so important if you haven’t heard them before. You also get 1G of storage and access to free WordPress themes. However, the free plan has its downsides: you’ll have to have a generic domain name like ýourwebsite.wordpress.com, you can’t remove WordPress ads or monetise the site yourself, and there’s no customer support available. WordPress.com’s terms of service mean you can’t use the website for any commercial activity if you’re on the free plan. All up, it’s a pretty bare-bones approach to creating a website.

Personal:The personal plan allows you to create a WordPress.com site for only $12 a month and includes a free custom domain name, the ability to remove WordPress ads, and 6 GB of storage. However, your customisation options are still minimal without access to premium themes and plugins. You also don’t have access to SEO tools or the ability to upload videos, and you can’t use the WooCommerce plugin to sell products. If the goal of your WordPress website is to promote your business effectively, this plan isn’t for you.

Premium: The premium plan, at $22A a month, gives you 13GB of storage and allows you to use premium WordPress themes – a big step up from the highly limiting free themes. You can also monetise your site with WordAds, upload 4K videos, and customise your theme more with extended colour schemes, background designs and complete control over CSS. The premium plan also allows you to integrate Google Analytics – a powerful tool to track the traffic to your website. However, you still don’t have plugin-enabled WordPress.com or access to custom themes. This greatly limits your SEO capabilities compared to a self-hosted WordPress.org site.

Business: The business plan, at $54 a month, is where inclusions really start to ramp up, and WordPress.com says this plan is the best option for web developers. This plan includes 50G of storage, uptime monitoring, SEO tools, and the ability to install third-party plugins and themes. This makes a huge difference to how much you can customise your website, but $54 a month does add up quite a bit over time and still has less flexibility compared to WordPress.org.

WordPress.org Costs

Using WordPress.org is free – however, the freedom it provides can incur costs. These include:

Website hosting: As we explained above, the primary difference between the two platforms is that WordPres.org requires you to find a hosting provider or host the website yourself. Plans with WordPress hosting companies can vary between $10 to $50 a month, depending on whether you choose dedicated or shared hosting and the bandwidth your website requires. Most quality hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, domain name registration, regular backups and firewall protection.

It’s important to be selective about your hosting provider and plan, as it can affect your website’s speed and overall performance. You can read our article about how web hosting affects SEO to learn more. 

Website maintenance: Using WordPress.org might also mean paying for outsourced website maintenance. While you can maintain your website yourself, it requires a high level of expertise and large amounts of your time, which can be hard to come by if you’re running a business. WordPress sites require regular updates to remain secure and function properly, and installing WordPress updates must be done carefully so your site doesn’t break. Outsourcing WordPress website maintenance can cost between $10 to $100 a month but can save you a lot of time and effort. 

Paid plugins and themes: While there are thousands of free plugins and themes available on WordPress.org, thanks to its open-source nature, there are some behind a paywall. These premium themes allow you to customise your site even further and add intricate functionalities WordPress.com does not allow, like booking platforms and form integration. The average plugin runs between $50 to $200 a month. 

Ease of Use

One of the most critical factors to consider when choosing between WordPress.com or WordPress.org is ease of use. Not everybody is a born WordPress expert, and the two platforms differ significantly in how easy they are to use. Here are the key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org regarding usability:

User-Friendliness of WordPress.com

WordPress.com is renowned for its user-friendly setup. It offers a guided, step-by-step process for building a website, and WordPress.com doesn’t require coding skills. If you’re using WordPress.com, you also don’t have to worry about hosting, maintenance, or security – this makes it a great option for a beginner looking for a simple website that allows a hands-off approach.

Learning Curve of WordPress.org

The WordPress.org setup requires a bit more technical know-how. You need to choose a web hosting provider, install the WordPress software, and handle server configurations. While this process isn’t overly complex, it can be intimidating for absolute beginners. However, once you get past the learning curve, WordPress.org offers extensive control and customisation options. You can change your website at the code level, install custom themes and plugins, and tailor it to your exact specifications.

Why WordPress.org is Better For Businesses 

We hope this article helped clear up the differences between WordPress.com and its .org counterpart. Personally, we always recommend choosing the .org version of WordPress. While WordPress.com works well for beginners wanting to start a blog or personal website, it’s not as well-suited for business websites. These days, your website serves as a visual storefront and is often the first impression people get of your business – so being able to customise your website freely to suit your brand identity is crucial. WordPress.com does not offer anywhere near the customisation options that WordPress.org does. The control WordPres.org allows extends to branding, user experience, and functionality, allowing businesses to create a unique online identity that aligns with their objectives.

Crucially, WordPress.org does not have the same limitations on e-commerce and monetisation that WordPress.org does. Even if you’re currently just looking to give your business a platform rather than sell products directly, it’s vital to have the option to scale up your e-commerce capabilities as your business grows. WordPress.org also has a huge number of SEO and marketing plugins available, ultimately helping more people discover your business.

Experienced WordPress.org Website Development, Maintenance and Hosting 

At Futuretheory, we’ve used WordPress.org to develop over a 100 websites for businesses around Australia over the past decade – check out our work to see some examples. During that time, we’ve gained extensive knowledge on how to leverage WordPress to develop and design SEO-friendly websites that actively drive forward the business goals of our clients. We also offer high-speed, secure web hosting, and worry-free WordPress website maintenance. If you’re looking for someone to launch and manage your online presence with expertise, get in touch with us.

At Futuretheory, we’ve designed and developed over 100 websites. Along the way, we’ve refined our process of planning a website into a well-oiled machine that consistently delivers positive outcomes to our clients. In this article, we’ll guide you through each and every step we follow to create an effective website plan:

How to Plan a Website

Creating a well-structured plan for your website is a vital step in ensuring the success of your online presence. Having a website project plan helps simplify the entire process, aids in adhering to your budget, and ensures your website also reaches the best possible outcome. Our approach has seven phases that we always follow when building a website, each with its own set of requirements and objectives. Our seven phases of planning a website at a high level are:

• Phase 1: Research and Discovery (Objectives, Target Audience, and Competitors Research)
• Phase 2: Details and Resouce Planning (Sitemap, Budget, and Timeline)
• Phase 3: Website Design (Wireframes, Mood Board, and UX design)
• Phase 4: Website Development (Front-End, Back-End, CMS, and SEO)
• Phase 5: Testing (Quality Assurance, Performance, Cross-Browser and User Testing)
• Phase 6: Launch (SEO, Hosting, Analytics and Monitoring)
• Phase 7: Ongoing Review (Updates, Monitoring, and Feedback)

Phase 1: Research and Discovery

There’s a lot of truth to the old saying, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. That is why the research and discovery phase is one of the most essential steps to planning your website. By taking the time to conduct thorough research and analysis, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and identify your competitors, which can help you make informed decisions throughout the website development process.

Armed with this knowledge, you can create a website tailored to meet your audience’s needs while standing out from the competition. A successful website depends on creating a plan, and the research and discovery phase is the first step in ensuring that you achieve your website goals.

Define Objectives

You need to clearly define what you want to achieve with a new website and what the purpose of the website will be. Are you hoping to increase brand awareness, launch an ecommerce website or improve communication with your audience? Each of these examples look very different during the web design process and development phase and require different resources. Defining the specific purpose of your website is crucial for:

• Clarity and focus: Defining your objectives prevents your site from becoming a confusing mix of ideas and features. This focus ensures that your design and content align with your goals.
• Measurable success: Well-defined objectives make success measurable. You can track progress with metrics and determine if your website is meeting its intended purpose. 
• Resource Allocation: Clear objectives and planning can help you make decisions about design, features, and content creation. This ensures that your resources, including time, budget, and manpower, are used efficiently.
• User Experience: Clear objectives lead to a better user experience. Users appreciate a site designed with a purpose, making their journey more efficient and enjoyable, ultimately increasing conversions.

