Many successful websites are large, complex affairs with many pages and content. However, sometimes more is less true in the world of web design. And that’s why, instead of taking a traditional approach, it might be worth creating a one-page website on WordPress.
In this article, we’ll delve into the benefits and applications of this type of site. . Then we will show you how to create a one page website in WordPress in just three steps. Let’s get started!
📚 Table of Contents:
Why You Might Want to Build a One Page Website
Most websites have multiple pages. At the very least, there’s usually a home page, a contact page, an about page, and pages for whatever content or services you’re offering.
A one-page website, on the other hand, condenses everything the important information on a single home page, often by including a series of dedicated sections. Designing a single page website offers a number of benefits, such as:
- Simplicity, making it easy for visitors to navigate your site and find what they need.
- Ease of maintenance, as there is very little content to keep up with.
Of course, a single page design is not the right choice for all websites. Large, complex sites have their place. However, if you’re running a small business site, portfolio, or simple store, you might want to consider this format.
The Essential Elements of a One Page Website
When your website only spans a single page, you need to be very deliberate about what you include. It’s important to provide all the information your audience will need, without cluttering the page or overwhelming them. Everything you add to your page should be there for a reason.
Here are some of the essentials if you’re looking to build a one-page website:
- A prominent call-to-action (CTA), such as a signup, contact, or buy button.
- An About section that explains who you, your company, or your organization are.
- Branding elements, such as your logo and tagline.
- A list of products or services, if applicable.
- Links to your other places and content on the web, including network profiles social networks.
- Contact information, including various channels if possible.
It is also important to pay attention to the order of these elements. In general, you’ll want to place the most important information and CTAs up front, with contact details and links closer to the bottom of the page. Think about what your audience will need to see and in what order, and that will help you determine which elements to include and how to organize them.
Ultimately, just because you’re using a one-page website design, that doesn’t mean necessarily that you cannot have a blog. If you still want to include a blog, WordPress will still allow you to link to your blog from your one page home page.
How to Create a One Page Website (EXACT STEPS)
Now, let’s talk about how to design your site. The first thing you’ll want to do is look at some existing examples of one-page websites for inspiration. Then move on to step one.
Step 1: Determine Your Site’s Focus
As we’ve discussed, choosing to build a one-page website means you’ll need to be very deliberate about his design. That includes being clear about your goals. When you’re limited to a single page, you’ll want to pick one or two key things to focus on.
To do this, consider the main call-to-action around which your site will be designed. What do you want visitors to do: sign up for a membership, buy a product, attend an event, or hire you for a job? Everything on your page should encourage people to take that action. This means providing the information they will need, explaining the benefits, and clarifying the next steps.
Step 2: Select a Quality One Page Theme
If you have decided to create a website of a page in WordPress, you can use any theme you want. However, a smart strategy is often to choose a one page theme that has been created specifically to help you design this type of site. These themes make it easy to include all the necessary information while maintaining an attractive design.
When choosing a theme for a page, here’s what you’ll want to look for:
- A creator of pages with the pre-built elements you’ll need, such as a contact section.
- A method of dividing your page into multiple sections that can be distinguished visually.
- Navigation that allows visitors to jump to various sections within your page.
- An easy way to add CTA buttons and customize them.
There are many one-page themes available. Neve, for example, is a multipurpose theme that’s perfect for concise yet well-rounded one-page sites. It is compatible with many popular page builders, includes a live customizer, and helps you quickly set up your one page site.It also includes pre-designed sections for contact information, your bio, a storefront, and more.
Step 3: Design Your Site
Once you know what you want to include on your site, If you’re clear on your focus and have chosen a strong theme, you can start designing the page. You’ll want it to be appropriate for your audience, reflect their style, and be optimized to meet your goals, which means you shouldn’t just follow a formula.
However, here are some tips to keep in mind. Consider when building your site:
- Keep your page simple and don’t include anything that doesn’t serve a specific purpose
- Clearly distinguish between different sections with a variety of headers, backgrounds , etc.
- Create navigation that quickly takes visitors to the sections they need.
- Make your main calls to action prominent and persuasive.
By following this tip, you’ll be able to create an amazing one page site in no time.
