Deciding whether or not to build a custom website for your business can be a difficult decision. You have many things to consider such as budget, timeline, scope, maintenance, etc. not to mention, how a custom website may fit into your short and long-term business goals. At Webspec, we work with small, mid-size, and big businesses all across the State of Iowa and beyond to determine whether or not a custom website will fulfill their needs. When building custom websites, we use WordPress, an open-source platform with endless customization possibilities.
To make things a little easier in your decision-making process, we’ve put together a guide of five benefits to consider in building a custom website. Hopefully, this will help you not only better understand the capabilities of a custom site, but it will also prepare you to have those conversations with potential website developers.
1. Unique, Custom Design
First and foremost, a custom website means you get to decide how it looks. Using other “out of the box” website tools can be a good starting point, but ultimately you are using pre-existing design templates and switching out colors, fonts, etc. With WordPress, you have the ability to start completely from scratch. You can implement moving animations, abstract designs, or features that are unique to your business or brand. With a design that is unique to your brand, you’ll stand out from the crowd and chaos of a cluttered digital landscape.
The following is a small sample of the many businesses and organizations we’ve helped to upgrade their overall design through a custom website:
- The Smoothie Company
- Goodwill of Central Iowa
- Paws & Pints
- Iowa Educational Services for the Blind & Visually Impaired
2. Optimized SEO Benefits
SEO (search engine optimization) involves implementing best practices that can give your website more opportunities to rank higher on search engines, enabling your customers to find you. With a custom website, there are plenty of ways you can improve SEO. With hundreds of plugins that will assist you in metadata, redirects, structured data, and more—you can work to make your website stand out amongst your competitors on SERPS (search engine result pages). With more visibility and higher rankings, comes more leads and, ultimately, more conversions.
WordPress is also very user-friendly. With their approachable backend, you can continue to update the unique content on your website, include blogs, and implement additional content strategies to boost your SEO.
Our team of WordPress experts will build your site to be as efficient as possible, furthering your SEO page rank.
3. Enhanced Security, Ownership & Control
A custom website allows you to have more ownership over the content, functionality, design, and security measures. WordPress offers regular updates to address bugs, performance improvements, and security vulnerabilities. With more ownership and control of your website, you decide how much you want to update the content on your website while your website support team makes the software updates necessary to keep your site optimized. When you have a custom website, your site grows with you.
You also have more security knowing that your website is receiving foolproof support and hosting. Your site needs routine backups and firewalls that block any malicious requests. These services often do not come packaged with other online website page builders. When you host your site at Webspec, you can rest assured knowing that your site is secure on a well-managed, fully featured server, and paired with a CDN (content delivery network) to serve your content from the internet as geographically close to all of your customers as possible.
4. Scalability
Most businesses have a long-term goal to grow, gain more leads, and serve more customers. Don’t let your website’s performance or functionality be your bottleneck. A custom website will grow with you and your business. You can create landing pages for ad campaigns, add a plugin to help customers schedule appointments with you, or even add e-commerce when it’s time to take your products online. As the digital landscape grows, so does the need for better and newer technologies. WordPress is home to thousands of page builders and plugins, and developers all around the world continue to make more as our needs change and the web evolves.
Consider the investment in a custom website. Sure, a smaller site can get you what you need in the short term, but a custom-built website will allow you to grow and scale into the long term. Investing now will save you time and money later on.
5. Expanded Integration Capabilities
You have many options available to you when it comes to website integrations. With a custom website, you can integrate third-party services, APIs, and more unique systems critical to your business. We can help you seamlessly integrate your current e-commerce platform into your new custom site. If you use special tracking APIs or other third-party applications, it’ll be all the easier to migrate them over.
Some businesses utilize unique processes and workflows that are essential for their businesses, that go beyond the scope and capabilities of even a custom website. These businesses may need a custom software application, built with the necessary tools, integrations, and services to manage your data.
Let’s Work Together To Build You the Custom Website Your Business Needs To Grow
These are only five of the many benefits you can take advantage of when creating a custom website for your business. The Webspec Websites Division has built custom sites for decades, assisting internal business leadership/executive and marketing teams in reaching and exceeding their goals. Our team will work alongside yours to figure out how we can make you stand out from your competitors and bring more value to your customers. If you’re ready to take the next step, let’s chat!