Target Audience

Indentifying who you’re trying to reach is a pivotal step that will influence the design, the type of content to include in your website, and the overall approach. Where are they located, who are they, and how will they use the website? Ultimately, your website’s success hinges on its ability to cater to your target audience’s needs, preferences, and expectations. Here’s why it’s so important: 

• Customisation: Knowing your target audience allows you to tailor the website content, design, and user experience to resonate with them, leading to higher engagement and conversions as visitors will feel like the site speaks directly to their needs.
• Relevance: Defining a clear target audience enables you to create website content that’s relevant to their interests and pain points. This establishes a genuine connection, fostering trust and loyalty.
• Competitive advantage: Tailoring your website to your distinct target audience allows you to stand out by offering a more compelling experience, differentiating you from competitors with a more generic approach and generating more website traffic.

Competitor Analysis

The next step in the planning stage is identifying your direct competitors, and studying their websites allows you to identify gaps and opportunities. You can use this information to improve your website structure and plan, as well as to determine what to avoid. Moreover, studying your competitors’ websites can also serve as a benchmark for your website’s performance, helping you to set realistic goals and expectations based on industry standards.

A lot of popular SEO tools offer competitor analysis. Some of the tools we use and recommend are:

• SEMRush – https://www.semrush.com/
• Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com/
• SpyFu – https://www.spyfu.com/
• SERanking – https://seranking.com/

SEO Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a cornerstone of creating a website plan and can’t be overlooked. The first step is keyword research, which involves identifying the relevant keywords to aim for in order to rank higher on search engine results pages. Keeping in mind your target audience and the keywords your competitors are ranking for, use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords relevant to your business or niche that you should aim to rank for.

In tandem with Google’s keyword planner, the four online tools we listed above are an excellent place to start conducting your keyword research.

Phase 2: Details and Resouce Planning

Sitemap

The next step is to create a website sitemap. A sitemap is a visual representation of a website’s structure and hierarchy. It acts like a map that outlines the organisation of a website’s pages, content, and links. This helps designers and developers plan and organise the content and ensure that your website is logically arranged and easy to navigate. Our favourite website sitemap tool is Octopus – https://octopus.do/.

Technology Stack

Now, it’s time to decide on the technology stack you’ll use during web design and development and how you will host your website after launch. Selecting the tools that best suit your website needs, tech skills, and budget is crucial to ensuring the process goes smoothly and you achieve the best possible outcome. This includes the Content Management System (CMS) your website will be built and run on, the programming language used to develop it, and what kind of web hosting you’ll choose. 

The technology stack you use is a strategic decision that impacts your website’s functionality, performance, and ease of maintenance. It’s important to weigh up the long-term costs of each option, including licensing, hosting, and maintenance.

Budget and Timeline

Budget and timeline are crucial to any project plan, and building your website is no exception. The first step is defining the project scope – the number of web pages, features, and complexity of your website. A larger and more complex website will require a larger budget and a longer timeline. It’s also essential to account for the small costs that add up in your budget, including the technology stack, web hosting, domain registration, and third-party integrations your website needs.

Regarding the timeline, remember to account for every step from the initial research to pre-launch testing and allocate extra time for revisions. 

Legal Requirements

An important part of planning is ensuring you account for any legal requirements your business website has to meet regarding data protection and website accessibility. You might save yourself a headache by making sure your website is accessible and in line with disability access laws from the jump instead of having to go back and make significant changes after launch. Here are some examples of legal requirements you have to account for as the website owner:

• If you collect any personal information on your website, like email addresses, you need to have a privacy policy on your website. 
• If you sell any goods or services on your website, you need to be in line with consumer laws and include a refund, warranty and shipping information in your terms and conditions
• If you publish information or advice on your website, you need to include a website disclaimer
• Your website has to be designed and developed in a way that allows individuals with disabilities to access its content and features

Phase 3: Website Design

You’re ready to move on to the design! Our favourite tools to use are Adobe XD and Figma. When designing a website, it’s always important to keep in mind ease of use above all else. Check out our article on the fundamentals of great web design before you get started to build a solid knowledge base.

Here are the steps you need to include in your website design plan:

Wireframes

Creating the wireframe using Adobe or Figma is the first step of designing your website. A wireframe is a visual prototype illustrating the website’s content layout, navigation, and behaviour. There’s no need to worry about the content of your website at this stage – simply fill the wireframe with placeholder or ‘dummy’ content to get an idea of how it will look. This helps identify and rectify any potential issues early in the design process.

Wireframes are a crucial part of collaboration between a professional web designer and their client. They provide a chance for the client to get an initial look at what their website will look like before moving on to the development stage and add any input they might have.

Mood Board

Mood boards are a great tool to help guide the visual style of your site during the design stage, including the colours, fonts and images to include on your website. Creating mood boards helps you narrow down the overall stylistic feel of your website. We find mood board inspiration for websites using sites like Dribble, Behance, and Awwards.

Make sure you keep your brand’s style guide in mind when creating a mood board to ensure the final design aligns with your brand identity and goals. 

UI/UX Design

Now that you’ve solidified the look and feel of your site, it’s time to design the user interface, create the website layout and add the images for your website. If you want to design a successful website, make sure to factor user experience into every single design choice you make. The end goal, even beyond visual appeal, is to design a website that is easy to use and responsive. Ensure you use breakpoints, flexible media and images, and fluid grids to make your design as responsive as possible and guarantee a well-designed website. 

If you’re not familiar with responsive design and its importance, our article on the definition of responsive web design is a great place to start.

Phase 4: Website Development

There are many approaches you can take to develop a website. You can either develop the website from scratch, hire a freelance developer or agency, or use a premade website theme or template. It all depends on your technical expertise, the features you’d like your website to have, and your budget. Some of the most popular website development tools and website builders are:

• WordPress – WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, thanks to the high level of customisation and flexibility it offers. With thousands of themes and plugins available, you can create a wide range of websites, from simple blogs to complex ecommerce sites. Thanks to its user-friendly interface, it’s popular with developers and beginners alike.
• Squarespace – Squarespace is a popular website builder known for its user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. It’s perfect if you want to create your website without coding skills and launch it quickly without breaking the bank. However, using a website builder like Squarespace means your customisation and plugin options are limited when compared to WordPress.
• Webflow – Webflow allows you to create basic websites without the need for coding knowledge and offers more customisation options than Squarespace. However, the pricing model means costs can quickly add up the more features you want,

Front-End Development

Front-end development focuses on the visible part of a website that users interact with directly. Front-end developers use languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the layout, design, and functionality of web pages. This stage is essentially when the web designer’s wireframe becomes ‘3D,’ and the interactive elements, such as forms and the navigation menu, are coded. Doing this right ensures the website functions exactly as it should for users.

Back-End Development

Back-end development is the process of coding the hidden infrastructure that powers the website. This includes the website’s server-side logic, databases, user management, security, API, and more. These functionalities are what allow the website to function seamlessly and securely. While users may not see the back-end, it’s the engine that powers the website, ensuring that everything runs efficiently and that user data is managed securely.

