How to Dial in the One-page WordPress Website

If you’re looking to offer a more affordable (and easier to build) solution for a client’s business, online portfolio, and much more, you may want to consider a one-page WordPress website.

One-page websites are simple, popular and — when built on Managed WordPress — easy for nearly anyone to maintain.

However, dialing in the one-page design isn’t always a simple task for website designers, especially when you’re used to taking on larger or more complex projects. Luckily you’ve come to this post. Here, we look at tips to help create a solid one-page website design. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Determine whether one page is enough

2. Create a strategy for content

3. Build an anchor menu for easy navigation

4. Understand the audience

5. Make scrolling easier

6. Make the website mobile-friendly

7. Develop strong CTAs

8. Avoid large text blocks

9. Optimize for search engines

10. Include social media accounts

11. Be creative with the contact block

Why a one-page WordPress website?

One-page website designs have gained increased popularity among business owners and web designers because they’re simple, easy and trendy. But while one-page websites are ideal for different types of business, they are not a one-fits-all solution.

Before settling on a one-page website, ensure it is ideal for your client. You may want to create a one-page website if they don’t have a lot of content or many different elements. A single-page website may be ideal for clients who:

• Want to create an online portfolio or personal website
• Sell a few products or services
• Have one-time events such as conferences and weddings
• Need a campaign-specific landing page

On the other hand, a one-page WordPress website may not be ideal, for example, if their content is complex or they sell lots of different products or services with tons of information.

Tips for creating a one-page WordPress website

Less is more in design, and web design is not an exception. After all, the fewer pages a site has, the more it will be appealing to visitors. A good one-page design will communicate a story effectively, promote a brand and drive conversions.

However, that doesn’t mean that creating a one-page WordPress website is a simple task. Without the right gameplan, you may end up with a single page that isn’t attractive and doesn’t serve your marketing purposes.

To that end, here are steps to follow for a perfect one-page website design:

Determine whether one page is enough

Before you take any step, it’s best to determine whether the situation calls for one page or a classic website. Depending on the type of client you’re helping, one kind of website might be better than another — you need to weigh the options to determine which type of website will work.

As stated earlier, a one-page WordPress website should have a simple yet robust design that is user friendly. It often displays only a small amount of text but more images.

Due to its long scrolling design, you have the option to be creative and decide the order in which content appears.

One-page website design offers a good user experience. Since the content appears in a linear fashion, visitors won’t get lost in multiple pages. These sites also render well on mobile and tablets, and are easy to maintain.

A classic website comes with a homepage alongside other pages, often services, a contact page, and FAQ. The main advantage of a classic web design over a one page is that it allows you to display tons of content about products or services.

With the classic design, you get the option to display each piece of content on a dedicated page, allowing more thorough descriptions. But if you decide that a one-page WordPress website is best, move to the next step.

Create a strategy for content

The first step to creating a one-page WordPress website is to plan out content. One page allows you to control the order in which content appears. The idea is to ensure the order is both logical and intuitive.

Be careful with what you place above the fold or what the visitor sees before scrolling down the site. Ideally, the main message should entice visitors.

Like any other website, a one-page WordPress website could include an about section, services and products, more about the offering, an FAQ section, CTAs, a photo gallery and contact information.

How you prioritize this content will determine how effective the one-page design will be. Remove unnecessary information to keep content as simple and organized as possible.

Build an anchor menu for easy navigation

Unlike a classic website (where each item links to a page of its own), a one-page WordPress website menu links to a different section of the same page. As a result, you need to build an anchor menu to link each section.

These are three important steps to help create an anchor menu for a good one-page design:

• Create an anchor — An anchor will help users navigate to a particular part of your one-page design. While some templates come with built-in anchors, there’s usually an option to rename, move or delete them.
• Link anchors to the menu — Linking the site’s menu to anchors makes it easier for visitors to go to a specific section. The idea is to select the corresponding section to attach an anchor to, which will help in the navigation.
• Create a menu order — Linking the menu to anchors isn’t enough. You should ensure the order in the menu corresponds to the order of section. Single-page website designs involve a lot of scrolling. As such, ensure that the menu is always visible by freezing it. Fortunately, this is easily achievable via plugins such as WP Floating Menu.

Understand the audience

When it comes to a one-page WordPress website, you have only one page to display many sections. That’s why it is important to identify gaps in every section and fill those gaps to improve user experience and overall site performance.

Analyzing which sections have gaps and making the necessary changes is paramount. To achieve this, you need to group your visitors based on location, demographics, source, behaviors, devices they use, and other such criteria.

