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After the introduction of the internet, our lives became more easy and it also became easy for merchants to create online stores as well.

It’s known as e-commerce.

So if you want to start a new e-commerce or if you have already begun selling, and need more profits. Then no worries just create a business plan.

“Why Do I Need a Business Plan?”

Having a comprehensive business plan will definitely you to establish a clear roadmap for your business outset. You can access yourself and your progress, while you can identify all the requirements and resources that you need.

Finally, it will save you a lot of trouble, time, and money.

Get Started: 1-Page eCommerce Business Plan

Swiss business theorist by the name of Alexander Osterwalder created a tool called canvas for designing 1-Page eCommerce Business Plan. Well, it’s not the complete plan but it’s a good place to start.

Business Model Canvas Structure

Here we mention the different sections of the business model canvas:

• Key Partners: Who is necessary for your business to be successful?
• Key Activities: What does your business need to do or achieve to be successful?
• Key Resources: What can you use to benefit your business?
• Value Proposition: What is your unique selling point?
• Customer Relationship: What is important in your customer relationships?
• Channels: How do people hear about your business?
• Customer Segments: How do you differentiate between customers?
• Cost Structure: Where will the money go?
• Revenue Streams: Where does the money come from?

You can check a few examples from the internet.

How to Use the Business Model Canvas

Let us see how to use the canvas model.

You can use the answers of the following questions for filling the canvas.

1. What do you plan to do?
2. What needs are you satisfying?
3. What is your unique selling point?

Later throw in some keywords. Make sure that your model is flexible enough to adapt to new conditions.

After filling this, your initial model is complete. Use this canvas as a reference for your original or traditional business model.

The Traditional Business Plan

It’s time for some formal work. This might sound scary but this is quite easy. Do know that having business model help you get loans and will also give you an edge our your counterparts.

Now let us see about the six sections that you should include in your business plan.

Section 1. About Your Company

This is all about your company and what others need to know about your firm, ranging from missions to visions and other goals as well. Including a little bit of history about your company.

But do always follow a structured manner. Starting from why the customer should choose you over others?

Vision, mission and value proposition may sound similar but they are different.

Value Proposition: why the customer should choose you.

Mission Statement: why your business exists right now.

Vision Statement: what your business hopes to become in the future.

After adding these three, you can follow the following list.

• Is your company a sole proprietorship, LLC, or corporation?
• What date was your business established?
• What do you sell?
• What is your industry?
• What is your businesses history?
• What are your objectives – short and long-term?
• Who is your team?

And other business related data.

Section 2. The Market and Your Competition

This section is mostly about marketing. And your competition.

You can use the tools like PEST and SWOT for analysis.

PEST: Is used find the growth of the factors like political, economic, social, and technological factors.

While SWOT will help you in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of your business.

You can use the following data for SWOT.

• strengths – what is working for them?
• weaknesses – what isn’t working for them?
• opportunities – what are they ready to take advantage of?
• threats – what are they worried about?

You can find the templates for both the PEST and SWOT online.

Section 3. Your Marketing Plan

Let’s talk about customers.

It’s crucial that you have a plan for getting more customers for your site. You can do a little bit of research about this. The best way to get excellent data is to think like the customers or do a customer interview so that you can know and replicate their tastes in your site. So that more people will be attracted to your site.

You can use the SALES FUNNEL to achieve the same in a more efficient and easier way.

Section 4. Your Business Operations

In this section, you should be able to create a plan that will reflect all your operations from manufacturing to the production. Including your contingency plan and production process.

For more reference, you can take a look at this questions.

• How long it will take to produce a specified number of units of product.
• What has been done to unify customer feedback into the production of your product or service?
• What strategy do you have in place to handle a major increase in demand for your product or service?

Later include the following details as well.

