How to create a classified website

A classified ad posting website is a platform that connects buyers with sellers.

Creating a successful classified website

A successful classified website must have these features

1. Dynamic classified categories — you must have a strong admin panel from where you can add or remove categories
2. Dynamic fields within a category — let's say you want to add “fuel type” in the cars category, you must be able to do this from the admin panel, if you would hire a developer to do these changes then it will increase maintenance charges
3. Dynamic locations — a classified website is based on location so the admin must be able to add new locations from the admin panel
4. Extensive search — search is the most important feature of a classified website, normally classified websites have a different server that performs search and keeps a record of all search data & results, elastic search is recommended
5. Dynamic SEO — with the changing SEO trends you should be able to add SEO friendly content against different categories from the admin panel
6. Dynamic Sitemap — when you add a new category then your sitemap should automatically include it so that it can be indexed on time
7. Spam ads detector — when your userbase will increase you should be accepting a bulk of spam ads, so in the admin panel, you should be able to set up spam keywords and if an ad has spam keywords then it should have a status like “Pending Admin Approval”. This will cut off your cost to hire persons who will manually check all ads.
8. Save user search data — Save all the data that users are searching on your website, it will help you to figure out what people are looking for on your site and then you can focus on that category, I prefer using https://search.google.com/search-console/about as well as queries saved in your database
9. Chat feature — users should be able to communicate within the website, it will increase session time with inturn increase site ranking and will be a plus on privacy (for those users who don’t want to share their phone numbers)
10. Multiple admin roles — let’s say you want to hire SEO experts, then they should be able to modify content against categories and should don’t be allowed to play with categories, so setup multiple roles.

How to hire a developer for creating a classified website

• Try on freelancing websites (Upwork, freelancer)
• Make sure the developer you hire is experienced with developing classified websites
• Setup your development & marketing budget
• Keep on monitoring the development and make sure all the above-mentioned features are there.