WordPress boasts incredible stats this 2021. And when we say incredible, we meant stats convincing enough for you to build a WordPress website.
- 62% of the 100 fastest-growing companies use WordPress (U.S only).
- More than 500 new websites are created using the free version of WordPress.org, daily.
- 70 million new blog posts, every month.
Currently, there are over 455 million websites that use WordPress and that number speaks a thousand words. It’s safe to say that WordPress is incredibly well-liked by the community and we wouldn’t question you if you want to build your website using this platform.
Here are the essentials step to build a WordPress website.
Step 1: Pick a niche
Before you go straight to creating a WordPress acocunt and launching your website, you first need to pick a niche or a topic you want your website to focus on. This could prove to be a daunting task because, well, 10,000 of websites could possibly already exist inside your chosen topic.
If your WordPress website is not for business, make sure to pick a niche that genuinely interest you. This way, you will enjoy updating the website and adding new content for years to come.
Step 2: Choose a domain name
A domain name is the address that people type into the search bar to access your website.
That’s why it is important that your domain name has to be something that people can easily remember.
When brainstorming for your domain name, it has to be:
- Related and fitting to your brand’s identity
- Simple and easy to remember. Avoid using complicated words and unique characters
- Easy to spell, pronounce, and type
- Avoid hypens and numbers
Step 3: Register domain and choose a web hosting provider
You’ve now decided on your domain name and the next step has two parts.
- Register your domain name
- Select your hosting provider
There are website hosts out there that does these two parts for you, making building a WordPress website easier.
However, if you don’t opt in for an all-in-one provider, you need to find a website to register your domain and another website to host your website and link them together. An example of this would be to use Google for domain registration and then WP Engine for website hosting.
Step 4: Install WordPress
After Step 3, you now have a website host and a domain. Step 4 requires you to integrate WordPress into your website.
There’s no definite way to do this step because this depends on the host you use. Hosts such as Kinsta and WP Engine will install WordPress for you, while others might require you to install WordPress manually.
You can look up your website host’s procedure for installing WordPress by searching it up on Google.
Step 5: Choose a theme
One of the most exciting (and most confusing too!) is choosing amongst WordPress’ more than 8,000 themes. Ecommerce, food, fashion, finances, all concept. WordPress’ themes has it.
When choosing a website theme, it’s important that the color scheme and overall concept must reflect and fit your business or your niche. In addition, it should also offer the features you need, such as custom header or an editor style theme.
And the most important thing is to choose a responsive theme. A responsive theme allows your website to adapt to different devices, from larger screen desktops to medium-sized tablets to the smaller smartphones. These ensures enjoyable user experience.
Step 6: Add and customize pages
Your website, aside from your social media pages, serves as a channel for information. This is where the essential details about your business can be find.
The basic pages you should first have on your website are:
- Homepage
- About Us page
- Page/s for your products or services
- Contact Us page
Since you’ve added pages to your website, another essential feature you have to add is a navigation that your users can use to travel to and from different pages. As you add more pages, place them in your navigation or categories under your navigation for organization.
You can also pick from different website layouts to customize your pages according to their purpose.
For example, your products pages might have to include a pictures of your items, a section for name and description, and another section for reviews. Note! Pages looks best when they are uniformed so before customizing, plan out and decide on the overall look of your website.
Make a style guide including:
- Color scheme
- Font color and style
- Image style
- Placement of essential elements
- Page formatting
This style guide will make sure that your whole website looks cohesive and organized.
Step 7: Add plugins
To build a WordPress website, you need to install plugins that brings life to your pages. Plugins add more functionality to the website and gives a better user experience.
WordPress has over 58,000 plugins that can help you enhance your website such as:
- SEO plugins to search engine optimized your website
- Plugins for contact forms
- Ensure the safety and security of the website
- Integrate email capabilities
- Enable two-factor authentication
When adding plugins to your website, make sure that each of them complements and integrates with one another. If they don’t, it can also cause problems and glitches to your website.
Step 8: Check website load time
Your website’s speed and load time are huge factors for Google ranking and user exprience. Your target audience and potential clients are more likely to turn away from your website when it loads slow. It annoying and bothersome for them.
Content, plugins and other various elements you add to your pages can slow down and affect the performance of your website.
That’s why when you build a WordPress website, you use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your website currently loads, on desktops and mobile devices. It also offers suggestions on how to improve your website.
A few ways you can improve your load time are:
- Removing unnecessary plugins
- Optimize image file sizes
- Enable browser cache
- Use a content distribution network