Content Management System

If you’re using a CMS, now is the time to integrate it. This means installing the CMS on your server, configuring the settings, and setting up the necessary databases and files. Once the CMS is in place, you can start adding content. The CMS simplifies content upload, enabling non-technical users to add text, images, videos, and other media through a user-friendly interface.

Mobile Responsiveness

Ensuring your website is optimised for mobile devices during the web development phase is paramount. This is essential for a good website these days – over 55% of all people using your website will do so from a mobile device. If your website isn’t responsive on mobile devices, you risk alienating over half your website traffic through poor user experience. Google also highly favours mobile-optimised websites in the search algorithm, so make sure to complete this step! Use responsive design frameworks and CSS media queries to adapt the layout and styling to different screen sizes. It’s also important to optimise the content, images, and interactive elements for mobile devices to create a seamless user experience.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a critical stage of developing your website, as it ensures that the website is discoverable by search engines like Google, making it visible to a broader audience. This includes ensuring your website is fast, easy to use, and populated with keyword-rich content. Pay attention to the more minor details your website may be missing, like meta stage, header tags, and alt text for images. These small details give search engines more information about your website and help them rank it accordingly.

The content you plan should always have SEO in mind, and remember to implement on-page SEO strategies when planning the content on your site! Making sure your website is also optimised as well as well-designed ensures all your hard work pays off and people find your website on search engines.

Phase 5: Testing

Quality Assurance

Now that your website is designed and developed, you’re almost there. It’s time for quality assurance! This means identifying and addressing any technical issues, such as broken links, 404 errors, malfunctioning interactive elements, and proofreading for typos or grammatical errors. No developer or copywriter is perfect, so this step is essential to ensure your website successfully launches and is as professional and polished as possible. It’s the small details like broken links that often frustrate a user the most and damage your website’s credibility. 

Performance Testing

Performance testing before launching a website involves evaluating its speed, responsiveness, and overall efficiency to ensure it provides a fast and seamless user experience. You can use sites like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to see how long each individual page on your website takes to load. If any of them take more than 4 seconds to load, you have to re-optimise it for the sake of user experience and SEO. Compressing images, minimising file sizes and using efficient coding practices can significantly improve performance.

Cross-browser and Device Testing

Once you’ve checked your website’s speed and optimised it accordingly, it’s time to make sure your website functions correctly and consistently across different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Resolving any compatibility issues that may arise will help your website reach as wide an audience as possible successfully. You should also double-check your mobile is responsive by testing it on different devices, like mobiles and tablets. 

User Testing

Conducting user testing can help you uncover any less apparent issues with your website before launch. By gathering feedback from real users who interact with your site, you can discover any usability issues or areas for improvement and ensure that the website aligns with user preferences and expectations. 

User testing typically includes tasks like navigating the website, filling out forms, and providing feedback on their experience. This allows you to make informed adjustments before the site’s launch.

Phase 6: Launch

Pre-launch SEO

You’re on the home stretch – now it’s time to ensure the launch goes smoothly and your website gets the recognition it deserves after all your hard work. Putting in some more SEO work right before you launch will help! Make sure to submit your search map to search engines. This will help them crawl your site correctly and improve your chances of ranking highly on the results page. Next, set up your Google Analytics account and link it to your website – this will provide valuable SEO insights when it goes live. 

You should also dedicate some time to planning your content down the line and how you will promote your website after launch. This will make it easier to upload new content regularly after your site is launched – an essential part of SEO maintenance. 

Deployment and Web Hosting

Every website requires a host, and the host you pick can significantly impact your website’s security, speed, and SEO. Check out our article on how website hosting affects SEO and the different types of Canberra web hosting available to learn more. Using a reliable hosting service to deploy your website will set you up for success. Opt for a hosting plan that suits your website’s needs, whether shared hosting for smaller sites or dedicated servers for high-traffic websites. 

Double-check that all server configurations are in place and that domain settings are configured correctly to point to your website. This phase prepares your website for public access, making it available to users worldwide.

Website Launch

The moment of truth has arrived: it’s time to launch your website and make it accessible to the world. Once you’re confident that your site is ready for prime time, hit the ‘go live’ button with your hosting provider, and your website will be accessible to visitors. This marks the beginning of your online presence and the opportunity to connect with your audience! Just remember to promote the website continuously, whether through ongoing SEO or pay-per-click ads.

Post-Launch Website Analytics and Monitoring

Launching your website is just the start of a long journey for it to reach its maximum potential. To ensure the ongoing success of your website, keep an eye on post-launch analytics and monitor website performance and user engagement. 

Our favourite tool for this is Google Analytics, which is free – https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/. It enables you to track essential metrics like the kind of traffic your website gets, the number of visitors, and their behaviour on your site. Not all forms of traffic are equally important, and organic traffic should always be your priority. To learn more about organic traffic and how to generate it post-launch, we have a helpful article explaining the different types of traffic and how to increase organic traffic specifically.

Regularly monitoring these vital metrics will allow you to make data-driven improvements to your website and ensure that your site continues to perform optimally and remains aligned with your goals, helping you adapt to changing user needs and trends in your industry.

Phase 7: Ongoing Review

Updates

Staying on top of technology updates is an essential part of website maintenance. This is especially true for WordPress websites, as the themes and plugins require regular updates vital to the site’s function. Updates are also crucial for your website’s security, as they often include security patches! Consistently updating your website will help it adapt to changing trends and technology, maintaining its relevance and reliability for visitors.

As mentioned before, it’s also essential for SEO purposes to regularly update the content on your website to keep it fresh. Google favours websites that are routinely updated in the search engine rankings, meaning having an actively maintained website will directly help you reach more people. 

Monitoring

Regularly monitoring your website’s performance is another fundamental aspect of website maintenance. Use GT Metrix to track uptime (how often your website is down for users) and speed. These metrics help you immediately detect and rectify any problems, ensuring your website remains accessible and functional. There are also free online monitoring tools that help you identify any weak spots in your site’s security. Using these performance and security metrics tools – and often – will allow you to proactively protect your site from threats and maintain a positive user experience.

Feedback Loop

Metric tools are fantastic, but don’t forget about the value of direct feedback from the users of your website. Hearing from the users themselves allows you to gain direct insight into their experiences and expectations of your website, allowing you to make adjustments accordingly and offer a continuously improving user experience. You can encourage user input by implementing surveys, contact forms, or user comments. This will help you keep your website user-centric, which should always be the priority. 

Good Luck Creating Your New Website!

Planning a website can be daunting, but as we’ve outlined in this article, breaking it down into well-defined phases and steps can simplify the process. Whether you’re an experienced web designer or just starting, having a structured website plan is the key to success. By approaching your website development as a marketing strategy as much as a technical endeavour, following this website plan should set you up to create a website that engages your audience, stands out from the competition, and drives forward your business goals. We hope this website plan template serves you well!

Experienced Canberra Web Design and Development 

Although we’ve honed down this process to be as efficient and effective as possible, website creation is still something that takes time and expertise to get right. At Futuretheory, this is something we’ve learned after delivering over 100 websites to clients. If you’re interested in our website, design or marketing services, contact us today for an obligation-free quote. We’re passionate about every step of the website development and design process and the outcomes they deliver for our clients in Canberra and beyond. 

