Introduction:
From generating qualified leads to boosting SERP rankings, a successful enterprise WordPress site must achieve a balance between driving sales and generating brand awareness. For corporations that want to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer, there are a handful of questions that typically come to mind.
Will WordPress scale to meet our needs? Is WordPress secure enough for our brand? How do we incorporate marketing efforts into our WordPress site?
If your team is asking questions like these, it’s important to understand what capabilities and features WordPress offers specifically for large corporations. Let’s take a look at the 5 elements of every successful enterprise WordPress site: speed, uptime, security, conversion, and marketing.
Speed: The Fast Lane to User Satisfaction and Better Rankings
Website speed and bounce rates are directly correlated: the longer a website takes to load, the more likely it is to have high rates of page abandonment. A slow website turns away potential customers and signifies a poor user experience, which causes Google and other search engines to rank that site below competitors with more nimble loading times.
Boost Speeds with Caching
You understand that speed affects your SERP ranking, but how can you create a faster website? One feature that’s considered a must amongst enterprise WordPress users is page caching. Caching essentially speeds up your website to a global audience by reducing the amount of information that needs to be processed between the website’s server and the end user.
While there are a handful of great plugins for improving caching on a small scale, large companies with high-traffic websites require more complex server caching systems. Some managed website hosts offer geo-caching and geo-replication mechanisms, which are designed specifically to speed up WordPress sites for a more efficient user experience. Pagely uses NGINX full-page caching to accelerate the front end and Redis object caching to accelerate backend database access. Contact sales to learn about what we can do in terms of setting up shared geocache nodes to give your global visitors a faster user experience.
No Detours
To further boost speed, consider leveraging a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site’s assets on servers around the world, significantly reducing the distance data travels to reach your visitors. This can dramatically improve loading times, especially for a global audience. Tools like Cloudflare or KeyCDN integrate well with WordPress and can offer an additional layer of caching and security.
Uptime: Keeping Your Site Available 24/7
Unplanned website downtime is one of the most frustrating things that can happen for a high-traffic business website. But since downtime is bound to happen at some point or another, it’s important to be prepared for when it does happen.
Effective Monitoring
The best way to prepare for downtime is to adopt a form of uptime monitoring that minimizes the extent of downtime periods. Choosing the right uptime monitor for your business depends on how much traffic your website receives daily. While basic tools check your website’s uptime every 5 minutes, for example, you probably want advanced functionality that will monitor your website 24/7. Many tools are also equipped with automatic alerts, which is the most efficient way your team can learn about downtime (and the quickest way you can get your site up and running before angering more customers).
Some uptime monitoring tools on WordPress also provide businesses with critical insights into how their website’s user experience is impacting conversions. For example, you may learn that a shopping cart is malfunctioning, or that there’s a problem with your opt-in form. This is especially important for websites with global audiences, because it sheds light on how user experience translates into different languages.
Always Have a Backup
Implementing a robust backup strategy is also key to minimizing downtime. Regular, automated backups ensure that, in the event of a site failure, you can quickly restore your site to a previous state. Look for hosting solutions that include or offer easy integration with comprehensive backup services.
Security: Fortifying Your Online Presence
Security is perhaps the biggest concern of large corporations using WordPress, and rightfully so. One thing to keep in mind is that WordPress is constantly reforming its security features. It’s important to update WordPress every time a new version is available, as this will ensure that your site has state-of-the-art protection at all times. Pagely keeps the entire software stack updated from the machine kernel up through all core services to the plugins and wp core files.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Corporations with hundreds of internal users will want to take a preventative approach to securing user accounts. One way to prevent security threats on WordPress is to adopt multi-factor authentication, also known as MFA or 2-factor authentication. This system prompts all of your website’s users to enter an additional verification code every time they log in. This safely verifies everyone’s identity and helps prevent hackers from breaking into your website. Google Authenticator is one commonly used tool that sends a unique verification code to each user through a mobile app. We offer 2fa as an option for all users on their Pagely admin.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Another way to make your WordPress site more secure is to use a web application firewall (WAF). Industry standard firewall mod_security uses a set of rules to prevent common threats like code injection attacks. Large corporations should consider the benefit of managed WordPress hosts, which offer built-in security features that conduct all security measures, including screening for malware, conducting bot scans, preventing brute force attempts, and more. At Pagely we’re constantly monitoring new exploits and baking rules into our software firewall as well as our malware scanning process so that you’re protected and benefiting from the collective intelligence and surface area of thousands of customers.