Now, let’s talk about the tools. So how can you build a great one page website as efficiently and quickly as possible?
Build Your One Page Website With Elementor
Elementor is an easy tool A user-friendly, feature-rich page builder that makes it easy to create any number of pages within a WordPress website. This makes it the perfect tool for creating a great one page website.
In the following sections, we’ll show you how. The example we are using is a site for a fruit and vegetable store. The website will have:
- a page with many sections that house the content
- a menu that visitors can click on to go directly to the relevant sections
- a header that houses the logo and menu
- a footer
Here’s a preview of what the website will look like in the end :
We’ll go over each step in detail, but here’s the basic process:
- Install the free Neve theme.
- Install the Elementor plugin if you haven’t already.
- Set up the “canvas” of your website: the header, footer and menu.
- Add your content with Elementor.
- Link the menu to different sections in your layout, to create the effect of one page navigation.
- Set your layout as the home page of your site.
1. Install the free Neve theme
- Go to Appearance → Themes → Add New in your WordPress dashboard.
- Search for “Neve”</ li
- Click the Install
- button Once WordPress installs the theme, click Activate to make it available</li
2. Install the free Elementor plugin
- Go to Plugins → Add New
- Search for “Elementor”
- Install and Activate the free Elementor Page Builder plugin.
Now, with a clean WordPress install, an active Neve theme, and the Elementor Page Builder, you are all set to build your one page website .
3. Configure the header, footer and menu
You will use the Neve theme to configure the header, footer and menu of your one page website.
Header
Go to your WordPress dashboard and click Appearance → Themes → Customize to customize the Neve theme:
First, you’ll select the colors and the background of the website
Next, in the Customizer panel, click Header → Change Logo and add your site’s logo. Adjust the width of the logo, add a site title, site icon, and a tagline. Choose whether to show or hide the site name and tagline in the header.
On the Design tab, choose a header design and color, and set the padding and margins. Alternatively, choose one of the header presets.
Menu
Next, you need to create the navigation menu that will be displayed in your header. To do this, click Menus → Create New Menu. Give it a name and set its Menu Location equal to Main Menu.
Click Next and Add elements. Here, add the names of the sections that you will create. For example, Main, About Us, Products, and Contact. To do this, click the Custom Links button.
In the URL field, enter a hashtag followed by the name of that section. Later, when you set up Elementor, you’ll set it up so that these links go to specific sections of your layout. For example:
- #about-us
- #products
- #contact
Footer
Go to the Footer and add text and background color. You can add any content you want here:
Press Publish to save all changes
At this stage, your site has a header, footer and a menu. . It should look like below. Now, you’re ready to use Elementor to add the content that goes between your header and footer:
4.Create a new page and add content with Elementor
To get started, go to Pages → Add New to create a new page. Give the page a name. If the theme provides sidebars, that will also appear. But you can trim the sidebars by setting the Page Attributes to full width.
On the new page that opens, click Edit with Elementor. A panel opens to the left. On the right hand side is the editing area where you will see the website take shape.
A quick introduction to Elementor’s interface
Before we continue, let’s take a look at the Dashboard. Elementor. It has many creative elements or widgets like headers, paragraphs, images, or videos. You can add them to your content by dragging them.
At the top left of the panel is the hamburger menu that opens many options. Here you will be able to adjust the colors, fonts and style of the theme globally. Needless to say, this saves a lot of time when adding new pages.
From this tab, you can also exit to the WordPress dashboard at any time.
At the bottom of the panel, there are options to adjust page settings, name the page, page, view edit history and switch between response modes. In addition, there is a browser that shows an organized view of the page.
By clicking the eye icon, you can preview the page, and when it’s ready to publish, press the publish button .
Now, it’s time to start adding some content.
Two Ways to Create a One Page Website with Elementor
At this stage, you can Choose to go about building a one page website with Elementor in two ways:
1. Insert one of Elementor’s pre-built templates and then customize it however you like. To do this, click the folder icon in the live preview of your design and a series of templates will open up, some free and many professional. In the Pages tab, you’ll find completely finished layouts for entire pages. In the Blocks tab, you will find pre-built templates for specific sections of a larger page (this is the most useful for a one page website).