In reality, Google considers over 240 recognised factors when ranking websites, extending far beyond just a website’s content. Your website performance and core web vitals, such as speed and loading times, are also important when it comes to SEO and greatly influence your search engine ranking. Having an unreliable web host can negatively impact those core web vitals and, by extension, your website’s SEO. In this article, we’ll explain how web hosting affects SEO and what factors to look for when choosing an SEO web hosting provider.

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is what allows your website to be accessible online, and every website needs to be hosted. In short, when you pay for a web hosting service, you’re renting a small space on their server to store all the files and data that make your website functional. When someone tries to access your website, their browser sends a request to the server. The server then retrieves and displays your site on the user’s end. The web hosting provider you choose affects how quickly that whole process happens, and if the website host provider fails, so does your website – so choosing the right hosting provider is important. 

Why Uptime and Reliable Web Hosting is Important for SEO

Website ‘uptime’ is the percentage of time your website is accessible to users, including all its pages and essential functions. No website is up 100% of the time – sometimes, websites need to go down for essential maintenance, for example. However, if your host regularly experiences server issues, this will cause your website to go down and affect your site’s uptime. This could happen because they don’t have the infrastructure to handle large spikes in server traffic. Many hosting companies provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee, at a minimum. This equates to only nine hours of downtime a year. 

It can be hard to determine your website’s uptime – no one can watch their website 24/7. However, there are tools available online that allow you to run uptime reports, testing the reliability of your web hosting provider and holding their 99.9% uptime guarantee to the test. If you find that your host isn’t meeting this guarantee, it’s definitely time to find a more reliable one – the amount of downtime your website has can significantly harm your website when it comes to effective SEO. Here are a few reasons why:

Poor uptime hurts user engagement and SEO

The internet is a fast-paced environment, and internet users have very little patience for 404 error pages. If your website is down, they won’t wait around for it to go back up – they’ll exit and go to your competitor’s website instead. 

Google highly favours websites that provide users with a good user experience (UX) and have a higher user engagement rate. Poor website uptime will result in a higher ‘bounce’ rate (people who only visit one page of your website and click off), low session durations, and fewer pages visited by each user. Google uses these factors to determine the quality of your website’s UX and ranks your website accordingly. Having a good UX is one of the core pillars of Google’s algorithm, so having good website uptime and choosing a hosting provider that’s reliable is crucial!

Your website is often down? Google won’t be able to crawl and index it

Search engines like Google use bots called ‘crawlers’ to scan websites, analyse their content and index them accordingly. These bots check websites regularly to make sure the information they have is still up-to-date. If your website experiences frequent downtime because of issues related to hosting, it could coincide with the bot’s visit and prevent it from being crawled and indexed. This delay could impact the search engine’s ability to discover new content, leading to lower rankings and reduced visibility in search results.

If you’re wondering why your website is consistently going down even though your host has 99.9% uptime, check out our article on the most common reasons websites go down to rule out other factors.

An SEO-Friendly Hosting Company Should Ensure Fast Loading Times

Poor quality web hosting can result in slow loading times for your website, even if every other part of your website is perfect. This could be because your host uses poor-quality servers that can’t handle a lot of traffic, slow server response time from your host, or the server is a long distance from the majority of your website visitors. If you use shared hosting, slow loading times also might mean you need to update your web hosting plan you’re on to have more CPU, RAM, and bandwidth allocated to your website.

Having a slow website significantly impacts the UX and, in turn, impacts your SEO. Internet users are used to having everything available at a lightning-fast pace, so when a page takes more than a few seconds to load, frustration starts to set in. Anything more than a few seconds of loading time will result in a higher bounce rate, sending all the wrong signals to the search engine algorithm. The faster your website loads, the higher it’s likely to rank on search engines.

How fast should your website load?

The faster your website loads, the better. On the first page of Google search results, the typical page speed is 1.65 seconds, and one study showed that 40% of internet users will click off a site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. These industry standards don’t just apply to the desktop version – these days, 55.5% of all website traffic comes from people browsing on mobile devices, so ensuring the mobile version of your website loads in under a few seconds is important, too. 

While there are many other factors that impact how quickly your website loads, such as how many plug-ins you have, the number of files that need to load and the size of the files, the quality of the web server plays a huge role. Choosing the best web hosting plan and provider for your needs is vital to ensuring your website loads quickly and is SEO-friendly. 

How to check your website speed

It’s important to regularly check how fast your website loads for viewers to ensure it consistently provides a smooth experience. There are lots of tools available online that allow you to do this, like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. These tools are free and easy to use – just enter your URL, and they do the rest of the work. If you find your website consistently has a speed index of over 4 seconds, no matter what alterations you make on your end, it’s time to find a new web host for the sake of your search engine ranking and UX! 

How your web host’s server location can impact SEO

When looking for an SEO-friendly web host, server location is one of the most critical factors. Hosting your website on a server in the same country or region as your target audience can signal relevance to search engines. This is because each hosting server has a unique IP address, and search engines use this information to determine the server’s location. When your server’s IP address is associated with your target audience, search engines will rank your website accordingly. This improves your website’s visibility where it matters the most, boosting your search rankings.

Server location impacts your website’s speed

When a user accesses your website, the request has to travel between their location to the server and back again. Therefore, hosting your website on a server closer to your target audience will reduce the physical distance that data has to travel. This, in turn, results in faster loading times for users in that region. This is especially important for businesses that cater to a specific area. For instance, a plumber based in Canberra would want their web hosting service to be located in the same region to ensure that their website loads quickly for their highly-localised audience. As we mentioned above, speed is one of the most critical factors in technical SEO, so make sure you select a web hosting service provider with servers in your specific location.

Consider whether to add a Content Delivery Network to your hosting plan

 If your business operates across the globe instead of one specific region, it’s best to pick a host that offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers placed in various locations around the world. When someone visits the website, they get the content from the nearest server instead of the website’s main server. This makes websites load faster and perform better, no matter where the user is. However, CDNs can be costly and an unnecessary expense for smaller businesses trying to excel in a local market only.

Web Hosting for SEO Needs to Be Highly Secure 

Good hosting services do more than just make your website accessible to users – they also provide a secure hosting environment and implement robust security measures to protect their servers from unauthorised access, malware, and other threats.  This is vital, as most browsers flag non-secure websites warning to discourage websites from quickly through. If this happens to your website because your host offers poor security, it will result in a high bounce rate and tank your search engine ranking.

The same goes if your website gets hacked – Google might flag it as potentially harmful to users and deindex it entirely from the search engine results page. It’s important to remember that search engines always prioritise security and trust when ranking websites, so choosing a host that ensures your website is secure is essential for SEO best practices.

The importance of an SSL certificate 

The best way to indicate to search engines that your website is secure and protects the data of its users is to have an SSL certificate. SSL stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ and is like a digital ID card for your website. When a website has an SSL certificate, it means that the information you send to that website, like passwords or credit card numbers, is encrypted or scrambled during transmission. This encryption makes it much harder for hackers to intercept and read your sensitive data. You can tell a website has an SSL certificate when you see “https://” at the beginning of the web address and a padlock symbol in your web browser’s address bar. 

Google highly favours websites with an SSL certificate and will always rank it higher than websites without one. Most good web hosting companies offer free SSL certificates as part of their hosting package, and this is one of the more essential things to look for when choosing a host. It’s an essential hosting factor not only for your SEO efforts, but the security of your website as a whole. 

