Growing Your Website, Step 2: Finding the Right Tech Stack

Ezoic is pleased to offer a limited series offered by guest author and Ezoic publisher, Ron Stefanski, where he details the important steps to take when growing a website or online business. Stay tuned for more helpful tips as he publishes articles throughout the year. 

According to an annual report from Blissfully.com, typical mid-market companies currently use an average of 185 different apps in their tech stack. 

These numbers are overwhelming, to say the least. But luckily, you don’t have to use that many apps to grow your website. 

All you need are a few well-chosen technologies and software tools to help you build the ultimate tech stack for website growth.

A tech stack refers to the technologies, frameworks, programming languages, software, tools, etc., that are used in developing and deploying websites, apps, and various other digital products.

Your tech stack is to your website what building materials are to a house. 

By choosing the right tech stack, you can be sure that you have the tools at your disposal to streamline your processes, enhance user experiences, and take advantage of new growth opportunities. 

With that in mind, here are three tech stacks you should consider when growing your website.

1. Choose the Right WordPress Plugins

Building the ultimate tech stack for scaling your website starts with using the right plugins. 

There isn’t a right way to scale a website since every site is unique. Scalability is all about removing obstacles when you hit specific limits. 

For instance, your website has different phases of web traffic and as your site grows, you’ll have to find ways to effectively monitor and scale for website traffic. 

These include:

• Load-balancing
• High-level caching
• Building faster and better servers with more CPU, memory, and other resources
• Scalable databases
• Faster disks (e.g. SSDs)
• Bandwidth/network upgrades

… and so on.

Having the right set of plugins installed on your WordPress website will help you take care of a wide range of issues that limit your growth, including:

• Handling larger portions of website traffic each month
• Supporting traffic peaks in case of “breaking news events”, paid campaigns, etc.
• Maintaining a large customer base (by enhancing the platform’s filtering abilities, messages, connections, etc.)
• Dealing with large volumes of data entries
• Managing the workload of rendering heavy interactive records, video resources, etc. on the platform
• Handling concurrency issues with regards to increased ongoing interactions, including notifications, messages, likes, publications, etc.

These are just a few of the many different ways having the right plugins can help you avoid limiting your site’s growth. 

But, with over 50,000 plugins currently in the WordPress directory (not to mention tens of thousands more plugins on third-party sites), how can you find the right ones to help you grow your WordPress website?

To help you in that regard, I have listed a few must-have WordPress plugins that have the ability to skyrocket your website’s success.

•  HubSpot: An essential marketing tool to help you manage contacts, check conversions, follow leads, build email newsletters, communicate via chat and forms, engage with website visitors, and more.
• WooCommerce: If you are running an eCommerce website, you need a reliable plugin. WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce plugin to help you sell products and services on your website.
• W3 Total Cache: This plugin lets you easily store data so you can provide it faster the next time it’s requested by a user. This dramatically reduces your site’s loading times.
• WPForms: A popular WordPress form builder with a beginner-friendly interface to easily drag and drop forms onto your WordPress website.
• Yoast SEO: A plugin that analyzes your content for keywords and readability so you can supercharge your SEO efforts.

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2. Get the Best Web Hosting Services

Hosting is a service that allows websites to be published online. WordPress web hosting services are available in all shapes and sizes, and there are thousands of web hosting companies to choose from. 

But, when choosing the right hosting provider to help you grow your website, it’s important to focus on the three most important factors: 

1. Reliability
2. Speed
3. Security 

These are key components to any successful website, and by choosing the right host, you’ll be able to improve your search optimization and increase sales. 

There are different types of WordPress hosting options to choose from, including:

• Free Hosting: You can host your WordPress website for free, but if you are serious about growing and scaling your site, I wouldn’t recommend taking this route.
• Shared Hosting: This is a great web hosting option for beginner bloggers and small businesses, but shared WordPress hosting is not an ideal solution for growing your site.
• VPS Hosting: VPS (virtual private server) hosting is perfect for medium-sized businesses and high-traffic blogs.
• Dedicated Server Hosting: WordPress dedicated servers are best for blogs and websites with extremely high levels of traffic.
• Managed Hosting: This type of web hosting takes care of everything for you so you don’t have to worry about a thing. 

