Website launch: the most important thing to think about

Creating a website today is no science, because you no longer need knowledge of HTML , CSS or some programming language .

The author of this article is SEO expert Miroslav Beňo . At the same time, I would like to thank him for sharing his experience with us in this guest post .

You can quickly create a really good website or blog via WordPress . All you have to do is find a suitable WordPress šablón , which you can also get for free or use a heavier caliber in the form of Divi or Avada šablón , with which you can click on the website more than you want.

Only in the case of more complicated things would you need a quality programmer.

In other words, today you can be online with your own website in literally minutes . However, this does not mean that the website will fulfill its purpose.

If you just want to try to create a website to have one, you don’t have to read this article.

But if you’re serious about your own website or blog , you have big plans for it, and you potentially want to sell or monetize it through affiliate marketing .

In addition, some essential things you should address as soon as possible, others you can postpone until after the start. Unfortunately, most people in the beginning deal with what doesn’t matter at all in the beginning and only get to the essentials when it’s too late.

So in order to increase your chances of creating a successful website and your efforts are not in vain, I have the most important thing for you here, which you should pay attention to .

The most important thing

Before you even start a website, something completely different is important than what your site will look like, where your hosting will run, or who you will register your domain with.

The most important thing is to find out if the area in which you want to operate has the potential to receive high and targeted traffic (at least 10,000+ per month) . Slovakia is a very small market and therefore does not have such options as America, China, Britain or Germany.

Last time I saw an advertisement for an American who sells basketball courses and teaches people how to play it. I quite doubt that in something like this it is possible in Slovakia to earn even a basic living.

In contrast, eternal areas such as:

• exercise
• nutrition
• recipes
• health
• relationships
• finance
• motivation
• travel
• fashion
• lifestyle
• beauty
• etc.

… they are also suitable in Slovakia , because you have the opportunity to really reach tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people with them.

There are two simple ways you can verify the potential size of the audience you want to reach:

1. The first is to find keyword searches on Google using the Keyword Planner .
2. The second is to find out the size of the audience that you can reach through advertising on Facebook by targeting different interests.

If total Google searches in a given area exceed 10,000, or you can reach 100,000 people on Facebook, you have a better chance of success than if you went to a new area that no one is interested in right now.

Website / domain name

Your site and domain name will accompany and present you. Although you can change it at any time, I recommend thinking long-term from the beginning so that you later avoid many complications .

It is most ideal to come up with a name that is “brandable” . While you don’t have to plan a big campaign or build a strong brand in the beginning, a brandable name will allow you to stand out from the crowd and build awareness of your site better than just the keywords in your domain.

The process by which you get to good names is relatively simple and has only one drawback – it is lengthy because good ideas do not come to wait:

1. write down all the words that are associated with your area , the emotions you would like to evoke in people, the words expressing your vision, etc.
2. combine and adapt words or their parts

For example, I recently set up two blogs about the exercises fitnessrevolution.sk and fitadvisor.sk using the same procedure (this one is still in the creation phase).

Recommended reading:
63 tips on how to choose a domain name for a website
How to go about choosing the best possible domain for your business

Choosing a web solution

You can create a website in three ways:

1. you can customize it
2. you will use a “box” solution
3. you use some CMS – content management system

It is very advantageous to have a tailor-made website, because in this case you can design almost anything and the programmer will code it for you. However, such a solution is very costly because you will not only pay the programmer, but also the graphics that the website must design for you.

Today, a large number of tools (so-called box solutions) are available to create a website without programming skills , that it is a problem for ordinary users to choose something: Webnode , Wix , Blogger …

But their problem is that they will greatly limit you on what you can do.

Therefore, in 99% of cases, it is best to choose the WordPress CMS. There are so many benefits to using WordPress that other platforms don’t catch on at all, and they’re far from allowing you to do as many things as you might need at a later stage.

In addition, an experienced programmer can program virtually any functionality or plugin for you . With box solutions, you usually don’t have that luxury and you’re limited to what they provide. As for plugins, a lot of them are available for free, so you can add a lot of functionality yourself at any time.

Web hosting selection

There is such wisdom – as much as you are willing to put into something, as much and even more will come back to you.

Of course, in the real world, something works, something doesn’t. In short, this is the case and it must be taken into account. However, you also need to realize that if you don’t put anything into something and try to find only the fastest and cheapest ways, it will affect the quality and the result will be more than bad.

I mention this mainly because many people in Slovakia tend to save on everything, even web hosting . I’m not saying that you need your own virtual server right away, but definitely don’t run your website on cheap hosting for a few tens of cents or Czech crowns. Not even on free hosting. Quality is not the one who doesn’t say the technical parameters to tighten up a nice modern site at all.

You can have really good hosting for the initial phase of running a website from about two euros a month , which really isn’t much.

No matter who you choose hosting from, it should meet at least the basic technical parameters such as:

• fast server response for fast page loading
• data center located in Slovakia, because the site could load more slowly from a foreign server
• possibility to install SSL certificate
• PHP version 7.1+
• the latest database versions
• memory limit ideally 512 mb
• http2 support
• CMS support

Recommended Reading: How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?

šablóny selection

You can think of the template as a default look on your site. You just need to throw in the content and šablóna it will take care of and nice look and features.