Increased trust leads to better SEO metrics 

Having a secure website and an SSL certificate not only ensures the safety of your visitors’ data but also positively impacts your website’s SEO at an organic level. A secure website will have a padlock icon in the browser’s address bar, instilling a sense of trust in users. When visitors trust your site, they are more likely to engage with your content, spend more time on it, and explore multiple pages. Search engines take into account these positive user engagement metrics, like lower bounce rates and longer session durations, when ranking websites. Security+ can indirectly improve these metrics and is important to look for in a hosting provider.

Reliable Canberra Web Hosting

Web hosting is a commonly overlooked factor in SEO, but it plays a huge role in ensuring your website is fast and reliable, and this positively impacts your search engine ranking. We hope this article helped you have a firmer grasp of how web hosting can affect your SEO efforts and gave you some insight on how to choose the best web hosting for SEO. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit our resources page to learn more about SEO practices and all things website-related.

At Futuretheory, we offer reliable and fast web hosting with servers in Australia. We use enterprise-grade hardware for exceptional performance and speedy load times, as well as providing a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This gives you peace of mind to focus on other aspects of your business, knowing your website is in good hands. Our hosting features unlimited bandwidth and free SSL certificates. Our web hosting is also highly scalable, meaning you can upgrade from shared hosting to dedicated hosting at any time as your web hosting needs change and your business grows. We’re a great option if you’re looking for a hosting provider for SEO-optimised features.

We’re also an expert WordPress host, given that our team not only hosts numerous WordPress websites but is also comprised of WordPress developers so that we can look at your website holistically. An experienced WordPress host is able to make sure your website is optimised for everything that a WordPress website needs to run smoothly.

As a full-service digital marketing agency, we also offer web design, WordPress site development, maintenance, and SEO services. Whether you’re looking for a new website or just a new web host, we have the expertise and experience to help. Think we can help? Get in touch.

In short, responsive web design is an approach to web design that means the site responds to the user and their environment, no matter what device or browser they’re using or how large their screen size/window size is. This is done by making the layout able to contract or expand depending on the user’s viewport (screen), creating an adaptive design that provides a better user experience (UX). If you want to learn more about responsive design, here’s a beginner’s guide. We’ll go over everything you need to know about responsive design, why it’s the way forward and the best way to create a modern, functional website, and some basic steps to create responsive websites and examples of responsive web design in practice. 

Why Responsive Design Matters

Having a responsive design for your website is crucial. It ensures that your website looks and functions at its best, regardless of the device people use to view it – be it a mobile device, tablet, or desktop computer. With over 55% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices as of August 2023, optimising for multiple devices is more important than ever before. We live in a mobile-first world today, so while making your website responsive for desktops will always be necessary, you also have to consider the mobile version and different screen sizes during the website design process. This will help you avoid having a clunky and unattractive website with slow page loading times, which can drive away more than half of your website’s viewers. A survey conducted by HubSpot revealed that over 93% of people leave a website if it doesn’t display properly on their devices. As such, designers should never neglect the mobile version of their website.

Where Did The Concept of Responsive Web Design Originate?

Ethan Marcotte first introduced the concept of responsive web design in 2010 in an article for the design magazine A List Apart. Marcotte predicted the surge of mobile browsing and emphasised the need for web designers to adapt. He proposed that developers and designers move to create websites with one design that seamlessly responds to the user across all devices. 

The alternative is creating different designs for each device, otherwise known as adaptive design, resulting in a never-ending arms race to keep up with personal devices and mobile phone screens. Marcotte had complete conviction about the need for web designers to develop responsive design skills, stating in his seminal article: “This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience.”

The Basic Principles of Responsive Web Design

Web designers can achieve a responsive website by strategically using flexible grids, layout elements, and adaptable images and media. Incorporating these elements in the web design process allows web pages to automatically adjust and rearrange their content to fit various window sizes. Doing this leads to smooth navigation, effortless interaction, and an enhanced user experience that increases user engagement and satisfaction. Web designers use HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) frameworks like Bootstrap to create responsive websites. 

We’ll expand on the fundamentals of responsive web design below:

Fluid Grids

One of the key ways to make a design responsive is by using fluid grids. These grids allow content to resize and adjust based on columns. Essentially, fluid grids mean every element on the page occupies the same percentage of space, however large or small the screen becomes. The grid layout can also adapt based on breakpoints, allowing for a seamless and consistent user experience across different devices and screen sizes. By employing fluid grids, designers can create a flexible and adaptable interface.

Breakpoints

 In the CSS coding language, breakpoints are specific points in the range of screen widths that trigger changes in the design and layout of a website to adapt to various devices and screen sizes. Designers define these breakpoints as set pixel values in CSS. Once the website reaches these values, elements such as the grid and layout adjust to create a different CSS style to provide the best user experience possible. 

Designers can set breakpoints based on the screen resolution of different devices. Here is an example of the breakpoints a designer might set for their website, at which points the website will change:

• Small devices (e.g., smartphones): Below 600px
• Medium devices (e.g., tablets): 601px to 992px
• Large devices (e.g., desktops): 993px to 1200px
• Extra-large devices (e.g., large computer screens): Above 1201px

A design example of breakpoints in use would be a website that changes from multiple columns on a desktop layout to a single-column layout based on screen size at the 600 px breakpoint. You can also use breakpoints to shrink the sidebar to a simpler and smaller menu at specific screen sizes.

Flexible Images and Media

One of the most surefire ways to make your website more responsive is to ensure the images and media on your website are flexible. “Flexible” in this case means images and media should be dynamic and resized based on the width of the screen. This means responsive images always display in their original size unless the screen size is too narrow. If it is, the image’s width scales down with the size of the screen.

Using CSS, designers can ensure the maximum width of the image is set to 100 % of the screen or browser width. When the screen becomes too narrow, the image will scale its height and width without distorting or overflowing the layout. WordPress automatically implements this functionality for any images or media files uploaded.

Media Queries

Media queries are rules designers can set in CSS3 to ensure their website is both mobile responsive and desktop responsive. Media queries allow the layout, HTML blocks, font size, colours, and other design elements to change to accommodate the user. 

To work with media queries, designers must choose the breakpoints and rules they want to set. They can then apply the rules when certain conditions and breakpoints are met. These conditions might include viewport width, height, device orientation (landscape or portrait), or screen resolution. Designers can make their media queries even more specific, such as adjusting when the viewer uses a touch screen or mouse.

Here’s a simple example of how to use media queries: a designer might set a rule that reduces the text size when the user’s screen resolution is below 600px, the standard smartphone resolution.

Mobile-First Approach

Many proponents of responsive design use a mobile-first approach. This means they focus on the smallest screen sizes first and then progressively enhance the layout and features as the screen size increases instead of using the traditional method of designing for larger screens first and then scaling down. The idea is to ensure that the core functionality and basic layouts are, by default, optimised for mobile devices, meaning they never get left to the wayside. The mobile-first approach has its detractors, but it’s gaining popularity, considering mobile browsing now dominates.

Mobile-first design also ensures designers don’t add too many unnecessary elements to the website that would have to be axed for the mobile version.

Content Prioritisation

This leads us to our next concept: content prioritisation. If everything is emphasised, nothing stands out, especially on small screens. Not all content and features are equally important across devices, and smaller devices have limited screen real estate. A responsive website isn’t overloaded with features that only look good and function well on larger screens.

While having multiple columns and a wealth of informative content on your landing page might be great for desktop, it can look messy on mobile versions. This can cause essential information to be pushed down to the bottom of the page, forcing users to scroll endlessly. That’s why content prioritisation is critical. It involves identifying important content and ensuring it’s easily accessible and prominent, even on smaller screens, while less vital content is hidden or reorganised.