• Suppliers: the people or businesses, who will be providing the materials you won’t be making yourself.
• Facilities: where you’ll place your inventory or offices.
• Personnel: your staff and their duties.
• Equipment: the tools and technology you need to run your business.
• Fulfillment: the delivery method you’ll be using to get orders fulfilled.
• Inventory: how much inventory you’ll keep on hand or stored with a third-party and how you’ll track it.
• Customer Support: how will customer support requests and complaints and refunds be tracked and integrated?

Section 5. Business Finances

This section is all about creating a budget for your business. And plan that will get you profit.

Income Statement: it will show you your expenses, profits, and losses including your income.

Balance Sheet: all of your assets, net worth and liabilities are shown in this sheet.

Cash Flow Statement: it’s the same as income statement but the major difference is that it takes into account the actual date that money comes in and goes out.

Section 6. Measuring Your Success

Finally, we are at the last stage of this plan. Sometimes our plans fall apart or our goals may not seem realistic enough. But must include these two things into your plan.

1. You will stay on target and be able to celebrate your smaller victories.
2. You will be able to respond quickly when you fall behind schedule.

When you feel like you are falling behind then revise your plans once again. If necessary start from the scratch.

That’s how you design a business plan for e-commerce 🙂

Internet users are increasing every day. So is the potential for digital marketing. If you looking to start a new business look nowhere because the internet is your answer. With UK’s e-commerce to rising 17% from the last year and 8% of Europe’s revenue is coming from online retail it’s a no-brainer that starting an e-commerce business is profitable. What’s great is that if you already own an e-commerce website follow these  7 ways or strategies that will help you step up your game ASAP.

1. Rethink Your E-Commerce Platform

Does your platform have what it takes? Well, the platforms like Shopify or Magento maybe good live with but what really matters is what’s inside?

For instance, Manchester-based specialty auto part merchant Awesome GTI managed to increase its revenue by 96% by migrating from Magento to BigCommerce, just like that. So it’s about to choose the right platform that will cater all your needs.

2. Emphasize User-Generated Content

Who wouldn’t want a 5 star rated product? User reviews, photos, and their thoughts about the product published on the website will have a great effect as such it will increase users trust towards your store. And there are a lot of companies doing the same and earning a ton of cash.

3. Rework Your Product Descriptions

A detailed a SEO friendly description of a product is very essential. Not only does it act as advertisement to your product but with enough keywords you can actually get more traffic.

Make sure that your descriptions are not too big but more creative.

4. Integrate Video On-Site

Do you know what is better than product description? It’s video about the product. More and more people are using the internet every day to do all sorts of things, in which watching videos is also a part. So if you are able to integrate video about your products or the demo videos provided or created by the brands themselves, use those to your advantage and gain more sales.

5. Fine-Tune Your Site’s Design Elements

Now let’s take about your website. If you think your website is a little bit dull in any aspect don’t hold back use all your skills and tools necessary, to make the best-looking website. Starting from color schemes, layouts and even themes. Choose those wisely. You can use page builder to see these changes in real time.

6. Make Sure You’re Mobile-Friendly

I was emphasizing that new people are coming to the internet every day since the beginning of this article. The fun fact is that most of them are smartphone users. Normally pc oriented websites are not meant for smartphones and they tend to look ugly when we open them(websites) so make sure that your website is mobile friendly before it’s too late. You can use Google’s tool for the same.

7. Smarten Up Your Site Architecture

At last, it’s time for the UX. your UX design will decide your SEO score. For example, if you have categorized your products and have better keywords your website might get a much better score than before. So consider this and above all points. Sprinkle in some keywords where possible, create a great UX and you are all set.

In conclusion, if you follow above tips and make changes you will see more traffic than before, and it all boils down to the proper implementation. So all the best 🙂

First things first, we are not talking about bounce rates of balls, we are talking about bounce rates of a website.

It’s pretty similar to window shopping that we all are very fond of. When a new customer visits a website for the first time looking for something he or she wants, But most of the times they won’t find what they are looking for and will close the website.

