Home pages for the company - made by yourself or by a professional?

Few people dig out the yellow pages anymore when looking for services or products. Almost everyone turns to Google. If at this point your company is not found on the first page of the search engine or there is no home page, you are out of the competition.

If you want to stay competitive and grow your business in the long term, the company must have an efficient and professional website.

Since you are thinking about making a website, you probably already know all this.

At this point, you may be wondering whether to make the website yourself or leave it to a professional. Another question is what will all this cost.

In short, you can make your own home pages cheaply. However, you don't have to spend tens of thousands of euros on a website made by a professional, because there are also inexpensive solutions on the market. Our principle at Growly is that everyone, even small businesses, should have the opportunity to get websites that help increase sales and business quickly and in the long term.

Is it worth outsourcing the company website or doing it yourself?

In the endgame, the choice between making the home pages yourself and outsourcing is a question of results. The question is, how well does a self-made homepage produce results?

Often a home page put together with effort does not achieve the desired results when it is published. The entrepreneur has to redo the website with a professional, which takes unnecessary time and costs money in terms of lost sales due to a bad website.

In addition, an entrepreneur who builds a website himself may run into problems that stall the entire project and may eventually require the help of an expert to solve it.

In addition to time and money, the entrepreneur saves nerves when the work is left to professionals.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule: if the purpose of the home page is only to act as a digital business card, and the entrepreneur is not interested, for example, in whether it brings more sales and contacts to the company, you can make the page yourself without any worries.

Building a website that serves business goals involves a lot more information and work than it seems on the surface. Success requires in-depth technical know-how as well as an understanding of marketing and the customer.

If the entrepreneur plans to advertise a self-made and poorly converting website in search engines or social media, the project will be even more expensive. When the homepage doesn't know how to convince the company's offer from the start and convert visitors into customers, not even a large amount of traffic will bring about a change.

Websites made by a professional are financially beneficial

Inefficient homepages waste time and money when a potential customer who has already visited them ends up abandoning the site and buying from a competitor.

The company's homepage should tell why the customer should buy from you. Well-executed websites convert, i.e. sell effectively, because they are designed with customer experience in mind and to serve business goals.

An expert specializing in conversions has the know-how to build homepages that distinguish the company from competitors and place the product or service in such a light that makes the visitor interested and turns the potential into sales.

In practice, conversion means that the visitor takes the action the entrepreneur wants on the homepage, such as a purchase or filling out a form.

If the homepage has a hundred visitors a day, and no one buys, the sales and conversion rate is exactly zero. If one out of a hundred becomes a customer, the conversion rate is 1%.

The goal of the homepage is to generate maximum conversion, i.e. to generate as many sales as possible, and this is what a professional can do.

If, thanks to the new homepage, two visitors make a purchase instead of one, the conversion rate is 2%. In this case, the turnover coming through the website has doubled.

A good website conversion rate is at least 2-5 percent, but the percentage of self-made sites is often even lower, because not all factors influencing conversion and sales have been taken into account. As a rule, it is much faster and more likely to achieve a higher conversion rate with the help of an experienced professional.

However, if you make the company website yourself, at least note this:

Making websites always starts with a goal that you want the customer to do. This goal will determine the entire project. Everything that comes to the pages should be thought through, whether doing it serves the goal and the customer.

Your goal can be, for example, calling a customer, leaving a request for a quote, making an appointment, ordering a newsletter, downloading an e-book or getting to know the product and later making a purchase in the store.

When you know exactly what you want to achieve, you can ask and urge the customer to act in the way you want, making it more likely that the customer will act as well. When you have also built the homepage according to the goal, everything on the homepage will point to this, and the customer is even more likely to take the call to action.

Of course, other things must also be in order, such as the site's speed and user experience. It must be easy to navigate and the pages must have content that is relevant and beneficial to the customer.

When the basics are in order and you have first done the necessary work for the company's homepage, the homepage will do the work for your company. On the other hand, if you skip steps or build your website with a completely dumb feel or around your own interests and not your client's, the implementation cannot sell effectively.

So you can build effective websites yourself cheaply, if you have the time and interest in the subject, and you can follow the best practices in the industry.

There are many guides and instructions for this online. However, it is significantly easier to outsource the work and immediately get a home page for the company that will surely sell.

WordPress: the right platform for company websites

By far the best platform for a company website is WordPress. It is a cost-effective, flexible and reliable content publishing platform.

More than 60 percent of all websites in the world are built specifically on the WordPress publishing system.

If or when your company's goals or operations change, the WordPress homepage will scale with it. Other platforms are not as agile, and because of the wrong choice, you may have to build a whole new homepage in the face of change.

At this point, you should consider two different WordPress.

WordPress.com is very limited and therefore cannot be recommended for company websites. When we talk about WordPress, we mean self-hosted WordPress.org , which offers significantly more freedom and flexibility for business needs. In addition to the platform, you need a web host for the homepage, such as Zoner , and a possible maintenance service if you are not going to update the pages yourself in the future.

WordPress also has many other benefits that go beyond scalability. The platform is search engine friendly, and a wide range of plugins are available to create a custom homepage completely without coding. If necessary, you can easily add an online store to the homepage.

