Your average business owner won’t be familiar with WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Magento, Joomla, and Weebly. They are all website builders with pros and cons. Many of them are used to create niche websites with specific goals.
Shopify and Magento are best-suited for online stores. If you want to set up a blog that will eventually evolve into an e-commerce platform, these platforms won’t be the right fit.
There are other website builders and platforms with improved flexibility. They attract great interest from ordinary users as well as professional developers. The choice of a website builder depends on your skill level. This article will focus on building a site using WordPress.
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Where to Learn More About WordPress
You can find a reliable WordPress tutorial on YouTube. Tutorials like WordPress 101 are usually free to watch. More in-depth ones might cost around $12 a month.
This builder is fully customizable, enabling one to set up anything from a large online store to a small blog. It is also very feature-rich. There are many customized as well as free integrations to support your WordPress site and generate higher traffic and, hopefully, revenue.
A lot of information is available, considering how popular WordPress is.
Select a Domain
Your domain could be brandnewclothes.com or something else, depending on what you’re offering. It’s actually easier to choose a unique name for your site than you think. Just make sure your name of choice isn’t already taken. After registering it, check if you can use it to create social network accounts.
The Best Hosting for WordPress
To find the best hosting for WordPress, you need to look at speed, support, security, the location of the server, scalability, and other aspects. If you want to set up a small business, the main pillars are security, speed, space, and scalability, also the four Ss. Experts advise against WordPress hosting. Your domain name will have WordPress.org or WordPress.com added to it, losing some of its uniqueness in the process.
You could buy a plan for a customized domain name or choose an alternative. Some of the cheapest plans cost as little as $3 a year.
Create Posts and Pages
You can create pages and posts from the admin panel. You can publish posts in chronological order. WordPress measures your content’s uniqueness and readability automatically. As an open-source and free builder, it lets users upload images and videos as part of their posts to make them more appealing.
You can also link the pages you create from the WordPress admin panel to the homepage’s sections, where you have calls to action, information about your mission, or an About Us section.
You need to make sure you have the right tagline, title, and time zone before your website goes live.
Themes
Some premium themes cost a bit extra. If this doesn’t sound appealing, the builder has many free themes to choose from. If you can’t find a free theme you like, you can opt for a paid one. Your theme should be secure, lightweight, and responsive. They have the bare minimum of features needed to launch your first WordPress site. As a result, it will load more quickly and perform better overall.
The theme should integrate the best developer coding practices for safety reasons. You might need to consult a security expert here.
Last but not least, the theme should adjust to the screen size without leading your site’s appearance to deteriorate. This aspect is crucial for visitor engagement.
Theme Stores
Some stores have a wide variety of premium themes to choose from. A number comes with a subscription period, during which you can download themes and tools as often as you want. You can also buy one for a one-time fee.
Plugins
WordPress has many free plugins to choose from. These include:
- WP Super Cache to increase site page loading speed
- Yoast SEO to improve SEO and ranking on Google and elsewhere
- Antispam Bee to get rid of spammy comments on your posts
- Smush Image Optimizer to reduce image size and compress images. This will also improve loading time
- WP Sweep – cleans up the database to improve your site’s performance
- Contact Form 7
- WordFence to protect your first WordPress site from online threats
WordFence’s premium version serves to secure your site further. If security is very important to you, it’s recommended to get a paid copy of this plugin.