Don’t get me wrong here as the product/info they want is available on the website but the problem is that they weren’t able to navigate through the website to find what they want. Of course, the companies will lose money because of this. This happens very often. In an analysis by KissMetrics, it’s shown that the average bounce rate for a website is 40.5% and most of them are new visitors.

So if you own a website, we are pretty sure that you have experienced the same. Don’t worry here are five easy ways to decrease your bounce rate.

1. Focus on Attracting the Right Audience

Keywords are very important in fact they will decide whether you are going to get any search in the first place. Given their importance people started to mess with keywords to optimize their website and that really affects others. For example, when you search for the word ‘one’ (as in numbers) you will get all sorts of musicals, blogs, etc., instead of the matter, you are looking for!

Basically, all you have to do is optimize the correct keyword that directly represents your business, so that people will know and find what they are looking for and will stop bouncing. (Most them at least)

2. Reconsider Your Site Navigation

We all know bounces will happen when people couldn’t find or don’t know how to get to the content. Yes, Even if you have the best content in the entire website, your bounce rate will increase, if your website lacks proper navigation. It should be proper, simple, and appealing to the eye.

3. Show Targeted Content to First Time Visitors

First time visitors tend to bounce more than the regular ones. It may be due to the fact that they don’t know what to do when entering your site. Show some demos or tutorials for them to understand First-time about your site and try to great them every time.

4. Use Content Recommendations to Increase Engagement

We encounter content recommendations most of the time in the form of advertisements and other dialogues and for a good reason too. These recommendations help the companies to make more money by making people go through these recommendations and customers also enjoy these types of benefits.

5. Be Mobile-Friendly

Lastly, be mobile friendly. In this modern era where more than 2 billion+ smartphones were being used, being a mobile-friendly website is a must. If your site is not optimized for mobile then your bounce rates will increase drastically. For instance, there are over a billion websites which are not optimized for smartphones and they suffer a lot of bounce rates.

Emails are awesome, you can send as many to as many, the only thing you need is the email id of recipients.

That sounds great but if you were to send an email to a person who is not interested in your business or platform may backfire at you. Since all customers are not the same so does their needs and all you have to do is just segment your emails and recipients.

If you do this right, chances are that your traffic will increase significantly. All takes is just a personalized email.

These are five tips that will help you to achieve segmentation.

1. New Subscribers

New subscribers are your new potential loyal customers. So segment them in the new segment. Create a beautiful welcome email which is filled with politeness and respect towards your new customers.

You can also showcase your best work in the email so that it will be more pleasing.

2. Ask For Their Preference

If you can’t know what they want? How about asking them their own preferences! Sounds legit right. I mean this is the best way. By doing these we won’t be annoying them but instead, we are informing them.

3. Demographics

It’s another great way of segmentation but not as great as asking customers. But still, we can group them based on their region, gender, and age. Which might be 80% accurate? This way it will also save you some time, where spend time collecting the customer’s preferences.

4. Look At Purchasing Behavior

It’s a classical way of segmentation that the big shots like Amazon have implemented successfully. It’s similar to the demographics but here you will have more data to work on.

It will definitely help you in your future sales.

5. Pay Attention To Inactivity And Open Rates

This all may seem like stalking to you, but still, if you have to do something you must do it. By finding the customers who are not spending enough time or buying anything. You can send them emails by including some special offers or coupons.

You can also find other people who are regularly buying stuff from you and you can give them a special offer or membership etc.

Lastly, with the help of emails, you can actually connect with more people and expand your business. If implemented correctly.

Need more SEO? Then all you need to do is modify your web page’s content and we are done.

Well not completely yet!

Read to the end and you will eventually find out more.

Here’s a question that can answer most of your queries.

What Needs To Go On The Web Page, In What Order, With What Placement?

Consider that we are currently going to rank “faster home WiFi” so that we will get better placement in Google search and increase our revenue.

But you should ask yourself these questions first.

A. What is the searcher, in this case, trying to accomplish?

When they enter “faster home Wi-Fi,” what’ are they looking for?