Managed hosting is a particularly convenient solution for anyone looking to grow their website since it takes care of things such as optimizing your website for performance, keeping your website secure, regularly backing up your files, and much more.

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The importance of choosing the best WordPress hosting company cannot be overstated – particularly when you’re considering scaling up. 

Whether your website is getting tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of page views each month, the right web host will help ensure that you provide an excellent experience for every one of your users.

There are a lot of dependable web host providers out there, most of them with affordable hosting options. 

In addition to ensuring that the web host offers reliability, speed, and security, you might also consider these factors to help you choose the best web host to grow your website:

On top of these criteria, do some diligence on your hosting provider. Assaf Cohen, who runs gaming site Solitaire Bliss, explains, “I’ve experienced downtime with past hosting providers, which was problematic because our users play solitaire all day. I asked vendors their uptime history, and to explain any downtime, which led us to a great new hosting partner.”

Lastly, remember, the secret to successfully scaling your website is to have an affordable way for your business to be accessible and omnipresent – which is exactly what great web hosting will give you.

Examples of the Best Web Hosting Providers: 

To aid in your search for the best web host provider, I’ve listed a few of the top companies currently available:

• SiteGround: For a speedy and secure WordPress website.
• Hostinger: Most affordable hosting plans for growth.
• DreamHost: Affordable monthly plans for growing businesses.
• A2 Hosting: Fast and reliable shared hosting for scalable websites. 
• WP Engine: Best managed WordPress hosting service provider. 
• Bluehost: Best overall web hosting provider for beginners.
• HostGator: Best hosting platform for minimal/lean needs.
• GreenGeeks: Leading eco-friendly company for green hosting.
• InMotion: Best host provider for shared and VPS hosting services.
• Nexcess: Best for website scaling and growth.

3. Ezoic

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Your website growth tech stack cannot be complete without Ezoic. 

So far we’ve looked at the server-side (or back-end) part of your website growth. Ezoic is a crucial addition to the client-side (or front-end) of your tech stack. 

The front end refers to all the things that your users see on their screens, and Ezoic is a big part of optimizing your visitors’ experience on your website.

It’s an automated website ad testing platform designed to help businesses boost traffic and revenue by testing different ad styles and location combinations to find the best-performing ones. 

The platform is a simple way to improve the user experience of your website visitors and is perfect for publishers who want to increase revenue on their growing websites.

What makes Ezoic work so well?

Its ability to provide a better and enhanced user experience for websites by improving SEO and optimizing advertising. 

• Ezoic is mobile-friendly
• It provides an enhanced UX
• The platform decreases load times
• You’ll make more money from fewer ads
• You’ll also have optimized ad placements

Other Parts of the Tech Stack to Consider

In addition to WordPress, its plugins, web hosting, and Ezoic, there are many other parts of a tech stack that you could consider.

Before selecting any other pieces of tech to add to your stack, you need to first define what you’re trying to do. One of the most crucial elements of digital marketing is generating awareness and encouraging consideration for purchase.

Social media, email, podcasts, and many other tools can be used to accomplish this. There are many social media channels available including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and much more. 

Figuring out which to use and what sort of social media automation tools to use will require research into your target audience to determine what platforms they are most likely to use and how best to reach them there.

Offering online courses is another great way to build a following. You can use some of the best online course platforms to teach your fans new and interesting ways to use your products or services.

If your course material involves coding, gaming, or using a piece of software, you might also need to look into some of the best streaming services for sharing your screen, live broadcasting, and recording. This is especially useful if YouTube or Twitch is part of your stack.

Whatever tools you add to your stack, just be aware that you’re creating new channels that must be managed. When developing channel management strategies, always make sure to build a firm foundation for growth. 

Don’t ever try to build your tech stack too fast. Start slow and move at a reasonable pace. The tortoise always beats the hare in the end.

Conclusion

As you can see, you don’t need dozens of software tools and technologies to grow your business. 

All you need are a few well-chosen, flexible tools like the ones outlined above. 

Such a flexible system of technologies will help you grow your website without slowing you down or locking you in. 

This way, you won’t have to compromise on functionality, and you can upgrade or change the tools as your website grows and your needs change.

In case you missed the first part in this ongoing series, be sure to check out my tips for understanding your market. 

Your turn. What other tools are you currently using to grow your website? Let us know in the comments below!