WordPress is the undisputed #1 content management system in the world – almost half of the websites on the Internet use it. This is due to its ease of use, flexibility, and robustness. Creating new pages in a WordPress website is one of the simplest tasks in the CMS – normally, you need only seconds to do it.
But the decision isn’t as simple as it appears: it influences your design, your ranking in search engines, and maybe even your conversion rates. That’s why it is important to learn when to create a new page in WordPress and when to just extend an existing one. These tips are going to help you:
Traffic to Your Website will Change: Account for It!
When you create a new page and fill it with content, you change how people navigate your website. The new content on the page might’ve been part of an existing page, and now, people won’t see it unless they explicitly view the new page. This can be good or bad depending on the type of content and how you design your website. Nevertheless, you need to always keep in mind the fact that how traffic is distributed throughout your website will change. To better illustrate this, we’ll describe two examples:
- Example one: you decide to create a new web page for your services and expand on them and remove it from your homepage. While this means you have more space to go into details, it also means that people who visit your homepage don’t get to learn about your services – with fewer people learning about your services, your website will generate less revenue. This ultimately makes the decision to create a new page a bad one.
- Example two: you’ve found the perfect way to expand your website – you can create a new page with inspiring new content and informative infographics that get shared around a lot on social media. This results in that page and your website as a whole getting a lot of new traffic, and it drives sales up. This one is also clear – the decision to create a new page was a very good one.
These are two very clear cut examples, but there’s a lot of grey area in between – you need to use empirical data and your discretion when deciding how and when to expand your website.
Make Sure the New Page is Integrated Into Your Website’s Ecosystem
While creating a new page might be easy, integrating it into your website is a little bit harder. You need to make sure the new page is accessible: this means clear links in either your navigation menu, the relevant subsection, or the footer. These are how most of your pages are accessed, and without including your new page in these sections, you’ll see minuscule traffic.
Of course, this isn’t enough to fully integrate the new page into your website – there is a lot of advanced stuff you need to do:
- Make sure the new page is in your sitemap and isn’t no-indexed. This is important if you want search engines to find the new page.
- Make sure there are various backlinks to your web page: to ensure your new page gets enough traffic, you need to link to it whenever relevant from other pages on your website. This is quite time-consuming as you need to sift through the content of your website and find ways to link to the new page.
- Hire professionals if you don’t know how to do it yourself: a lot of entrepreneurs pay web designers to create a website for them, but then they start tinkering with the website – this is quite bad if you don’t have the necessary technical knowledge to ensure you’re not messing anything up when adding new web pages. If you have a high-value project and you want to be sure you get a high-quality website up and running, investing in PSD to WordPress services might not be a bad idea!