B. Are there multiple intents behind this query, and which ones are most popular?

If there are any intents ranking them is very important.

C. What’s the business goal of ranking? What are we trying to accomplish?

Having a better rank so that people will notice us, and possibly will visit our website increasing our revenue.

If we were to simulate the answers, we could guess that people need more WiFi speed than they already have.

They are trying to know whether they need to get a new connection or get a new isp or new hardware. These can be viewed as intents.

It’s no secret that most of the websites make their revenue through the affiliate for which they need more people and a better SEO rank will help us achieve the same goal.

Now We Can Design A Content Flow.

From the above data, you might have any idea on how and where things should go or what your website should do?

Simply put you should create a good flow. And that’s all that matters.

5 Big Goals That Matter.

The goals that matter here and the ones that you should be optimizing for, when you’re thinking about the design of this flow are:

1. How do I solve the searcher’s task quickly and enjoyable?

Having a better UI will definitely help you in this case. You can create some good visible effects for attracting them. But the most important part is the content.

Try to show all the options available for the user in our case how to increase the WiFi speed. So that all their intents will be met.

2. Serve these multiple intents in the order of demand.

As mentioned above by giving multiple choices to the visitors i.e catering to different intents is essential.

3. Optimize for the business goal without sacrificing one and two.

Don’t sacrifice your goals for some other, you can still integrate both them, for example, creating a website for both searchers and your own business goals. But it may affect your SEO slightly. But it’s ideal.

4. If possible, try to claim the featured snippet and the visual image that go up there.

Try to insert a good looking picture at the header and combined with a great content will capture the perfect snippets giving you an edge over other websites.

5. Limit our bounce back to the SERP as much as possible.

Don’t exaggerate your design elements to much. Make it simple that people won’t get annoyed and get their problems solved. Try to have a better control over the website by constantly updating or optimizing it. By doing this your site’s bounce rate will not increase.

Of course, it’s not limited to just the design elements you must also look after the content as well.

AI, Machine Learning, Internet of Things are the most heard buzzwords of the recent technological world, with more and more devices/systems adapting these resulting in rapid development in technology as well as bringing changes to the world. The growth is so rapid that more devices and technologies are popping out everyday than the previous day.

But when it comes to website editing and CMS WordPress is also picking it’s pace and announced a new update WordPress 5.0, which is running a little late, but most people and developers are eager to get their hands on it as soon as possible.

A staggering 75 million websites use WordPress globally, including numerous companies in sectors ranging from e-commerce to banking. Which is not 100% of all the websites present on the internet? WordPress faces stiff competition from the likes of WIX and Squarespace in the domain of micro-business and Blogging and also faces competition from Silverstripe and Drupal in the domain of SME and enterprise side.

Customers are humans and humans can hardly concentrate on a given task for 8 seconds, meaning that customer are pretty impatient and the delay of 5.0 can affect the WordPress, since it may not be able to provide all the required plugins whereas others do. Here the customers being both brands and web surfers it will reduce the efficiency and the traffic generated by a WordPress website resulting in bad customer/user experience.

Bad User Experience

As mentioned earlier people tend to dislike things when they couldn’t find what they are looking for, the bad layout also affects your traffic.

In a Google survey, 52% of people stopped using or visiting a company with a bad mobile experience.

So to ensure that your users won’t feel irritated it’s better to give them what they want without any restrictions and simplified accessibility, usability and proper interaction with the users will also definitely help towards your goal of keeping more engaged with your site at any given time.

So maybe this new update 5.0 will help companies to get more people and will also resolve the problems of moderation, but chances are that it may have the same fate as the TSB, which failed drastically in an overhaul. Creating huge losses for all the stakeholders!

And now its homepage is more chaotic than ever before too many bugs and IT problems.

We all know WordPress as a CMS but WP also offers other services like WooCommerce, an open source WordPress-based e-commerce platform, which powers more than 30% of all online stores.