Educating your team on basic security best practices is also crucial. Regular training sessions on password management, recognizing phishing attempts, and secure file sharing can significantly reduce the risk of security breaches. Additionally, consider implementing a strict policy for plugin and theme installations to ensure only trusted and necessary additions are made to your site.
Conversion: Turning Visitors into Customers
Your corporation’s website is an extension of your sales team, and it should succeed at creating memorable brand experiences and generating leads. To understand how your marketing efforts impact conversion rates, it’s essential to take advantage of conversion tracking. This offers detailed insights into what steps a visitor takes on your website, from the first time they land on your homepage until they take a specific action. The key here is to focus on a specific conversion feature and then track it to better understand user behavior.
Utilizing Tags to Identify Trends
For example, you might want to use tags to determine how often a certain link is clicked, which CTA buttons get the most hits, and whether or not people are using your social share buttons. When you have access to this information, you’ll be able to optimize your site for more effective conversions. Before the conversion though you ideally want to be tracking all the lead sources you control via UTM parameters. If you’re not familiar with this practice see this primer we wrote on using UTM parameters to track attribution.
It’s also helpful to combine your conversion tracking and analytics data in the same dashboard. This is not only easier for everyone, but also more secure. Automatic tag managers like Google Tag Manager allow developers and marketers to create, edit, and delete conversion tags from a single location, without having to access or edit code. Keeping your code secure enables marketers to focus on conversion tagging strategies without compromising security.
Experimentation
A/B testing is another powerful tool for optimizing conversion rates. By creating two versions of a webpage or element (like a CTA button), you can test which version performs better and make data-driven decisions. WordPress has plugins and integrations with tools that can simplify the process of setting up, running, and analyzing A/B tests, making it easier to refine your website’s user experience and conversion paths.
Marketing: Engaging and Converting Your Audience
After gaining information about how visitors interact with your site, it’s important to offer content that provides value and converts customers. Generating qualified leads starts with an effective marketing lifecycle — the ability to create valuable top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content is key. WordPress makes this easy by offering customizable features and plugins for every stage of the buyer journey.
To generate awareness from your blog, for example, you can implement a scroll-triggered opt-in form that encourages users to sign up for your newsletter. One free plugin that allows you to create a lightbox pop-up is called Pop-Up CC. WordPress also offers many plugins for creating landing pages, such as Unbounce, LeadPages, Thrive Landing Pages, and Optimize Press. Here, you can host informational middle-of-funnel content like eBooks and white papers behind a gated page that captures visitor information. When it comes to bottom-of-funnel content, you can use the conversion tracking tips listed in tip 4 to test the effectiveness of a “get demo” or “contact sales” page.
Last but not least, implementing a strong SEO strategy is vital for driving traffic to your site and increasing visibility. Utilizing SEO plugins like Yoast SEO can help optimize your content for search engines, making it easier for potential customers to find you. Additionally, social media integration allows your content to be easily shared across platforms, expanding your reach and enhancing brand awareness.
To learn more about hosting your corporation’s website with Pagely, visit our page on enterprise WordPress hosting solutions today.
In order to make WordPress more secure, they should make two factor authentication as the only way to login. Traditional login methods are prone to brute force attacks.
Clef two-factor authentication plugin is a better choice instead of the normal username-password combo.