3 Things To Avoid When Building A Website From Scratch

When you're building a website from scratch, there are many mistakes to me made. Let me go through three of the most important things you need to know to successfully build your website from scratch. I learned all of these lessons the hard way, in my past 24 months of creating WordPress sites for entrepreneurs all over the world. Building a website from scratch has been the vast majority of my projects, and I get many emails about this topic (which led to writing this post). Don't worry, I'm not going to lose myself in technical details. I try to keep things as simple as possible so that you can easily follow along and become more proficient in building a website from scratch. Let's dive right into it:

1. Not having a website strategy

Building a website from scratch can be very overwhelming, especially if you're building a website for your business. That's why having a website strategy is absolutely mandatory. This website strategy will help you decide in tricky situations, will help you chose the right WordPress theme and the right plugins, and will make many things easier. Creating this website strategy should be the first step; before you're creating a website from scratch you NEED to have your strategy in place. In this strategy, you should have the following items included:

• What's the main goal of your website?
• How do position the business in the market?
• Who's your ideal visitor?
• How will you convert your visitors into leads?
• How will you drive traffic to your website?

These are just a few points from a full-fledged website strategy, but they are important. At the end of this post I have a recommendation for you ;-)

2. Choosing the wrong web host

When you're building a website from scratch, one of the most important choices to make is your web hosting account. The web host has a mandatory influence on your website when it comes to three areas:

• The loading time of your website.
• The security of your website.
• The maintenance of your website.

There are managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine, which handle most of the WordPress maintenance for you. I hosted with them in the past and was pretty satisfied with their performance and maintenance. However, they lacked 24/7 support, which is mandatory in my eyes. That's why I now host my websites with Cloudways, who have a great customer service and performance. They don't update my WordPress site, but I can handle that myself ;-) You can identify the wrong web host by:

• Not having 24/7 support (click here if you need support)
• Having only shared web hosting
• Having bad reviews and a slow website

3. Not setting up funnels

The last mistake when building a website from scratch is to not set up funnels that systemize your business. There are several types of funnels you should have, two of the most important are lead-generation funnels and sales funnels. Lead generation funnels should be added right when you're building a website from scratch, as they help you turn your website traffic into email list subscribers or leads. Basically, funnels work like this:

1. You set up a landing page on your website that has a specific call-to-action that you want your visitors to execute.
2. You drive people to that landing page using free or paid traffic.
3. You tweak the landing page and optimize its conversion rate.

When building a website from scratch, you definitely need to think about funnels and how to best integrate them into your site. And the great thing is, you don't need to be a techy to build a funnel. You can use simple landing page themes and connect them with an email service provider, or a service like Clarity.fm. A sales funnel then takes this to the next level: You drive traffic to a series of pages that familiarize your visitors with your offers, e.g. by showing a video series. Or you can offer a low-price entry-level product and then upsell to your core offer. Funnels can be built to any extent, it's totally up to you.

Conclusion

So, when you're building a website from scratch, you now know which mistakes to avoid. There are many pitfalls in this process, which is why I created a training program that teaches you everything you need to know. It's called WP Mastery and includes video lessons that walk you through the entire process of building a website or optimizing an existing website. Click here to check it out!