Since it’s operated by WordPress, you can get access to a wide variety of themes, plugins and much more. By using WooCommerce, you can sell any product without paying any transaction fee to the WP and WooCommerce also calculates all the taxes that are required to pay by the customer. While you can pretty much change or customize everything in WooCommerce.

WooCommerce also has the ability to create new accounts for customers or customers can use guest login, tracking orders, keeping track of your inventory, stocks, check out details, notifications, emails etc., it has also the capability of accepting all types of payments from different types of payment gateways.

WooCommerce recommends SiteGround, where the baseline StartUp plan gets you 10GB of web space, unlimited email accounts and databases, a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and data centers on three continents. At a reasonable price of £2.75 ($3.85) a month.

On top of that, you have the complete control over customization.

Getting Started

Now that we know what WooCommerce (WC) is let us see, how to set up one. Obviously you need to create a new WordPress account or use the existing one. Later WooCommerce asks you to fill and opt all types of formal services that you need, including the method of download.

You can also get a hosted WooCommerce account with pre-installed WooCommerce and hosting. You can refer to SiteGround’s WooCommerce plan for further details.

Creating Your Store

WooCommerce is based on WordPress, so when you first login into the WooCommerce account, you will be given same instructions, demos similar to WordPress later you will be given a plain theme, which can be easily changed.

Go to your WordPress dashboard, which will contain WooCommerce menu with the setup wizard.

Wizard is used to set up the WooCommerce, and you will be required to fill all the details like your currency, types of payment gateways that you will accept and some other formal details including shipping and tax rules and much more.

For automatic tax calculation and services, you need to download the specified plugins by WooCommerce.

It’s Time to Design Your Store.

You can customize the theme, page layouts etc., with the help WooCommerce. You can add some CSS to your site if you want.

By using an import tool you can import product catalogs from other platforms in the form of source code in CSV format, up to 128 MB. Of course, you can physically edit or add new products to your store with ease, since it’s done by WordPress editor. You can also add all sorts of media to your store. You can also throw in some YouTube links as well.

WooCommerce may not offer as many features as BigCommerce, but still, it’s more efficient for small stores and for basic stores.

Setting shipping requires a lot of work. It totally depends on which service you want to choose, or which services that is available in your regions.

WooCommerce combined with WordPress is pretty easy to do, but beginners might find it a little bit hard.

Running Your Business

Now that we have created a store, let’s see how to maintain it. WooCommerce is pretty capable and is adaptable to all sorts of situations. It keeps track of your inventory, if items are out of stock then it will hide those items. Give notifications about the stock. You can also add a new admin or multiple admins, with a different scope of control.

Since you already have a WordPress account, you can use that to blog and advertise your store.

Add-ons are not always free in WooCommerce, but you can use these to notify your customers, about new stock via SMS or you can also add a live chat to your store.

Support is not that great. It may take a while before your issue is resolved.

In conclusion, WooCommerce is a smart choice for experienced users while novices may find it a little bit hard to use WooCommerce.

Pop-ups, overlays, modal, interstitials are sometimes useful and annoying most of the times.

But have ever wondered how they may affect your SEO, and if they did, is it good or is it, bad?

If you don’t know the answer common let’s explore it.

Let’s look into what pop-ups, overlays, modal, interstitials are?

They are basically the part of UX.

Pop-ups

There are a variety of pop-ups like the dialog box or the new window that opens up when you click randomly on the webpage. Well, it may help you to generate ad revenue but according to Google, it’s not really a good thing. Meaning bad SEO score in fact many browsers will block this.

Overlays

These are kind of similar to the pop-ups, but they will not cause as much trouble as the pop-ups do, according to Google anyway. Layouts those messages that appear randomly in front of your screen prompting you to sign up for a newsletter and some other similar messages. These cause much more trouble in the mobiles than in pc. Which, we will explore in a few minutes.