The choice used to be very simple – you chose what you liked the most. Although this is still a necessary criterion, there are several others that need to be considered today:

• Design vs. UX – in addition to a nice appearance, it is necessary to pay attention to at least the basic principles of UX (user experience) such as clear navigation, easy orientation on the website, simple registration process, etc.
• šablóny functionalities – each šablóna is somehow programmed and therefore has predefined options. Therefore, you need to choose especially according to whether the šablóna handles what you need.
• šablóny Compatibility – Not every šablóna must be compatible with new updates to the CMS or third party plugins.
• Code quality – improperly programmed šablóna can not only slow down the page loading, but can also pose a security risk.
• Responsiveness – šablóna should also be suitable for mobile devices, as in many cases up to half of them visit the web.

Recommended Reading: How to Choose the Best WordPress šablón u

Site traffic

Launching the page will not automatically result in increased traffic to the page. The harsh truth is that almost no one comes to your site unless you somehow do so in the beginning . For this reason, you should know the most effective sources of traffic, choose one at the beginning and use it to the full.

In Slovakia, it pays to focus most on these sources of visits :

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – This is about increasing the position in search results for the keywords that people are looking for. The higher you are, the more traffic you will get.
• Social networks – Facebook or Instagram are great ways to build a fan base, make yourself known and send people to your site.
• Email marketing – the larger and more targeted your email contact database, the more people you can reach and let them know about new products, services and content on your site.
• Paid advertising – You can “turn on” advertising and promote your content and products or services at any time via Google or on Facebook and Instagram. The benefit is that you can get instant traffic, but once you turn off an ad, you won’t be blank enough about your site.

None of these sources of visits alone are better or worse. Ideally, you should be able to catch them all at once, if time or money allow.

Because I have extensive experience in search engine optimization, I am an SEO consultant and I know how to write articles, so I chose SEO at the beginning for my new website , although social networks, currently mainly Instagram, are in for a given segment.

Recommended reading: WordPress SEO ultimate guide

Analytics

To see if your site is moving forward, you need to set up at least these two basic analytics tools from the beginning :

• Google Analytics – a tool that allows you to track traffic to your site, how it is reported, from which sources it also came to measure goals such as the number of completed contact forms or downloaded ebooks.
• Google Search Console – a useful tool, especially for finding out what keywords people came to your site from.

Quality and valuable content

Since there are hundreds of millions of websites worldwide and in Slovakia we can also count about 150,000 (estimated based on the total number of registered .sk domains), it cannot be assumed that people will show interest if your content is not at least a class better and more sophisticated .

Although quality and value are subjective concepts, there are several objective assumptions on how to work with such content :

It must be fun – if you write something strongly, it will feel from the text, even a professional copywriter who would not enjoy your assignment will not write a text that will radiate enthusiasm. That is simply not possible.

You need extensive knowledge of your topic and an overview – only under this assumption can you write something that will not be a compilation of other articles and will not look like every other published article.

Ideally, you should also have practical experience in the field – a great example is the area of exercise and health. In lifestyle magazines, you will find articles on one hoof from copywriters who either do not train often or not at all. To make matters worse, I prefer not to mention that they have almost no knowledge of how the human body actually works. I sincerely feel sorry for the people who read it, because they are very disappointed and don’t get anywhere.

Publish something that people just can’t find – fortunately, everything is on the Internet, not on the Slovak Internet. I don’t want to offend anyone, but most of the content on the site is essentially identical. One piece of information is taken over, and many copywriters write content by putting together some of the articles from other copywriters.

Basically, I don’t even mind, because when I realized that, I discovered a huge hole on the Slovak Internet – very few people will put in the effort to examine something in detail, substantiate the facts, point to examples, etc.

Thanks to this, I managed to increase traffic from Google by 1063% on the wy.sk website (mainly via the blog) in the course of 18 months .

Technical page of the website

Security

• SSL certificate (eg Lets Encrypt certificate is available free of charge from most web hosting providers)
• redirect (so-called redirect 301) to the secure https protocol

Loading speed

The complete foundation when launching a website should be:

• suitably encoded website / šablóna for fast loading
• image optimization and compression
• chachovanie
• lazy loading

Recommended Reading: How to Speed Up a WordPress Website

What is enough to solve after launching the site

Logo

If you already have a designed logo, it’s just a plus. If you don’t have one yet, you don’t have to worry about that at first. Honestly, no one will interest your logo on the first visit . All you have to do is write the name of the domain or your project in some nice font and set it as the logo on the site.

Contact page / page about us

These two sites are a must-have and should not be missing on any site. But if you’re just starting out, you can do without them in a week or two. Especially if you are starting a blog. It is much more important to write the first quality content.

This doesn’t just apply if you had your ad turned on from the beginning and sold something. Somehow customers still have to contact you. In addition, the site would not look credible.

Collection of emails

As I mentioned above, an email database is one of the best channels to promote your site and you should get started as soon as possible . However, a week or two after the site launches, it’s not really necessary unless you have paid advertising enabled. Almost no one will visit your site anyway.

Again, as with the contact page / page about us, it is better to produce some quality articles in the beginning and then focus on other important things like collecting emails.