From A Design Concept to a Key Strategy

Mobile browsing has become even more popular than Marcotte could have possibly predicted in 2010, now accounting for the majority of all browsing. As a result, responsive design has gone from a concept to an essential strategy you need to implement if you want your website to be successful and have a good user experience. We hope this article helped set you on the right path to creating a responsive website that functions beautifully, no matter the device. If you need a bit more guidance, check out our article on the more broad fundamentals of web design.

The internet is a potent marketing tool, and having a firm idea of exactly how Australians browse the internet can influence your digital marketing strategies and how you design your website. For example, you might be surprised to learn how many Australians primarily use mobile devices to access the internet. This statistic underscores the need to ensure your website is compatible across all devices to maximise its potential reach.

Internet connection speeds in Australia in 2023

The median mobile internet connection speed through cellular networks increased 6% to 86.01 Mbps in 2023 – a big jump. 

The median fixed internet connection speed also increased by 1% to 53.06 Mbps in 2023. Fixed internet means the connection is sent to individual receivers from the main access point (typically supplied with high-speed fibre-optic lines).

One key takeaway from these statistics is that mobile internet connections are now much faster than fixed internet connections, thanks to the prevalence of 5G. In 2023, 5G availability reached 36.6% in Australia. As a result, Australia has some of the fastest mobile internet speeds in the developed world.

Browsing device statistics in Australia in 2023

As of July 2023, desktop computers remain the most popular device in Australia, holding a market share of 52.5%. Mobile devices are also highly favoured for browsing, accounting for 43% of the market share. Tablets, on the other hand, hold a mere 4.6% of the market share.

Mobile connections in Australia in 2023

Data shows there were 32.71 million cellular mobile connections in Australia at the start of 2023. This equates to 124.3% of the total population, meaning a significant amount of Australians have more than one mobile device, e.g. one for personal use and one for work.

Desktop screen resolution statistics in Australia in 2023

Knowing the most popular screen resolution sizes is essential for web designers to determine breakpoints, a key tool to creating a responsive website.

The most common screen resolution for desktop computers for Australians in 2023 is 1920×1080, taking up 24.2% of the market share.

1440×900 and 1536×864 were almost tied for the second most common screen resolution, coming in at just under 10% of the market share each.

Mobile screen resolution statistics in Australia in 2023

As for mobile devices, the most common screen resolution is 390×844 – the same screen resolution as the iPhone 12 and 13 models. 14.75% of mobile phones have this screen resolution in 2023.

414×896, the screen resolution of the iPhone X models, is just a little behind, at 11.14%.

The most common screen resolution for tablets is 768×1024, at 38.83%. This is the same screen resolution as the HP Touchpad.

Most popular search engine in Australia in 2023

Knowing which search engines to optimise for is crucial for an effective Search Engine Optimisation campaign. The most popular search engine in Australia in 2023 is Google by far, with 95% of the market share.

Bing comes second, with 3.75% of the search engine market share. Trailing behind at 3rd place is Yahoo!, at 0.73%.

Which Australians are using the internet the most in 2023?

Each business has a specific target demographic, and knowing how much this target demographic uses the internet, and how, can help influence your digital marketing strategies. 

The age range that uses the internet the most is 25 and 34. 3.76 million respondents within this age range reported using the internet. The next largest demographic to use the internet is people aged 35 to 44, at 3.26 million. The 45 to 54 age range isn’t far behind at 3.15 million.

All statistics and numbers are courtesy of Statcounter (gs.statcounter.com), Data Reportal (datareportal.com), and Statista (statista.com).     

Having a website that’s consistent and reliable strengthens your online presence, reflects well on your business and can also help increase profits – especially if your in-site shopping function is dependable. Your website having consistent up-time can also help improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), helping you reach as many eyes as possible. No website has a 100% (99.9% uptime is still almost 9 hours of downtime a year) uptime rate, so don’t stress too much if it’s down sometimes. Here are some of the main reasons your website might be down and how to fix them:

1. Issues With Updates

If you use WordPress or another content management system to host your website, it might be down due to a server software update from your host that you haven’t installed, causing compatibility issues. This can lead to your site being laggy or even website crashes. You can prevent website downtime by turning on automatic updates to make sure you’re always in the clear and keeping on top of updates; however, keep an eye out for website settings that can sometimes change with updates and cause issues. It is also important to manage website updates carefully for a website using numerous plugins and third-party software – you might consider investing in a website maintenance provider in this instance.

2. Server Overload

Users might not be able to access your website because of server overload. This happens when the server exhausts its resources and can no longer take any more requests. This happens because of spikes in traffic, for example, the first day of an online sale causing significantly more people than usual to try and access the website.

If this is a recurring issue for your website, you should revisit your hosting plan and see if you can upgrade it to suit a higher bandwidth in line with your changing needs. Sometimes this happens deliberately because of malicious attacks, known as distributed denial of service (DDoS). This is when hackers flood a server with fake traffic in order to overload it and cause website outages, negatively affecting performance and uptime. You can prevent this by making sure your host offers DDoS attack protection.

3. Host Provider Error

If your site is down for everyone, and you’re running the latest version and haven’t made any changes on your end, it’s likely an issue with your web hosting provider, and it’s their responsibility to fix the problem.

Often, this happens because your provider is running maintenance or experiencing server issues. If this happens, the best course of action is to contact your web hosting service and alert them, so they can fix the issue as soon as possible.

The right host will have multiple backup options in place to minimise downtime, such as multiple data circuits from different internet providers and backup generators to prevent outages. Most hosting companies also provide a guarantee, like 99.99% up-time – or only 52 minutes of downtime per year.

4. Human Error

No one is infallible, and human error is one of the most common reasons for website downtime. If you’ve recently made changes to your website, the developer might have made an error in the website code as simple as a typo. Websites need every line of code to be perfect to function properly, and with this level of precision, mistakes are bound to happen from time to time.

One way to prevent this and minimise your website’s downtime is to use a staging environment as the last step when you make any changes to your website. A staging environment is a copy of your website that allows you to test functionality and fix any bugs before the website goes live. This can reduce downtime significantly.

5. Expired Domain and DNS Issues

Your domain name expiring can also cause website downtime. Your domain name is your unique website address that appears after the www and is separate from the website hosting service. When you enter a domain name into your browser, it sends a request to the global server network that forms the Domain Name System (DNS).

You have to continuously renew your domain name, otherwise your website will go down. If you try to access your website and get a “This site can’t be reached” error, an expired domain is probably why.

You’ll be able to prevent this by setting your domain name to renew automatically so it doesn’t expire without your knowledge. This is important as not renewing your domain name makes it possible for other people to purchase, meaning your domain name could be up for grabs.

Your website could also experience downtime due to a domain name server outage. Just like web-hosting server outages, this can happen because of DDoS attacks against the provider, outages, or human error on the network administrator’s part. Choosing a reliable, reputable DNS provider can prevent this.

Here’s How to Check if a Website Is Down

The first step is to do a quick check if your website is down for everyone, users in certain locations, or just you. If only one user has told you they’re unable to access your website, don’t panic yet, as it could be a network or computer issue on their end.

To check the status of your website, enter your URL, then hold down shift while refreshing to make sure you’re seeing the current state of your website and not a cached version. You can also open it in an incognito tab or another browser.