Modals

Let’s just say these are boxes in a webpage where you can edit stuff. Where you actually interact with the background data rather than say a pop-up or a layout. For instance, editing a image online. Unless they spammed or advertising unnecessarily, they won’t cause much trouble.

Interstitials

You can compare this to the unskippable ads that you see at the beginning of the video in Youtube. Which people don’t really like. Yeah, there the website likes Forbes that does the same.

What Are The Factors That Matter For SEO?

Now let’s take a look at factors affecting SEO.

A) Timing

Time is a really important factor. Sometimes you can see the layouts or pop-ups at the very beginning, or in the middle or in between 80% to 100% mark.

Each of this appearance will be treated differently. And based on the type of content shown and the amount time shown are also important.

If the appeared content is taking even a little bit of time, it will affect your SEO.

The smaller the duration the better your SEO score will be.

B) Interaction

Google has updated its mobile guidelines recently. Based on the interaction of the element with content like the duration, whether it’s affecting the readability or is it, not easy to terminate will be the deciding factors. Later the owners will be penalized by Google.

C) Content

Sometimes we can observe that few websites will show us a message asking for the permission to use cookies, or taking our consent. These types of messages are not affected by Google’s guidelines whereas the ads, on the other hand, treated differently and harshly if they don’t obey the rules.

D) Conditions

Some people knowingly or unknowingly will create few conditions that might fly under the Google’s radar but not anymore. Make a wrong move, well you will be penalized. Sometimes websites and systems are not optimized enough to deal with it since it’s still considered as UX.

E) Engagement Impact

It’s no secret that Google monitors the activity of every website that has been visited via Google. So whenever your bounce rates increase Google will deem your UX as poor, which may affect your SEO.

Best Practices

After reading all the data provided above, it’s pretty obvious that having bad elements in your UX will definitely hurt your SEO.

So try not including harmful elements in your UX.

Also know the following information about your website that will help you, while designing UX

• Bounce rate
• Browse rate
• Return visitor rates
• Time on site after the element appears

Finally, mobile browsing is becoming a hot topic and Google is really working hard towards increasing mobile experience. So it’s better to sacrifice some ads rather than getting completely banned from the internet (worst case) and mobile users are increasing every day so keep that in mind.

Technological developments made our life easier. So does online shopping. It’s estimated that the current value of e-commerce is 2.290 trillion dollars as of 2018 and reports suggest that it may well 4.4 trillion dollars by 2021.

In other words, it’s the best time to start an online e-Commerce store. And this festive season can be great for e-commerce. If you already have an e-commerce store, where you will sell products online, follow these steps to make a fortune!

1. Choose Your Platform Wisely

Look no further than WooCommerce. It powerful, open source, and has a large community that will support you. As well as a ton of extensions and add-ons.

2. Choose Managed Hosting

Managing an online store is no easy feat. It requires a lot of skill. During the festivals, the traffic will be quadruple meaning you need to pay attention to the store 24×7. While at some stores shopkeepers have no idea how to deal with the server. It may turn into a security threat to your online store. So use managed cloud hosting where all these problems are taken care off.

3. Fast Speed to Ensure Maximum Sales

Time is money! Every second counts. It’s proven that 40% of visitors give up on products when the product takes 2-3 more seconds to load. So better to be safe than sorry. Try using a CDN to avoid these types of problems.

4. Responsive Design

Make sure that your web store is compatible/responsive in smartphones. There is a been steep rise in smartphone usage and people started to use phones to shop. So you don’t want to be left out, from the smartphone users. Use mobile smartphone first strategy for better results.

5. Change Your Showcase

Changing your storefronts, banners, and some colors will definitely have effects on people, in a good way. By doing your website will seem to be more active or ’alive’, while expressing your joy and promoting your store at the same time.

6. Impressive (read, usable) Design and Layout

Getting lost certainly sucks, no matter where you are! In other words, if your store’s navigation lacks, you can most definitely see a rise in bounce rate rather than sales. Investing in a good theme and layout will help you to get more sales.

