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4 Reasons Why You Should DIY Your WordPress Website

One of my biggest entrepreneurial tips is to get the help you need that contributes to your business’s growth.

Outsourcing the tasks that are low-level yet important while you work to be the visionary of your brand is a key to success. I know that you’ve heard this a bunch of times. But when you’re an emerging service-based business, coach, or content creator, a good rule of thumb is being sure that you understand all aspects of your business.

Learning pieces of software, running your social media accounts, handling your own bookkeeping, and keeping up with so many other tasks is essential to running a successful online business. In most cases, when starting out, it’s good to DIY these items for a little while then outsource them later. 

Another major aspect of your business (that helps connect all of your marketing efforts together) is getting your website. Starting with a WordPress-based one will give you the tools from start to beyond-launch to scale up when needed.

Now, since building a WordPress website may seem like rocket science, you may have thought about hiring a professional designer (like me!) to do the work for you.

And that’s fine; if this is a viable option for you, then why not save time by having a trusted web designer take this task off of your plate?

But for some folks, DIYing their WordPress website may be just the thing that they need. And that’s coming from a professional web designer. Yes, I do think that working with a WordPress expert is important, but this doesn’t have to be done right away.

If you’re confident in your tech skills or are open to learning the art of website design, then here are 4 reasons that may make you stick with that decision.

It’s easier than you think

Let’s just get this one out of the way: building a website has a lot of moving parts but building a WordPress one (wordpress.org) is slightly more complex. Steps involved in creating a WordPress based website include:

  • Buying your domain seperately
  • Buying your hosting
  • Connecting your domain to your hosting account correctly
  • Safely building your website on or off of your newly set-up hosting environment (Pro tip: I suggest building on your own local setup)
  • Installing and configuring WordPress
  • Figuring our what theme and plugins you need for your particular build
  • Content planning, designing, building, and launching the site
  • Optimizing your website’s SEO

Ok, that’s a lot, lol.

But since we’re living in the age of modern everything, WordPress websites have gotten easier to DIY over the years. Yes, they still involve those things that I mentioned but there are amazing WordPress-focused hosting platforms out there that help with the initial set-up items.

Those set-up items sound complicated on paper but they’re much easier than you think. Plus, when you build your site with a drag and drop page builder like Elementor or Divi, your project instantly becomes even more manageable.

Need resources that can help manage your business and website DIY project? Head over to my full resources page here!

You’ll save money

A professionally built website can be expensive. With prices ranging between $1000 to at or more than $10,000, working with an expert web designer or agency can get costly. For a good designer, these prices are standard.

If you’re just starting out and your budget isn’t yet ready to handle paying thousands of dollars for a website, learning to DIY it yourself is best. For emerging entrepreneurs without a website, your first one doesn’t have to be perfect from day one of launch. If you have a cleanly designed and easy-to-navigate website that displays everything a user needs to know, you’re winning!

The wonderful thing about building a WordPress-based website is that it allows you to start with a powerful and highly-scalable option. You’ll be able to enhance your website with pretty much any feature that you can think of with the help of plugins.

And since there are so many developers that can create custom plugins for WordPress, you’ll be able to find help easily if you need a more customized function or need ongoing support for your site while you focus on other aspects of your business.

You’ll feel more confident when you regularly update your site

When you DIY your website on your own, you’ll know it from top to bottom. It’s just going to happen. Not only will you feel major confidence from creating your own website (it’s no walk in the park!), you’ll fully understand it because YOU built it.

For new entrepreneurs, your brand is in its infancy stages which means your business’s information is constantly evolving and will need to be updated on your site. DIYing your site automatically gives you the confidence and know-how to jump into your site and make these changes on the fly.

Furthermore, you’ll have no nervousness of breaking your website, logging in to maintain or update your website’s plugins, or in some cases, migrating your website to another host. And since we’re talking about WordPress, there’s a huge community of WordPress users and experts that can help you out when you’re in a pinch.

If planned well and created with care, you’ll be able to get your dream website it launched quickly

A good website starts with a good strategy and ends with a well-executed design plan. When you start with discovering your website’s goals, audience, and needs, you’ll be a step ahead of the game when it comes to creating a website that captivates.

I go into a ton of detail in this post, but to recap, when you carefully plan out and take care of the below action items in your website’s project the end result will be a website that does major work to contribute to your business’s growth:

  • Know your brand’s why: Creating your mission and vision statements let you and others know exactly what your brand is all about.
  • Understand who your website’s audience is: Diving deeper into who your brand serves will have you creating content with the quickness. You’ll know what to say and how to say it in a way that speaks to only that set of people.
  • Know your website goals and the actions that visitors need to take: Website goals should be created to help grow your business. Raising your conversion rate, increasing your list of email subscribers, and driving more traffic from your dream customers are just a few examples of good website goals.
  • Gather inspiration pieces: Everyone wants a custom website but the design idea can spark from existing sites. Collect 3-4 existing website designs that inspire the look and feel of your own and that your audience may frequently visit.
  • Map out your website: The homepage is normally the start of a website’s visitor journey but they’ve gotta do something else after they’ve landed there. An important action that they should take is to navigate to core pages on your website but mapping out this flow ahead of time will help you make sound decisions for your each of your page’s layouts, call-to-action buttons, and navigational menus.
  • Put the right content on your website: After you’ve mapped out the site, you should now know what pages you need. Write those down in a list then begin brainstorming content for each.

Conclusion

DIYing your website strategically and with a laser focus on getting it done will do wonders for your new business faster! It’s so much easier to create than you think, you’ll save time and money when it comes to hiring a professional designer, and you’ll know your website from top to bottom to confidently make needed updates to it.

Hey there, I'm Brittany. 👋🏾

Hey there, I'm Brittany. 👋🏾

I'm all about helping creatives and small businesses stand out and grow their brands confidently online. Interested in getting your dream website launched? Or does your current site need support from a web design nerd and expert? Let's work together; learn more about my services today!

Explore Web Design Services
Hey there, I'm Brittany. 👋🏾

Hey there, I'm Brittany. 👋🏾

I'm all about helping creatives and small businesses stand out and grow their brands confidently online. Interested in getting your dream website launched? Or does your current site need support from a web design nerd and expert? Let's work together; learn more about my services today!

Explore Web Design Services

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