You can insert any template by doing click on it. Then you can fully customize each element.
2. Alternatively, you can start from scratch by clicking the plus button to add a section and build your layout from a blank canvas.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll adopt a combination of both methods: We’ll build the first section of our website from scratch and then we’ll choose from template blocks to fill in the remaining sections.
How to Create One Page Website Sections with Elementor
Elementor uses sections, columns, and widgets to create the layout of any page. Sections are the largest building blocks and you can add columns within them. Within these sections or columns, you will be able to add the widgets you want.
Click the ‘+’ sign to add a section and choose the column structure.
When you hover over a section, a blue border appears with a handle at the top. This identifier allows you to add a new blank section on top of the existing section, or edit/delete a section. Clicking the dots in the middle takes you to the section controls: Layout, Style, and Advanced. Also, you can move the sections up or down by dragging the dots and right-click to bring up more options like duplicate or delete.
Similarly, you can click the column icon handle in the top corner to choose column layouts within the section. You can also adjust the width of the columns and the space between them. Right-click the boxes to add more columns, duplicate existing ones, remove them, and more.
From the Elementor panel, you can drag any element (called a widget) onto the column. Once you add an item to a column or section, a pencil icon appears in the upper right corner. Click this icon to display the content, styling, and advanced editing options in the Elementor panel.
How to create the first section
We’ll use the first section to let visitors know about the nature of the business and something about it. To do this, you can use the entire width of the section to carry a background image. While editing the layout of the section, you can adjust the width of the content and stretch the section to the full width of the page, simply by pressing a button.
To add the background image, choose the edit section option by clicking the dots on the controller. Visit the Style tab that appears in the panel and upload the image from the Media Library. Adjust the size of the image as well as the overlay.
We’ll add a single column inside the section and center it inside the section.Within the column, we’ll use three widgets: Header that tells visitors you’re selling fresh fruits and vegetables, a text editor that draws attention to delivery options, and a button where visitors can place an order. .
Add a header widget:
Drag a text widget:
Add the button widget:
Now you can customize each widget using the edit options feature.
If you want, you can also add the widgets into three separate columns by adding columns by clicking the column icon. What’s important to note here is that each widget can be fine-tuned for layout, style, and more.
Create the remaining sections
Now that the first section is ready, you can move on to the remaining three: About Us, Products strong> and Contact.
As mentioned above, we will use ready-made template blocks from the Elementor library to build these three sections. Elementor has many free template blocks in each of these categories and is searchable in the library.
For the About Us section, we’ll choose a simple template block with a header, text editor, and a video widget. You can replace all of this with your own content.
The template block with the replaced content:
In the same way, you can use template blocks for the Products and Contact section. The template used for the Contact section comes with social media icons. Click the Styling tab to control icon color, size, padding, and more.
Since Elementor allows for a lot of customization, you can make these sections They look different from the imported ones. templates.
When you’ve finished making your desired changes, click the green Publish button and your changes will be live on the site.
5. Link the menu to sections of a page
To have a clickable navigation menu, you need to connect the various sections in your Elementor layout with the navigation menu you created in step 3. To do this, open a section ID and go to the Advanced tab. In the CSS ID field of the Elementor Dashboard in the appropriate section, fill in the correct section name without the hashtag.
For example, if your menu links to #about -us , I would add the CSS ID as about-us. Then, repeat the process for all the sections you want to link to:
6. Set Your Layout as Homepage
As the last step, you can set the page you just created as the homepage of the one page website built with Elementor. To do this, go to Settings → Reading. Click Select a static page under Your home page displays and select the layout you created. Finally, click Save Changes.
If you are confused by any steps, we have a complete guide on how to set up a static WordPress homepage.
Finally, your one page website is ready. Here’s an example of what it might look like:
Conclusion
Here are three simple steps that will get you building a one-page website today:
- Determine the focus of your site.
- Select a quality one page theme, such as Neve.
- Design your site using Elementor if necessary.
Do you have any questions about how to create a WordPress one page website on your own? Let us know in the comments section below!
Written by John Hughes and Priya.
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