You can collect this data for clients if you install proper analytic tools like Google Analytics on the site. Ensure that you have everything set up to get required data and determine the metric to track.

Tracking user behavior for a classic website with multiple pages is straightforward. But things get rather complicated when it comes to a single-page website.

Luckily, free tools like Google Tag Manager will help track activities on a one-page website. This tool will enable you to track different actions on the site and provide more insights regarding the needs and expectations of a target audience.

Make scrolling easier

A one-page WordPress website involves a lot of scrolling. Don’t make visitors keep scrolling down the site to find what they are looking for — make it as simple as possible.

A scroll-top button (yep, there are plugins for that) and anchor links make navigation easier and fast. You may also want to use parallax scrolling (make the background move a different speed from the foreground content) to keep your users engaged when scrolling until they find what they are looking for.

No matter how creative you want to be with navigation, you shouldn’t ignore usability. After all, visitors are real humans, so ensure they can easily find the content they need.

Make the website mobile-friendly

People spend more time on smartphones or tablets than desktops. You may also have heard about mobile-first indexing, where Google considers the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

As a result, ensure the website is functional and looks as good on mobile as desktop. Adapting to the mobile version shouldn’t cause headaches if you use a readymade CMS like WordPress.

Develop strong CTAs

Strong CTAs for the one-page WordPress website are essential. This command phrase, such as “Buy Now” or “Sign Up,” takes the form of a button or hyperlink to increase sales or conversion.

To get the most from a CTA, it needs to:

• Be logical, intuitive and concise
• Encourage visitors to take action
• Unique from other graphical elements
• Placed at strategic places for users’ view

Once you have CTA content, link the button to an anchor to make it easy for visitors to navigate a particular section.

Avoid large text blocks

Having too much text on one page can hurt conversions. After all, users expect as brief a chain of actions as possible (e.g. visit > see what you need > take the required action).

Imagine if, during the second step, there’s tons of text for the user to read.

Include only the information that directs users to a CTA, and presents it in a brief and straightforward manner. If you have a lot of information to share with users, create a separate blog and link it to a unique place on the website.

Optimize for search engines

The need for search engine optimization for any website cannot be overstated. When it comes to a one-page WordPress website, you only have one page to rank for several keywords, and you have fewer things to optimize than a classic website.

However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot optimize the single-page website. Yes, it may be a bit challenging, but it’s possible. That said, here are things to remember when optimizing a one-page website:

Improve page speed

Page speed refers to the time it takes to display a page content fully. In our case, this is the time it takes to display one page of website content.

A significant number of visitors will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load.

And if your website loads slowly, Google and other search engines will consider it to have a bad user experience. That’s why you need to analyze your site loading speed and optimize it.

Luckily, Google has a free tool to help analyze your website speed. To analyze your website, go to PageSpeed Insights and enter the URL. This tool will help analyze how a site performs on both desktop and mobile devices.

Once you get insights into what is slowing down the website, try to resolve all errors to improve website speed.

Optimize each section for SEO

Treat each section of the one-pager as a separate page and optimize it for SEO. The idea here is to ensure that each section of your one-page website has a heading tag to tell what the section is all about.

Next, optimize each section for the primary and related keywords. You also need to optimize text blocks for those keywords and include alt texts in images.

Ensure content is fresh and relevant

Content is king, but only if it’s fresh and relevant for an audience and search engines. Content is not static. To keep up with the ever-changing Google algorithms, pitch content updates to your client so the website can rank higher on SERPs.

Include social media accounts

Social media can provide a perfect way to improve an online presence. As such, connect your client’s Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles with their one-page WordPress website to help improve traffic to the site.

One way to achieve this is by adding an Instagram feed. Doing this will provide an opportunity to share the latest photos of your client’s business with visitors.

Another perfect way to incorporate social media profiles into the website is to place icons for all business social media accounts. Users will see these elements as they scroll the website, providing a perfect way to further interact with a business.

Be creative with the contact block

Last but not least, make sure visitors can easily find contact information on the site. That said, consider placing phone numbers, email addresses, blogs, and social media links in a separate block at the top of the site.

The idea is to ensure that users will not need to scroll to the bottom to see contact information. After all, this can be troublesome, especially if the site has many media components that can load slowly when there’s a poor internet connection.

Closing thoughts on the one-page WordPress website

Creating a one-page WordPress website has many benefits, including better SEO potential, it’s faster and easier to maintain, intuitive to use, and easy to organize. Once you determine that a single website is best for your client, the above tips will help you get a perfect one-pager going.