If the website is working fine, the problem could just be on the individual user’s end. If this is the case, you can provide the user with tips to get the website back up and running for them, e.g., clearing out their cache, restarting their router, or contacting their internet service provider.

Just like most problems these days, there are online tools to help. You can also check your website availability by using website monitoring tools such as IsItDownRightNow or DownForEveryoneOrJustMe. These free tools will show whether a website is experiencing downtime issues in one click. It’s super easy to use – just enter the URL or the IP address of your website, hit enter, and it’ll help you determine whether the site works or not immediately.

When you receive feedback from a user that your website is down, but it’s still working for you, it’s also good to check whether the website is just down in certain locations. You can do this for free by using online website checker tools like HostTracker. HostTracker can send “pings” to 158 servers across the globe to see if your website is down in any specific areas.

What Is Website Uptime and Website Downtime?

Website uptime is simply the amount of time your website is “up” and accessible and functional for users. It’s a business-metric because having good uptime and response time can improve productivity and profits. Website downtime is the opposite metric, tracking the amount of time a website is ‘down’ or inaccessible.

Website Monitoring Tools

There are tools to check a website’s uptime and even track this data, as well as other metrics such as response time (how fast your website loads to users) and functionality.

Uptime checker and monitoring tools can notify you as soon as there’s a problem or your site goes down, so you can troubleshoot it as soon as possible and minimise downtime. It allows you to run reports, testing the reliability of your web hosting provider and holding their 99.99% uptime guarantee to the test.

Paid vs. Free Website Uptime Monitoring

Many uptime monitoring tools offer a free tier or free trials but paid uptime monitoring tools such as UpTrends have more features. Features you’ll have to pay for include monitoring multiple sites, mobile push notifications when your website status changes, and DNS monitoring. More advanced plans generally provide more information and can help you figure out the root causes of issues.

A paid uptime monitoring or website availability tool will also check whether your website is down more frequently, for example, every 30 seconds instead of every 5 minutes. However, if you’re running a personal website or a small online store, using the free options will suit you just fine – it’s just important you have one.

1. Homepage

Your website’s homepage will be the most visited page of your website. This is often where a visitor will land from search engines or if they type in your URL directly. Therefore, your homepage will likely be the first impression a potential client gets of your business.

Users will only stay on this page for a few seconds before moving to the next page (if your website has the right call to action or user flow set up). Or, they may only stay on your home page before exiting back to search results if they can’t easily find the information they need. Users want to be able to navigate your website easily.

Use your website to entice users to stay and explore. Headings should be easy to read and eye-catching. Icons should be subtle, so they don’t compete with the headings. You need a call to action (CTA) such as “see our services”, “book a consultation”, or “sign up to our newsletter” in a primary place on your homepage. The aim of this is to capture visitors’ attention before they exit to Google (or any other search engine!).

Your homepage should give a high-level snapshot of what is included in your website. As you scroll down the page, you should touch on most pages including your products, services, testimonials, partners and contact information. Try to look at your website from the visitor perspective – from navigation bars to images and copy. Present the information in a way that the visitor will understand and be able to follow.

You can use a tool such as Attention Insight to see how your homepage might perform with visitors. Attention Insight is a tool that uses AI to develop a heatmap based on thousands of pieces of user data.

2. Services page or product page

Your services or product page is the second most important page after your homepage. This is where visitors will be able to explore your core market offering – whether it’s a service they can book or a product they can purchase (online or offline).

Use this page to detail your services or list important information about your product. Begin with a summary or your main point of difference. After this, go into some of the more intricate benefits.

Dedicating a page to your services or products allows you to break it down in a clear and easy to digest way. This is also the place to show how you differ from competitors. Ensure to include a synopsis of services or a range of products, bullet points of the service or benefits of the product, videos and product images, and a call to action for more information, where to book or how to buy.

3. About page

Your about page is where you should show the core values of your business – who you are and what you stand for. Visitors will go to your about page when they want to know more about your company – and people are becoming increasingly more conscious of what companies they’re buying from.

Use this page to talk about exactly what you do. What can you offer your clients or customers that no one else can? What do you stand for in the world? What is important to you as a company? These are some of the questions visitors will be searching for on your about page.

Your about page is also a great place to let your personality shine through – whether you’re a fun cheeky brand, or a serious and exclusive brand, or something else entirely. This is where to show it off. Tell a story about the inception of your company – storytelling is one of the best ways to engage customers with your brand. You could even include a video from a director or key person in the company for a more personal touch.

4. Contact page

Your contact page is a very important page for your website – you can sell a visitor a service but if they can’t contact you, all that effort has gone to waste!

Visitors want to know how they can reach you, so make it easy for them on your contact page – they don’t want to search hard for it. Put all the necessary details above the fold and additional information (such as an interactive map) below the fold if necessary.

Don’t miss the opportunity to use a CTA such as “call us now”, “send us an enquiry” or similar. This adds that extra push for customers to complete the action, and makes it easy for them.

5. Blog page

A website that isn’t optimised for SEO is a website that won’t be seen. Search engines reward websites that look active and appear to be giving valuable information. The best and cheapest way to do this is by writing blogs.

Writing blogs on a consistent basis, that are related to your business area, will show Google and other search engines that you’re an authority figure on that topic. If search engines recognise that you’re an authority, they will reward you by showing your website higher in search results, increasing organic reach.

Additionally, a blog page will show visitors that you are an expert in the field. Once you build up a library of website content in your specific field, visitors will be able to read through and understand your products or services better. This will build trust with visitors that your company is the best choice.

These blogs are also great for sharing on social media. Blogs are great for SEO and they’re great for organic content to share with followers. Make sure to write engaging, interesting content that your followers would be interested to click on and read. This will bring more traffic to your website.

6. 404 Page

The ‘Not found’ page, or Error 404 page is the one of the essential website pages on this list, but for a different reason to all the other pages. While the other pages are important from a website content point of view, and contain pages of information that every visitor should be able to find out, the 404 Page is important in a more practical way.

What is the 404 page? The 404 page or ‘Not found’ page is shown to someone when an asset they are looking, like a page or an image, no longer exists in the location the link is taking them to. It is a way to inform a visitor of this.

Essential website pages

Every website should have these six pages we’ve explored above. These pages are critical in communicating your business or product to potential buyers or clients. However, these aren’t the only pages your website should have – there are plenty more pages that will be beneficial to have and will be specific to your industry or even business.

When looking at these pages, it is also important to think about SEO and website hosting – in fact, there’s a link between to these factors as well as we covered in this article.

1. How can website speed be measured?
2. How can speeds be improved?
3. Does website speed affect SEO?

The answer is simple: website speed test services.

There are many services out there offering website speed tests and most of them are really high-quality services. However, some websites don’t allow you to change testing location – where they load the website from, while some that allow you to pick the location do not let you pick somewhere in Australia.

These might not be issues for you if you use a Content Delivery Network but testing website load speeds from a location far away from your clients’ locations does not give you the detailed information you are after.

That’s where the three tools below stand out from the competition.

Website Speed Test by KeyCDN

Amongst the 14 locations across the globe that you can test from is Sydney, Australia. The speed test allows you to make the results publicly viewable as well, or you can simply untick the box to keep results private. This tool doesn’t give you optimisation tips but it shows a waterfall of what things are loaded from your website so you can get an idea of where the loading slows down. It also shows you a preview of what the site looks like.