In other words, you have full control over the layout and functionality, unlike many other platforms like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, etc.

Home pages must offer enough correct information

In order to make a sale through your website, the potential customer must understand your offering and the benefits and value associated with it.

If the message is unclear, the customer will feel the same about your company. And if the same things are presented better on the competitor's website, the customer will go there.

So, on the company's website, give the customer enough essential information to make and support a purchase decision, and make it as easy as possible to obtain the information. If the information is not easily and quickly available, but is, for example, hidden several clicks away, the customer will not find it.

Almost everyone wants fast and easy, so most visitors don't even try searching for information on the home page, but simply leave there.

When creating home pages, you should remember that the customer can arrive at any page via a search engine, so you should not leave important information only on the front page. The information the customer needs about the company, product and operations should be found all over the site, and for example on the own FAQ page.

The home page should also have a red thread that binds the separate pages into a coherent whole and guides the visitor to continue on the site.

If customers can't seem to understand the value of your product or service from your current homepage, the first step is to look at your page structure and content.

If these seem to be in order, you can think about whether the brand is in order. A carefully and correctly designed brand stands out from competitors, inspires trust and creates images that the company wants to convey to target groups. When working on a brand, it is often profitable to cooperate with marketing professionals.

We are ready to help your company with brand design as well.

Homepages should be optimized for people and search engines

A beautiful and professional website is important. It is also possible to achieve it easily with ready-made themes of WordPress or, for example, Elementor.

However, there is more to a website that serves goals than a pretty exterior.

More important factors are fast loading speed, page structure, compatibility with different browsers, scalability for tablets and phones, and relevant content. If your website does not meet these basic requirements, it will have a problem appearing in search engine results, getting traffic and making sales.

The search engine optimization (SEO) of the homepage is of decisive importance in terms of the Google visibility and traffic of the homepage. Conversion optimization (CRO) or the lack of it, on the other hand, affects how much of the traffic and potential customers convert, i.e. turn into paying customers.

Optimizing for keywords alone is not enough to gain visibility in Google's organic, i.e. natural, search results, as the technical side must also be in order.

An entrepreneur can try to advertise the website aggressively if the visitors do not come from Google. However, this does not work if no conversion optimization has been done.

In such a situation, the homepage needs both optimization for people and search engines.

Search engine optimization (improving Google visibility) and conversion optimization (increasing the number of purchases, appointments, calls, etc. desired actions) therefore play a key role in terms of the effectiveness of websites.

Most self-made homepages fail precisely at these most critical points, because there are so many things involved that it is often not possible to internalize or learn everything at once during one project. Sure, you can still find information by googling for those who want to look for it, but it's much easier to get there when, once again, you leave it to an experienced party - like us.

If your company's homepage does not appear high in Google's search results, or if your business has not gained momentum online, our experts can help.

Remember information security

Completed company websites must be maintained and updated.

If you don't keep your site up to date, it will quickly become vulnerable to security threats and attacks. This puts both your customers and your business at risk.

In WordPress, you should turn on the automatic updates of the system and add-ons, so you don't have to constantly take care of it yourself.

Search engines and of course customers also prefer secure sites. Acquiring an SSL certificate from a web host increases the information security and reliability of the homepage. SSL protection creates an encrypted connection between the website and its user, which protects both data transmission and the user's personal data.

In addition to ensuring data security, the homepage should be regularly monitored and tested for possible bugs, i.e. errors, because sometimes, due to an update, a theme or an individual function may not work as intended. This, in turn, can lead to a decline in user experience and sales.

In addition, content such as texts and images should be updated every now and then, as this helps to improve rankings in Google search results. Regularly updated content also looks more reliable in the eyes of search engines and customers than outdated information or completely abandoned homepages.

In practice, websites are never completely finished, as they require constant maintenance, updating and development. These things can also be outsourced to a company in the field.

You should create a schedule for the website project

You should set goals for the website project and create a realistic schedule.

Without a plan, the completion of the website can take longer than expected.

Also take into account the time spent on search engine optimization and marketing of the new homepage, and of course conversion optimization if you don't do it when building the homepage. These are also things that are implemented continuously even after the page is published.

Also be prepared for the fact that setbacks will inevitably come up during the process, and that sometimes it may take more time to solve them. Sometimes an entrepreneur has to resort to the help of an expert in a situation when Google no longer helps.

Websites for companies - Better to do it with a professional

Succeeding online requires effective homepages that stand out from the competition.

You can definitely make a company website yourself. Since there are really many factors involved in the process, the entrepreneur must have a lot of passion to learn about it and do it.

When outsourced, the entrepreneur does not have to worry about anything. With the right provider, you can be sure that you will get a turnkey solution that works in all respects and that will produce results for the company in the form of sales right away.

At the same time, you save time and money in sales, which you would lose due to a poorly converting, i.e. selling, website.

With Growly, you get exactly the kind of homepage you want. In terms of appearance, functionality and content. With us, you can be sure that your company's website serves its goals from day one. You can focus on your business instead of wondering why the right things aren't happening.

For us, you can outsource only some areas, such as the technical implementation, and make the contents yourself. In addition to an effective homepage, we help you get more customers with the help of brand design, search engine optimization and digital advertising.