The B2B SaaS marketing Tech Stack, Part 2: Hosting Your Website

This is part 2 of an 8 part series on building an inexpensive B2B marketing tech stack.  See the end of the post for the table of contents.

This series is mainly about the marketing tech stack in a B2B SaaS marketing department, but I’m going to add a little extra here about what should go on your website outside of the tech.

What are your goals?

Before we jump into the question of what provider you should use to host your website, let’s talk about what the goals of your website should be.

Goal #1: Get the user to stay longer than 7 seconds.

It seems like a ridiculously short time frame, but you have 7 seconds from the moment they land on your website to get them to stay.  How do they decide?

Does this seem right?

The first thing users notice, either consciously or subconsciously is the design and the page load speed. Does it look professional?  Is it rendered correctly on their device?  Did it load quickly?  This is unfortunately very subjective, nebulous and vague.  Also unfortunately, you have to get this right.

What is this site about?

Your main headline is everything here.  They need to quickly believe they have arrived on the site they were expecting.  The easy way to test this is to ask people that have never heard of your company what this site is about.  My favorite thing to do is ask people at the local train station.  I just walk up to them with a printout of the above the fold portion of my website and ask them what they think this website does.  Test it with your target audience as well.

Does it capture my interest?

This has a lot to do with your brand.  If you’ve done a good job of identifying your target audience and done some good persona development, you probably have a brand that resonates with your target audience.  You’re speaking their language and hopefully, they’re engaged.

Goal #2: Make Messaging Clear

Once they’ve decided to stay on your site, they’re going to start exploring a bit.  Every time they are confused, you lose a little bit of trust and the chance that they leave goes up.  The first rule about messaging is that isn’t about your company; it’s about your audience.  What are they looking for?  What do they want to do?  What pain are they trying to relieve.  To me this starts with having a clear positioning statement so you understand who you are and what you want to be.  Hopefully you’ve set up some brand guidelines (I’ll write another series on this), so you understand your tone of voice, personality, lexicon, etc.  You need to understand what makes you different and communicate that clearly.

Goal #3: Guide Them

What am I supposed to do? People want to be guided.  There is a great UX book titled Don’t Make Me Think.  I highly recommend it.  Have a very clear idea of a few key flows through your website that you want people to do and explicitly guide them here.  “You’re a doctor interested in reducing burnout?  Go here –>”

Goal #4: Create Great Content (Not just good content)

Be the expert in your industry and write great content to reflect that.  Be the thought leader.  This would also be worthy of an entire series, so I’m going to leave this alone for now.  Suffice it to say though, there is a huge different in great vs. good and so is the payoff.

Goal #5: ICPs

Design your website to work best for your Ideal Customer Profiles.  Know who you want and make sure they know it.  Make sure your best users and prospects see a space for them where they feel at home.  This can be as blunt as “For <insert your target here>.”  If you sell to actors, have a “For Actors” section.  If you were able to show your website to your target audience in a test group environment, they should say, “wow, this website looks like it was built for me.”

Goal #6: Design for results

Do you want a pretty site with no conversions or a ruthlessly optimized site that is an efficient conversion killer?  I know which one I want.  My favorite example of this is Neil Patel’s website.  There are pop ups, a “Spin to Win” game persistently in the bottom left corner and so much more when you start exploring his website.  Frankly, most of these things annoy the hell out me, but I GUARANTEE he has the data to show this gets his users to do what he wants.  In my experience, the only way to know for sure what works is to test.  So test everything.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program

Back to the tech stack.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument, that you agree with the above goals.  You might be asking yourself, what does my hosting provider have to do with any of that.  A lot actually.  While they will not be designing your website, they may put restrictions on you.  Or they may make it harder than it needs to be to accomplish your goals.  Or maybe their websites are slow.  Make sure your hosting provider can meet your needs, not have you meet theirs.  With that in mind, let’s look at the requirements you should have for any hosting provider.

Requirements

These are the factors you should prioritize when deciding on which technology and provider to use and selecting a hosting provider.  And by the way, the days of hosting things yourself are over.  Don’t even consider that.