Check it out: https://tools.keycdn.com/speed

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom Website Speed Test gives you three locations options, one of them being Melbourne, Australia. The tool also gives your site a Performance Grade, tells you the total load time, and shows you some more important information including a comparison of your site versus other tested sites. The Performance insights section of the results is the real gold mine as it shows you the worst performing aspects of the site first essentially showing what needs to be worked on and even how to fix it! Further down is even more valuable information on your website performance that includes a load waterfall, breakdown of asset types and more.

Check it out: https://tools.pingdom.com/

WebPagetest

This is the only tool designed solely for website speed testing and not as a service by a company whose core services are different. To be honest, it really shows. WebPagetest let’s you pick location as well as browser – something the other two tools don’t let you do. In Australia there is a general ‘Australia’ option as well as a ‘Sydney’ option – we generally pick the latter. There is also a raft of other options you can pick from depending on how advanced you want to be but we don’t usualy suggest clients delve into these.

Check it out: https://www.webpagetest.org/

Which one to use?

Our favourite by far is Pingdom’s tool simply because of the level of information you are given. However, for Canberra-based clients (or for testing sites further away from one of Pingdom’s 3 locations), the tool is better as a guide rather than a detailed idea of load times since the closest testing location is in Melbourne. What we use Pingdom for is get tips on optimisation and then we use one of the other 2 tools to get an idea of load times and if they fall within what we think is acceptable for the type of site.

WebPagetest is the best option if you are looking for more advanced functionality and conducting a speed test from Sydney rather than Melbourne.

This infographic from the team at WPEngine breaks down the impact of slow website speed, tips and tricks to speed up your website and the significant results that can be obtained from speeding up your website even a little bit.

What is an SSL certificate?

SSL Certificates are the little padlocks that you see on websites when you visit them, mostly on websites like eBay, at least historically, but moving forward, every website is going to need an SSL Certificate. So what do SSL Certificates do? They’re gonna allow a secure connection between your web browser and the web server that’s serving the website.

Why is it important?

It’s a sign of trust, it gives people confidence that what they are looking at when they come onto your website is legitimate, they’ll get an exclamation mark instead of a padlock and that’s going to tell them that your site is not secure, and for your general visitor, that’s going to turn them off your website very quickly. So if your website doesn’t have SSL installed, and your competitors do, your competitor’s website is going to look like they’re more legitimate, they are more trustworthy, and as a business, you want to inspire confidence and you want to inspire trust in your clients. It’s not what it looks like; your customer’s information can actually be stolen without an SSL, so it’s more secure anyway. But I guess it’s only important on websites, at least historically, where they were accepting any sort of privacy information so where they needed, where your clients needed to put in their name, their email address, things like that, where someone could hack into the website or cut in between your web browser sending that information and your web host picking it up, and do just all sorts of nasty stuff with that information.

What’s happening in October?

But moving forward, because of Google and even other browsers so not just Chrome, but Firefox, Internet Explorer, they’re gonna start enforcing this, not only because it’s increasing in importance, but also because I think the web has become quite a scary, even an unsafe place. The webs gonna me a much safer place with secure connections that won’t be interrupted and your website will look exactly how it’s supposed to without any interference from anything malicious. So the biggest problem with SSL is that installing it isn’t really for the average Joe, and if it’s not configured properly it might as well not be there, because it doesn’t actually do anything if you don’t install it properly which is daunting for website owners and for business owners but we’re here to say that it’s really not that difficult. It is a service we provide, it only takes a few hours to do depending on how big the website is, and if your site’s smaller, it’s not going to take long at all. So really there’s no reason to not do it.

Are there any negatives?

Well there are a few negatives: things like load times, it might have a slight effect on your website but it’s a small price to pay. You’d rather have clients that are visiting the website securely. Your own customer’s user experience is gonna be the most important, you gotta give priority to it, and depending on the SSL Certificate you go with, so the way they’re designed is the more expensive ones are more secure.

How much do they cost?

You can pay as less as twenty dollars a years for a SSL certificate which really isn’t that much. And those lower cost SSL certificates provide up to ten thousand dollars of insurance, basically, meaning that they would cover up to ten thousand dollars worth of damages that are caused by the SSL certificate not functioning as it should. So what kind of damages are we talking about here? So damages when used in terms of an SSL certificate is actually quite similar to say insurance, in that, they’re talking about any sort of negative effect that a poorly functioning SSL can have on your client. Let’s say you have credit card information and the client’s credit card information and the client’s credit card information was stolen, so personal data, most importantly financial information, yeah so not just credit card, but even bank account details if the SSL malfunctions and a client loses money for whatever reason, then the SSL insurance covers all that. Now that can extend up to millions of dollars depending on the kind of SSL that you buy, and the levels of security also change. So there’s the basic level domain verification which essentially means that when you have an SSL installed and a client visits your website, they can rest assured that your website domain has been checked by a third party organisation to make sure that it is all legitimate. So the client know that they’re seeing what they are supposed to see, and they’re not seeing some sort of website posing to be someone else. It should be noted that the SSL systems can be faked and can be wrongly setup but in most instances this would be caught out pretty quickly and chances are that your clients trust will remain with your website because the SSL technology and the SSL setup is only improving and is only becoming more robust and more secure. Now if you’re a big organization you can have organization validation SSLs which basically means that they can ring up your company, they make sure that you say, you… are who you say you are and pose to be on the internet, but they do it to a bigger extent so rather than just checking your domain, they would make sure that they would check business certification, registration, all those things. But for most clients, I would say that it’s really not important to get that level of cover, it’s just important that they get some SSL certificate installed on their website. This is probably something we should have all done a while ago, it just took Google and a few other big internet companies to say no, unless you do it, we’re gonna really get you in trouble and punish you for it, then that’s what it’s taken for us to do. To be honest, our company website, futuretheory.co has had SSL for at least the last two years. We’ve realised the benefits of it early on, and we’ve moved a lot of clients onto SSL, but we still have a fair few clients who are not for various reasons. If you’re listening, feel free to get in touch with us, we can help you out. It’s really inexpensive for the benefits that you get.

How can FutureTheory help?

Now that we’ve covered everything we wanted to talk about, it’s important to not that we’re here to help you, no matter where you are. We are based in Canberra, but we work with clients from all over the world, especially when it comes to SSL it’s something that we can do over the phone, on Skype, however is convenient to you. You can email us at hello@futuretheory.co and we will be more than happy to help you. We’re upfront, we’re straightforward, you will get pricing and all that information first.

In conclusion…

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s recap what we’ve covered. The most important point is that SSLs or HTTPS on your website is crucial come October 2017. Google and other companies and browsers will be telling you visitors that your website is not secure. You will be punished for it. Don’t leave it till the last minute, don’t leave it till October, start thinking about it now, especially if you have a big website, it could be a long long process, little things will come up. Definitely and this is the kinda thing where you want to get it right and you want to, you want to be thorough with it, you wanna check everything. It’s not something that we’d recommend just the average Joe try. We’re more than happy to advise clients and help client when we feel like their task and their things that clients can do but we feel this is an important thing. We’re talking about security here and you can’t make any mistakes, that’s it. So don’t let it kind of wait, do it now. So that’s it for our first podcast, thanks for listening, feel free to share this, talk to us on our website there’s pricing there’s easy enquiry forms in there, feel free to get in touch with us. Like we said before, we’re happy to provide pricing before we do any work, we can even come to your place of business, if you’re local, and work on projects for you even if it includes something as simple as installing an SSL.