7. Create a Page with Gift Ideas

Who wouldn’t like a gift during the festival season! People tend to buy a lot during festival sales in a limited time period. So if you toss in a gift or a great offer it will motivate your visitors and they might end up buying even more.

At least create a Thanksgiving page so that, they will come to your site once again.

8. Offer Free Shipping

Sometimes the price of shipping will be more than the product itself. So offering free shipping will have the same effect as giving gifts.

9. Use Secure Payment Gateways

Hackers are everywhere these days. So having a secure payment gateway is a must. Or else you might end up bankrupt. So try to invest in payment gateways or else you can also get some free plugins from WP library.

10. Simplify Purchase Processes

Who likes filling a dozen checks for buying a pen? It’s pretty annoying. So you must change your UX and create a new checkout method which uses the least amount of checks.

Doing this will definitely increase your traffic.

11. Clear Return Policies

Companies with clear return policies will have more customers. Why? You ask. It’s a no-brainer because people can return the stuff that doesn’t fit or something they want with way more little doubt. So that they will get some better things than before and will feel happy about that.

12. Plan Your Promotions Wisely

Your promotions not working? No problem just swaps it with a new one and problem. But do a little research, and try to show ads that people like.

13. Choose the Right Keywords

Be wary of the keywords that you are using. Don’t go overboard with keywords as well. Try to keep them clean. Or else you might attract some users that may just increase your rate.

14. Perfect Your Sales Pitch

Get the complete details of the products you are selling with a few great pictures to showcase your products in a way that appeals to the consumers. When people know about the product they are about to buy, they will feel comfortable enough to buy from your online store.

15. Product Presentation Videos

Apart from showing pictures, try to create and display a short video or presentation about the product so that people can understand the product much better. Which might increase the chance of them buying the product?

16. Call to Action Is Important

CTA is pretty important. CTA is the set of buttons such as Complementary Products and Products Viewed or Purchased by Other Visitors. If it’s Halloween season try changing these buttons to some sort monsters to attract more attention.

17. Involve Your Customers

Try asking your customer to join in your social media campaigns, so that you can involve them, by which they might become your friends, later into your loyal customers. This will also help your social media reach.

18. Keep in Touch via Email

Get your customers email. Start sending your offers, coupons, product catalogs and much more to your customers. Since email is great for keeping in touch with your customers.

Finally, it all boils down to your own ideas and implementations. The points are mere suggestions but you might and will much better if you work hard 🙂

In today’s digital era there are billions of devices accessing the internet every hour. There are also millions of malware spreading and affecting thousands of computers every day. Which are not noticeable unless you have good protection?

The most common of these occurrences is hacking. And mostly the poorly maintained websites will get affected. The government no exception for it either.

You might wonder who does hacking? It is done by a group or a single person called hacker, who will exploit all your vulnerable points in the website. Steal data in worst will blackmail you, which will not end in a good way.

WordPress is the largest web builders and website hosters are being hacked every day and most of them will be hacked due to the mistakes of the Admins.

If a device is connected to the internet no matter it’s functionality it can be hacked! Which will eventually lead to a digital disaster?

But in this article, we will be focusing on the WordPress, and how to protect your WordPress website.

Firstly, WordPress is a PHP script that communicates directly with the MySQL database. It means whenever you do a query, it has to communicate with the MYSQL database, which is pretty vulnerable.

So the question arises.

How Do You Secure Your WordPress Website?

It’s not just hacking that makes a website but there are other methods like spamming the chat or comment section.

A website is required for a business to thrive online. WordPress is the best CMS system most widely used, making it a target for all the hackers.

WordPress is pretty impressive itself, it gets new updates constantly increasing its features and security and much more. But it all falls on the users. If they use them properly they will safe or else..!

What Are These Best WordPress Security Best Practices Anyway?

Now the good stuff, let’s see how you should safeguard your website.

1. It Starts With Webhost

It is the first step and the biggest mistake a user could ever do!

