As the world moves further into the digital age, having a website for your business is more important than ever and highly recommended. While some business owners may think that having a website is unnecessary or too costly, the truth is that having a website can actually be extremely beneficial for your business in numerous ways.
Here are just a few reasons why having a website for your business is highly recommended:
In today’s digital age, having a website for your business is essential. Investing in a high-quality website can help your business increase its visibility, credibility, and revenue, while providing a convenient way for customers to learn about your products and services.
Below you will find some suggestions for hosting, themes and plugins that will help you in building a budget and choosing a suitable solution for your business. I wish you enjoy your reading.
In short, Cloud Computing is a model that allows convenient, on-demand availability and network access to shared computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing has evolved over the past 10 years.
Cloudways is the extremely useful platform for the hosting needs of small and medium businesses. It offers managed cloud web hosting services with many extremely useful functions and features. Digital Ocean, Vultr and Google Cloud cloud servers are the most used and accessible, they offer high upload speed, automatic backup copies and scalability with a single click.
I use Vultr’s 4/8G High Frequency servers, which seems to me by far the most appropriate choice. The 1/2G variant is only useful for small, portfolio or presentation sites.
The administration interface is the dream of any webmaster, it offers, in addition to server management, free SSL certificates, bot protection, monitoring tools, SSH access, cron jobs management, deployment via Git and above all: staging creation (using the storage allocated to the server) which seems extremely useful to me for during the site development, so you simply migrate the data from staging to live or vice versa.
Then we have these extremely necessary add-ons such as Elastic Email and Rackspace Email, which together facilitate communication with high volume transactional emails with customers, and Cloudfare which brings extra performance.
Of course, you can remove email add-ons using another provider, but the problems arise when the service provider blocks your account on the grounds because the volume of email (spam, as they consider) is much too high, your business is stuck for 2-3 days and you can’t do nothing until the provider agrees to reactivate the mail service. I’ve experienced this on Google and GoDaddy with some of my clients.
In addition, you can get access to premium support using Support Add-on, 24/7/365 assistance and support by chat, email or support ticket, DNS Made Easy, to facilitate DNS parameterization for your domain, Application Migration, to facilitate site migration on Cloudways platform, Safe Updates, for WordPress, theme or plugin updates, and Astra Pro, which extends the functionality of the free Astra version with new tools, layouts, style options, and many other powerful features to build professional websites quickly and conveniently.
Of course, if you have enough knowledge about DNS management, WordPress and web design, you wouldn’t need these add-ons, but they exist and are extremely useful for those who are more comfortable or don’t know how, but want maximum performance in the cloud, faster setup and response times using the Support Team or they simply need access to Astra Pro features for an exceptional design.
Long story short, just last year I used Cloudways to migrate 7 clients (three of them with two sites each) and develop for one client two large marketplaces with over 20,000 products each. The costs are extremely affordable, enough storage (SSD only), I had absolutely no problems with the servers or sites setup, the performance and speed were and are (still) excellent, and the support was impeccable (when I needed it, very rarely otherwise). It’s everything you need from a reputable hosting.
Throughout my life as a web developer and web designer, I have worked with all possible and “impossible” plugins and with many themes and templates. After a while I stopped building websites from scratch. First of all, it takes a long time, especially when you don’t have precise instructions and clear feedback from the client, and the receipts were minimal, because many clients do not evaluate and do not remunerate the time spent on deliverables as we evaluate. Often it is not only about money or the time spent in front of the computer, but also about the technique you make available as a freelancer, health and the precious time you would have spent with your family or friends. Unfortunately, there are people who don’t give a da[r]n about these things and this is where the discussions begin.
As such, I gave up this habit and turned to premium themes that offer, in addition to a modern design, updates and permanent and quality support without which a project would not have a long life, and the client wants this to ensure long-term investment.
You can find many of the themes used in the Templates section, but I warmly recommend Woodmart, Martfury and Astra, which have by far the best themes I’ve worked with. In addition to support, updates and modern functionalities, they offer 100% compatibility with Woocommerce plugins, for SEO and Elementor and WPBakery builders. I prefer to work with Elementor and Rank Math. In terms of performance, speed and design, it is important that the SEO part is included in the construction of the theme, and the 3 above themes are top-notch in this regard.
Now, if you have an online store with a lot of products, for example a marketplace with tens of thousands of products, loading and managing them could cause you some problems, but for that we have WP All Import, an extremely useful plugin for importing /export and update of products, stocks, prices, etc. but which also has an add-on for Rank Math with which you can improve SEO performance (basic) directly upon import.
If your business plan is based on drop-shipping or (multi)vendor-based, then Dokan would be an extremely suitable solution for any of the chosen solutions: traditional marketplace, digital marketplace or service-based marketplace, this offering the interface for the admin but also for vendors with extremely useful add-ons, accessible in 3 program variants: Starter, Professional, Business and Enterprise. The Professional version contains enough powerful advanced features for a marketplace.
It is possible that the images coming from vendors are sized improperly, too large in dimensions or size, and then you can use Smart Image Resize, which, in addition to managing media files, also offers support for converting JPG/PNG to Webp, modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Good solutions will always be a good choice because they save time, nerves and money. I hope this little guide will help you in establishing a budget and strategy for your website. Having said that, you just have to get down to business. I’ll take care of the rest.
For large and long-term projects that require cost estimates for higher but fixed budgets, signed contracts and recurring payments, please use the contact form on my company’s website : adydesign.ro. Thank you!
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