Best Practices For A High Converting WordPress Website

Simply put, you’d be hard pressed to find an open-source platform that enables you to create a website as comprehensive and visually dynamic as WordPress.

However, simply building a WordPress website by is no guarantee that it will lead to true business results. For that to happen you’ll need to adhere to true and trusted best practices. Luckily, we’ve collected some of them for you!

What Defines a Converting WordPress Site?

Forget WordPress; any business website (especially one that caters to a B2B audience) serves one ultimate goal:

Setting the ground for website visitors to convert into customers.

WordPress websites differ in that they are significantly more complex to create. Unlike with other website builders, to set up your WordPress website to incorporate the necessary lead capturing features and functionality, you’ll need to know how to code.

Well, unless you use platforms like Elementor. It is a powerful website builder that allows creating high-converting WordPress websites without writing a single line of code. It puts all of the web’s latest conversion-generating tools at your disposal and handles the technical work of coding them for you.

A high-converting WordPress website is one with a conversion rate that exceeds the industry average. The average conversion rate across various industries is 3.9% (you may find the rate for your specific industry in this research.)

How To Make A WordPress Website That Will Convert

Whether you choose to create a website with WordPress by coding, or, alternatively, you opt for a WP site builder like Elementor, you’ll need to properly address and, hopefully, implement the following best practices.

1. Perfect The Art of Engaging-but-Non Intrusive Pop-ups

Here’s what you don’t want to do:

Leverage an average pop-up builder and have it trigger as soon as people visit your WordPress website. More than likely, this won’t help boost conversions. In fact, it will probably disrupt the user experience and end up costing you revenue.

To use pop-ups correctly, you need a customizable pop-up builder with a wide range of configurable triggers. A good pop-up builder allows you to set specific triggers based on user behavior and interaction. This will result in your pop-up ads actually capturing interested leads right when they are primed to convert. No longer an annoyance, your pop-ups are now an extremely valuable conversion tool.

WordPress’ ecosystem is chalk-full of good pop-up builders. You can leverage a standalone solution (here’s a roundup of the best available options out there).

2. Gate Content Strategically

It’s more common than not for B2B sites to gate specific pieces of content. Typically a premier, research-based PDF, gated content is designed to qualify leads (which is a fancy way of saying that it can help you distinguish between serious leads and pretenders).

Gating content in a way to get tangible results requires some strategic thinking.

The key to your success will lie in finding a perfect balance. On the one hand, you’d like to see your content facilitate lead gen. However, it is important you don’t scare visitors off by portraying yourself as a subscription based content platform (unless that is your business model).

Here too, you will need to incorporate a WordPress pop-up builder. Make sure to require key submission information without burdening those who fill it out with endless fields (e.g. think whether or not it is really critical to have a visitor fork over his or her phone number… Perhaps an email address will suffice).

3. Examine YouTube Embeds Vs. Video Hosting Platforms

Video is a powerful tool for boosting conversions. It’s a far more engaging media format than text, audio, or still images.

It’ll shock absolutely no one that some of today’s best digital marketers rely almost exclusively on video to drive conversions.

But how do you properly present a video on a website? More specifically, on a WordPress website?

Embedding a YouTube video is always an option. The most popular option, YouTube videos can be placed within your WordPress website for free. However, whether YouTube embeds the best option for you, is an entirely different question.

If your website focuses on professional services or B2B solutions, a specialized video hosting service with analytics and powerful customization features may offer better results than a free option like YouTube.

Video content takes up a great deal of space and bandwidth, which means misconfigured video players drag down website performance and hurt conversions. Most professional marketers choose to embed videos they’ve hosted through a separate professional video hosting platform.

Most notable video hosting platforms offer extensive integrations with WordPress. Unlike with YouTube embeds, video hosting platforms enable you to untap your videos’ true conversion potential.

You can arrange for a form to popup on any given video, and stipulate its continued play time with the viewer filling it in.

That way, you know who exactly watched your video and can add him or her to your marketing funnel.

4. Integrate With Other Marketing Tools

Successful companies know that a great website is non-negotiable. Yet, it is just one (albeit central) tool in what is hopefully a well-oiled martech stack.

If you’re B2B, you’ll more than likely be leveraging a variety of other platforms; namely CRMs and various sales enablement software.

Your WordPress site has to be fully integrated with these complementary tools.

Luckily, almost all major CRMs integrate with WordPress.

How easy will it be for you to connect each platform to your site? Well, that will depend on the WordPress website builder of your choice. You can experience a number of native integrations or the integration process will typically entail a simple API token exchange. You can integrate live chat software for instant replies to your visitor’s queries.

If you build a WordPress website by yourself, integrating your marketing and sales tools will likely see you tinkering with code.

Final Thoughts

Opting for a WordPress-based website is, quite simply, the right choice. With a market share of more than one-third of the web, WordPress powers every conceivable type of websites; from niche ecommerce stores to media giants like The New York Times and the Walt Disney Company.

How long it’ll take you to build a website on WordPress, and how technically challenging it’ll prove to be will depend on how you approach the process.

Opting to build a WordPress website without a mediating platform is always a possibility. If that is your choice, it is imperative you can code.

Whichever way you choose, you’d be wise to implement a few or all of the best practices offered in this blog. Good luck!