Web hosting is pretty important. Of course, there are a ton of companies that will host your website. But are they secure enough? Web hosting same as buying a car but you have to choose correctly, that which car would suit you better and what is warranty provided by the company. It’s pretty nerve-wracking.

So just try to stick with WordPress hosting.

2. Initial Installation

During the installation, the WordPress will be sending all the data to MYSQL server in the form of PHP. For which you have to create a username and password.

Create a password as complex as you can since all the data will be stored in an unknown location in a server that you may never see.

3. Your Admin Username is Important

As a default, the username for admin will be “admin” which can be changed. In fact, changing it as soon as possible would be great.

Some may argue that people will use their company name to change their username which is like giving a free hint to the hacker who might hold a grudge against you.

But if you can create a username that’s less revealing then it won’t be a problem.

4. Email And Mail Provider

Usually, when we forget a password we can recover our password by using the recovery mail.

In other words, if your mail provider is not secure enough, it’s most likely that your account will be hacked.

Some of web hosting companies will provide their mail services which reasonably secure.

You can also a secretive mail that you never gave to anyone for login recovery.

5. Shield from Spammers

Spammers usually use bots to spam your comment section.

Soon or later your website will be filled with all types of malware, trojans. After some time your website may collapse due to excess load.

You can limit your comments section for the verified user like authenticating them using their emails or you can completely block them for few articles that are getting spammed regularly.

You can also use captcha for the bot verification and it works fine.

6. Secure your Admin Page

These are the four default roles which have admin access by default.

1. The Administration
2. The Author
3. The Contributor
4. Subscriber

The roles are self-explanatory. You have to lock the admin access for others except for the admin.

The wp-admin page is the most attacked part of the website, so if we have more admins it would definitely increase your vulnerability.

Of course, you can use Front End User Post plugin for allowing guest blogging.

7. Regular Plugin And Website Maintenance

Updating and maintaining your plugins is important, always lookout for updates.

Turn off the plugins that you are not using or delete some plugins if you don’t want to use them at all.

8. Always Back Up

Back up is always a good option. There are tons of free to premium plugins in WordPress, Which are awesome?

If you can afford to have a physical encrypted backup then go for it. It will help if you decide to clean your server or in the worst case, if your server is hacked.

9. Use Security Plugins

Now to secure your website, you can use the plugins in the WP, in fact, you should only use them.

Try to invest in a premium security plugins, which will have more protection than the normal one.

Please don’t download plugins from the third party. They may give away premium WP plugins for free but they might bundle in some malware which will later turn into a disaster.

10. Always Do External Analysis

Finally get a WordPress expert to check your website. It may cost you but it’s worth it all. You can also get your analysis through other big WordPress website design organizations you may get a discount.

How To Regain Your Hacked WordPress Website

Let’s imagine that despite your best efforts you got hacked. So how to get back, your hacked wordpress website. Let us see.

Firstly you will be removed from the search engines so that you won’t infect or cause trouble to others. Yes, you will also lose all your SEO score. In other words, your site is dead!

If you still have the access to the PHP my admin page along with a backup copy, you can get the problem resolved by just restoring your site.

But in worst if you don’t have any access and knowledge about PHP then give up and uninstall the old hacked WordPress and get a new one.

1. Backup Database

If you still have the access to your admin page then it’s time to back up. But before you do clean your website first, remove the changed variables and newly installed waste by hackers.

After securing your domain, than just restore your website from online backup or a physical backup.

2. Export Your Valuables

Now it’s time for the aftermath. You can restore some data from the backup but still, the data like comments and few articles may not be available.

Don’t worries WordPress can help you at this point. All you have to do is just navigate through the admin settings to find the “export” button and click on it.

After some basic steps, you are ready to go online. But it’s better to call your host, to check the situation there and have some WordPress developer experts, to look at your website and roll it online later.

Of course, you should take actions, so that your website won’t get hacked.