Best Practices For Choosing the Right Umbraco Package For Website Enhancement

Your website is a living, breathing, marketing animal that attracts, engages, and converts your most coveted prospects and target audiences, so it’s important that the tools you integrate into it increase overall engagement and improve the experience of the website as a whole. When you’re evaluating your website for areas of opportunity or notice potential pain points, it’s important that you understand what you’re trying to accomplish when installing a Umbraco package on your website and what options are available to you.

Step 1: Know Your Marketing Goals

Before you rush to install an Umbraco package on your website, it’s important that you solidify the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish. As a site owner or marketer, it’s easy to give in to the temptation to go crazy adding packages to your site, ultimately finding that you end up not having a use for them or that they simply don’t have the functionality you need. To find what type of packages you need on your site, review your analytics or user videos and heat maps. Doing so will give you a ton of great data to show you where users are having the most trouble on your site, guiding your next steps on the types of packages to look into.

After regularly doing this practice, you’ll find out if your goal is to:

• Increase leads or sales
• Increase traffic or website visibility
• Improve the navigation of the site
• Improve the blog functionality or features
• Implement website testing
• Improve your sales or checkout funnel

This will help you slim down your options and make your research into packages more time and resource efficient.

Step 2: Review Your Options

Once you know what you’re looking for in a package, hop over to Our Umbraco and take a look at the packages that the development community has created that are available to you and your team. Take the time to learn about the packages, look at the screenshots, learn if the package works with your version of Umbraco, and reach out to the developer to ask questions or alleviate concerns you may have. We promise the entire Umbraco developer community is friendly!

Make sure that the package you choose:

• Alleviates pain points or capitalizes on opportunities
• Achieves goals
• Has documentation for usability and installation
• Is compatible with your version of Umbraco
• Is continually updated

If the package you’re looking at passes this quick test, it’s time to bring in your development team!

Step 3: Consult Your Development Team

Before you install your Umbraco package of choice, make sure you sit down with your web development team or Umbraco developer to ensure that the package installation won’t hinder other functionalities on the website.

Sometimes packages may not work with your current version of Umbraco and sometimes deployments of your website will override any package you install. This is an often overlooked step in installing a package, so make sure that moving forward you’re conscious of it and know what limitations your website has.

Step 4: Install Your Umbraco Package

After you speak to your developer or development team, you’ll have a better idea of what installing your package of choice requires. It could be a simple click and install or it may take a bit more effort and some coding, but make sure your team is on the same page of what the requirements are so everyone knows their responsibilities.

After you install your package, make sure you test its functionalities to make sure everything is working as it should and nothing is breaking or hindering the performance of the website. Make sure you’re checking in regularly on your packages, their updates, and keeping in touch with developers from the Umbraco community if you have questions or recommendations. Remember – Umbraco gets better and stronger as the community continues to build and optimize the CMS and its packages. You’re not being a bother – you’re making Umbraco better!

Step 5: Train Your Marketing Team

The last step in all of this is to train your team members and site users how to use packages. This isn’t always required as most packages are easy to use and digest on first use, but sometimes packages require a bit of education and training.

For instance, if you download a website testing package (one of our favorites is uSplit), doing a bit of background research on how to install it correctly will enable you to properly run effective website testing strategies.

Taking the time to train essential team members with documentation provided by the creator of the package, as well as internal use documentation, will help your marketing and website efforts be more fluid and successful in the long run, saving you time and potential headaches.