Having a compelling website is crucial in this digital world. This is where most of your business activities, sales and promotion, take place. It is the best medium to present your services to a wide range of customers.
The foremost step of website development is to choose a relevant platform. Among the ocean of platforms in the market, WordPress is the most popular one. As per w3techs, WordPress is used by 64.2% of the website using a content management system (CMS). Also, it is used by 43.0% of all websites.
The reason behind the popularity of WordPress website development is that it offers numerous advantages. Whether scalability, SEO-friendliness, security, customization, responsiveness, etc., it has a lot to offer.
However, it is vital that your website effectively showcases your business vision and is built as per your specific needs. But how can you achieve that? Well, you can invest in custom WordPress website development services to achieve the same.
Are you familiar with custom WordPress development?If not, this guide is here to assist you. Keep scrolling the page for an extensive understanding of developing a custom website with WordPress.
What is Custom WordPress Website Development?
A custom website is a web development solution that is crafted to fit your specific business needs. It is a process to wireframe, develop, test, and launch the website in the best possible way.
This approach is usually chosen by well-established, medium to large-sized businesses. It fits the complex business needs that are not achievable with a pre-built website template.
Reasons to Choose Custom WordPress Website Development for Your Business
For an informed decision of selecting custom development to develop your business website, you should first know its benefits.
A Unique Website Tailored to Your Business Needs
Every business owner wants to provide a unique website experience to site visitors. Could you achieve that with a template? Obviously, no, because there might be chances that the template you pick is also resonating with someone else’s brand.
With custom WordPress development, you can get a unique website developed as per your specific business requirements. So, there will be less probability that you will land on a website with similar features as yours. It sets you apart from an ocean of websites on the internet.
Security
A custom website is developed by keeping high security in mind. It is far better than a pre-built website template that comes with loopholes and threats from malicious activities.
However, hiring a custom WordPress website development company means you need not worry more about security issues. This is because they are the team of professionals that build your website with enhanced security features.
Further, your website will be built with SSL security technology and keeping other security features in mind.
Flexibility
Is it good to get stuck with the functionalities you are experiencing now on your site for a prolonged time? Yeah, no one wants to cope with the same features repeatedly. Thus, it is essential that your site is flexible enough to adopt future changes. This is what you can get by investing in custom WordPress website development solution.
Unlike a template-based website, custom development provides you with a flexible website where you can make changes per your requirements.
Scalability
It is good if your site runs well now, but what about future expansions? Is it ready to handle the rising needs of your business? The answer is obviously no if it is developed with pre-built templates. But if you have leveraged the custom development approach for website development, you are free to add content, pages, features, and functionalities to your website as your business grows.
Custom websites are developed by keeping future expansions in mind and thus are easy to manage that will surely scale better.
High Performance
In this fast digital world, slow and steady do not have a place. If you are slow, you will simply be out of the game. This, too, applies to the website. A slow-loading website will force the customer to leave the site without even going through the services and products.
To run a successful website, it is essential to meet the core standards like the site’s speed and responsiveness. Often some ready-made WordPress themes are not mobile-optimized or come with performance issues. It is because they come with many features you don’t need, and thus, a lot of unnecessary code can slow down your site speed and performance.
In contrast, with a custom WordPress development, your site is created from scratch and will contain the functionalities that you actually require. It makes your site lighter and allows it to run faster, leading to a better user experience.
Custom WordPress Website Development vs. Template-Based Website
Though custom development is much helpful in making a custom WordPress site, does that mean the template-based website is entirely useless? No, that’s not. Both have their pros and cons.
However, when it comes to WordPress web development, there is often a dilemma between choosing custom development services or pre-built templates.
So, in custom WordPress website development vs template-based website, we are going to distinguish both on the basis of some factors. So, you can select a reliable one based on the factor that matters most to you.
Time
If your goal is setting up a website quickly, using a pre-built template will be a good option for you. With custom WordPress development, it definitely takes longer to plan, develop, and launch the site when building it from scratch.
Conversely, using a template will reduce the amount of your planning time. It will help you launch the site as early as possible. So, to get a website in a minimum time, you can rely on the template-based approach.
Cost
In case of a budget constraint, template-based website development will surely be your way to go. You can even get paid themes in the range of $10 – $100, which is easily affordable for any business. It will be good if you are looking for simple options and want to achieve different functionalities.
But is it ideal for enterprise-level businesses? No, it is more a trait of startups and small businesses. They can start a website with the template-based approach in less time and in a budget-friendly manner. In contrast, investing in custom website development could be costlier but will provide you with the best results.
Uniqueness
No doubt, custom WordPress development is the winner in offering uniqueness to your website.