Responsive

This is simple and every single provider should make this easy.  58% of all web traffic is mobile traffic and you need to support desktops, laptops, tables, phones and hell, maybe even smartwatches soon.  Your provider should make this easy.  And in case you’re thinking that doesn’t apply to B2B, think again, because 60% of B2B traffic is mobile.

Speed

The main metric here is page load time and there are two factors that go into that: 1) your technical environment, i.e. your web host and 2) the content you put on your site.  They’re both under your control and you should optimize for both.  Why does this matter?  For every extra second your page takes to load, another 4-5% of your traffic will bounce, i.e. leave before it is loaded.  The faster your pages load, the more pages people will visit on your site.  The faster your pages load, the higher your conversion rate will be.  You’ll show higher in search rankings.  Facebook will prioritize your site in the news feed.  It’s really important.

Good value

Most hosting providers charge based some or all of the following:

  • Number of sites
  • Bandwidth
  • Storage (Amount and type)
  • Number of hosting locations, CDNs, etc.
  • Customer Support
  • Other features

Don’t get caught up in the hype.  Most B2B sites only need one site, don’t need much bandwidth, don’t need much storage, don’t need their site syndicated over multiple hosting locations or need 24/7/365 live support.  Just start with the basics.  I will say one thing I do pay for is SSD storage versus hard disk because it is faster and I just told you how important speed is.  Most SaaS companies first websites shouldn’t cost more than $40/mo, if that.

Your IT department requirements

Does your IT department insist on using SSL (it’s a good idea)?  Do they require backups? Do you need your own server or is shared ok? Shared hosting is almost always slower.  Talk to your IT department and/or engineering team and make sure you know what they require.

Reputable provider with clean IPs

People think of spam as being an email only thing.  Not true.  There are disreputable hosting providers that host disreputable websites.  Blackists maintain a list of bad actors and those sites can be penalized heavily.  And if you’re on the same IP as them, well you get the benefit of their bad reputation as well.  This isn’t normally a problem, but if you are looking at hosts you’ve never heard of because they’re prices seem great, well, buyer beware.

Easy for non-techies to create content

One of the goals is to create great content.  This is really hard for a small team to do by themselves.  If you’re in a small start-up (and I’m assuming you are because you’re reading a series on how to build a marketing tech stack for under $1,000/mo), you’re going to need other people to create content for you.  This could be your CEO, engineers, customer success reps, outside contractors and more.  You’re going to want a system that makes that easy.  Make sure you look at the user interface of the system you’re going to use and make sure you’re comfortable using it.

Security & Access control

Some hosts only give you a single user. Others charge more for more users.  Both of these situations suck.  If there is only one login, when someone leaves the company you can either 1) hope they’re not vindictive or 2) change the password and screw everyone else up.

To use WordPress or not to use WordPress

Kind of like salesforce, there is an 800 pound gorilla to deal with in this space and that is WordPress.  WordPress powers approximately one third of all internet sites.  And believe it or not, its marketshare is actually growing.  For some reason, some people think that only small sites run WordPress, but it is actually slight more popular with bigger sites as ranked by the Quantcast Top 10,000 sites.  Therefore you first decision is whether to use this or not.

Pros of WordPress

Lots of developers

There are more WordPress developers than any other type of CMS developer, so you’ll never have trouble finding someone to work on your site.  This is a bigger deal than it may initially seem.  Lots of people have found a developer they liked who preferred a niche platform and had a really nice site built for them.  Then that developer got married, switched job, moved to Australia (this literally happened to me) or something else came up and then there was no one who knew how to update or maintain the site.  Big problem.  Not usually a problem with WordPress.

Ease of Use

WordPress is pretty easy to use and lots of user have experience creating content in it, which breeds familiarity.  People don’t need technical skills to create a new piece of content.

Plugins galore

Sometimes you need some custom functionality, like maybe a survey or poll, SEO, a user forum, or something else.  In a non-Wordpress world, this may mean custom development, which is time consuming and expensive.  With WordPress, there is probably a plugin.

