If you are taking a lean approach to launching a business or are strapped for resources, you can get a basic WordPress website up and running in as little as a day. All you need to do is download WordPress, set up your domain name, and choose a hosting provider. If you are trying to move quickly and conserve resources, you can start with a free WordPress.com plan and choose one of their free themes. Taking a lean approach to launching your business through WordPress can help you to establish proof of concept without expending too much time or money on development costs.

However, simply because you can get your website off the ground with little startup costs does not mean that this initial setup is sufficient to help you to take your business through the several stages of venture development. In order to ensure that your site evolves and progresses with your business, it is important to continue advancing the visual appeal, content quality, and site features and capabilities. Here are a few ways that you can incrementally work to level up your WordPress site after taking a lean approach to launch.

Enhance Your Site’s Visual Appeal

‍Upgrading from a free theme to a premium theme can really help you to differentiate your site from competitor sites. Some of the premium WordPress themes are superior to the free themes in that they come with enhanced tech support, help you to optimize SEO, are often updated more regularly, and have better responsiveness. In addition to choosing an engaging premium theme, you should work to incorporate professional imagery into your site. It is important that the images are edited, optimized, and sized appropriately, as not to slow down the speed of your site.

Organize Your Content‍

After persisting for several months or years, WordPress sites can quickly appear cluttered if the content is not managed properly. In order to take your site to the next level, it is important to put a rigid content library in place both to make it easy to organize new content on the back-end and to make it easy for users to find the content they are looking for. When publishing a new piece, linking to historical articles or videos that you’ve published previously can be a great way to group related content and help draw users to additional content that they might have otherwise missed. If users join the community several months or years after the site’s launch, linking to historical content and providing a clear organizational structure to manage content libraries can give latecomers the opportunity they deserve to get to know the brand’s history.

Social Sharing Capabilities

‍As your site visitors become increasingly loyal to the brand and feel personally connected to the company’s mission and content, they may be eager to share the site’s content with their friends and family members. In order to allow them to easily share content as they wish, it is important to make sure your WordPress site is equipped with social sharing capabilities so that users can easily share content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Beyond ensuring that your site is set up for sufficient social sharing, it is important to make sure that you work towards clear calls to action for the user so that individuals know both how to advance from one page to another during their time on the site and what you’d like them to do after they get to the bottom of a webpage or piece of content. You should set up the site such that the content is well organized and easy to follow, yet the user journey is fluid enough for them to navigate on their own to give them the freedom to explore their individual interests within the site’s content library.

Vary Types of Published Content

‍In order to keep your site visitors consistently engaged with the brand and always wanting more, it is important to vary the types of content that you release on your WordPress site. You might consider including a combination of longer articles that you push out less frequently, shorter news pieces that are published in alignment with reporting cycles, and videos. Videos can be a great way to both quickly introduce new site visitors to the brand and what they can expect from being a part of the community, and to provide content through an alternative medium to keep users on the site longer than they otherwise would have stayed if all content were to be in text form.

Increase Transparency

‍When followers are consistently engaging with a brand through reading blog posts and watching the newly published content each day, it makes them feel very loyal and increasingly curious to know more about the individuals behind the content they’ve grown to love. In order to build trust between individuals on your team and your site visitors, it is essential to build an engaging about us page, providing some background on the company’s team members. This gives readers exposure to the writers and creators behind the content. When building out the page, you might feature photos and bios of the individual team members and content creators and possibly even links to their individual social media pages. At a more macro level, you can leverage this portion of your site to share the story behind how the brand came to be and how the company has evolved over time. This level of detail can make it easy for site visitors to join late in the game, providing them insight into exactly who you are and what they can expect from reading your blog.

While you can quickly launch a basic site through using a free WordPress template, it is essential to continuously invest in the development of your site to ensure that it continues to grow with your business. Maintaining the reliability, content quality, and visual appeal of your site will keep repeated site visitors engaged and help to draw new users to your site.