Using a pre-built template might cause your site will look the same as the various sites with the same theme on the internet. Though it is time and cost-effective to develop sites via the ready-made template, you will end up with a common design that lacks uniqueness for your business.
Custom development lets developers incorporate functionalities and additional data as required for the platform. It ensures that the website is tailored to the technical and business needs of the site owner. It will provide an original look to your business that sets you apart from your competitors.
SEO-Friendly
A business owner can have an SEO-compliant site by opting for custom WordPress web development services. These sites always come with a user-friendly interface thus, secure a higher ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).
On the other hand, most WordPress themes are SEO-friendly. But if you end up choosing a non-optimized template for your business, you can still make it SEO-optimized by using a reliable WordPress plugin.
Therefore, both custom and template-based WordPress websites are easy to optimize as per SEO guidelines, including sitemaps, schema, site navigation, and many more.
How to Develop a Custom Website With WordPress?
For custom WordPress website development, you must have a concise idea of your business goals. It plays an essential role in the look and feel of your website.
Let’s understand the steps required to develop a website with WordPress
Define Your Business Goals
Apart from developing a website on WordPress, it is the foremost step in website development. Before hiring a WordPress professional, you must define your business goals. It will enable them to develop a website catering to your specific business requirements.
In addition, you must be aware of the market demands. It will give you an insight into your customer needs and the standout features of your website. It will also be financially beneficial to go with this route before investing a large sum of money in custom development.
Once you are done verifying your idea, the next step is to move toward turning it into reality.
Development
However, the idea of developing a well-performed website is based on your business goals, type, and niche. Before starting to develop your website, a professional first gather your site’s needs and technical requirements. Then, use it as a basis to map out your website’s UI, functionality, and features.
This step turns your site vision into a live website. The blueprint will be handed over to the WordPress developer, which then implements it to ensure it perfectly aligns with the interface.
You will have a fully functional custom WordPress website at the end of this WordPress web development step.
Testing
After development, it is essential to test the features and functionalities your website incorporates with. What if the site is launched without testing? There will be a high probability that your visitors will face performance issues.
It might be in the form of a disordered user interface on different platforms, slow loading, features not properly functioning, etc. Testing helps you to point out such issues before the website launch. The issues and adjustments will revert to the developer for rework.
Launch the Site
It is the last but crucial step of your custom WordPress web development process. Once it happens, you then need to monitor the feedback of your site visitors. It is good to get positive reviews but do not leave the negative ones. Try to resolve them by implementing relevant suggestions to establish yourself as a trustable brand.
How Much Does Custom WordPress Website Development Cost?
If we are talking about WordPress website development, the cost is one of the major aspects to discuss. Every business owner is concerned about how much does it cost to develop a website with WordPress?
The cost of website development varies because of the businesses’ unique web development needs. Despite the fact that WordPress is free to use, you may be wondering how the cost comes to be.
There is so much extra stuff from where the added cost comes. It includes domain name, web hosting, plugins/extensions, maintenance, security, and others. So, if you choose WordPress because it is open-source, you need to rethink. It is because developing a full-fledged website with this platform will require you to invest a lot.
However, by investing in custom WordPress development services, you will get the best results with your website. So, if you decide to get a unique website with WordPress tailored to your business needs, be ready with the proper budget.
You must not forget that every good thing comes with a price.
How to Find a Reliable WordPress Web Development Partner?
Finding a reliable website development partner will require a lot of time and effort. Moreover, WordPress is a popular website development platform, and you will find a lot of WordPress service providers in the market. So, selecting a reliable one could be cumbersome.
You can ease your task by validating each one on specific factors. So, what are the factors for hiring a web development partner? Well, it includes reviews and ratings, their portfolio, testimonials, a set of websites they have delivered in the past, etc.
The portfolio will help you to get the first impression of the WordPress professional you hire. It will familiarize you with their skills and competencies.
The client testimonials will give you insight into the developer’s past clients. It will give you information about their work ethic.
If you are not familiar with their expertise, you can check their testimonial section to decide whether they are the right fit for your long-term project or not.
Final Thoughts
In this digital world, people prefer searching online. Therefore, having a compelling website is necessary to increase the revenue of your business. It lets you connect with a wide range of customers worldwide and outreach your products and services to them.
WordPress is undoubtedly a powerful website builder platform that surely benefits you in developing an enticing website. Moreover, custom development provides you the benefit of having a unique online presence for your customers.
This guide has covered nearly every aspect of custom WordPress website development, whether its benefits, differences from the template-based websites, development process, cost, and various others.
So, make an informed decision and think about what you want from the website before investing in custom WordPress development services.
Good Luck!