It’s free

At least the software is.  WordPress is open source and you can run it on any system you want, for free.

Themes, themes, themes

If you don’t want to pay for an expensive designer, you can get started really quickly with one of the million (it seems like anyways) themes they have available, many for free.  Even the paid ones only run up to $200, which is a drop in the bucket versus a custom design.

Cons of WordPress

No beginners

Generally speaking, you need some technical knowledge to get started with WordPress.  Most newbies don’t understand the complexity of managing their own website, from setup all the way to security.  You also need some coding knowledge to manage and troubleshoot issues in WordPress.  Overall, this means there’s a bit of a learning curve.  But hey, you’re reading this on a WordPress site, so how bad can it be 😉

Custom Layouts can be tricky

If you modify a theme or create your own, you start getting into the custom site realm, which means only the developer that built it might know how to make significant changes.

Security and Updates

Because WordPress is so popular, it is also a frequent victim of hack attempts.  The more plug-ins you have, the more attack vectors there are.  Depending on the provider, it can be your responsibility to either keep the WordPress software up-to-date and/or the plug-ins.  This is not something I generally like to think about so I find this a bit cumbersome.  This is by far the biggest negative to WordPress, imo.

WordPress does not offer drag and drop by default

There are plugins, but without them, you’re creating pages inside the content development area.  It may not be the most intuitive way to create content and it may frustrate your users.

Speed

If you’re not a WordPress expert, it may not be easy to tune your website for max speed.  Some themes are notoriously bad and there isn’t a lot you can do to fix them.

Conclusion

There is no wrong answer here.  WordPress is great, which is why so many sites use it.  There are some other alternatives, which is why they’re in business.  I use WordPress sometimes and sometimes I don’t.  I have some recommendations either way.

If you go with WordPress

If you decide to go with WordPress, I highly recommend you go with a specialized hosting provider that concentrates on WordPress.  They take some of the negatives away and generally provide really good service.  The two providers I’m recommending make it easier to develop fast, reliable and secure WordPress sites, although they don’t take all the problems away.  They both handle all major WordPress updates for you and a host of other services.  If you go with either of them, remember that you’re getting essentially the exact same product.  Your decision criteria will be based on service, support, etc.

WPEngine

Starts at $35/mo and that includes 24/7 support via chat.  They handle all major updates.  They’re built on AWS, so they have great availability.  They give you free themes, offer a free Global CDN, have staging sites, free SSL certificates, offer a host of dashboards to monitor performance and much more.  You can’t go wrong hosting your site here.  I’ve used them many times and never had a problem.

Kinsta

Kinsta is a bit of a new kid on the block.  My favorite thing about them is every site is hosted using SSD storage, which means it is going to be fast.  They have a lot of the stuff that WPEngine has and they have a good reputation in the developer community.  They also have 24/7 support, a free CDN and more.  Their platform is built on top of the Google Cloud Platform.

If you don’t go with WordPress

Another popular, modern way to build websites is via a “headless” platform, which is more like building a website using api-powered Lego bricks.  You need a little bit more technical knowledge than you need for WordPress to get started (you’re going to need a developer), but the result is built for speed, infinitely customizable and for the lack of a better phrase, really modern.  This also increases security and allows you to reuse your content in more places.  If you go this direction though, you are headed down a proprietary rathole and all that comes with it.  Rather than give you the pros and cons of each provider here, just know that I recommend both.

Prismic:  starts at $9/mo

Contentful: starts at $39/mo

Note: for my latest company website, I’m using Prismic and moving away from Webflow (see below), although I still like Webflow.

If you don’t want a developer at all

Sometimes you just need something to get your website up and running as fast as possible with no technical skill or coding required.  For those, you can use any of the drag and drop web builders.  You’ll probably still want to find a template or use a designer.  I’m fond of:

Squarespace: starts at $16/mo

Webflow: starts at $12/mo

The Series

Next up: The great, free tools

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