What makes a perfect WordPress website?

As compared to other Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla and Drupal, WordPress is the best CMS as it offers a great level of flexibility and unbeatable features for web design and web development.

In the competitive online world, it becomes for businesses to establish a unique identity. In fact, website owners want dynamic websites that can quickly engage the visitors and create a sophisticated UX. That’s why web developers have created over 40 million websites on WordPress in the past few years. Vivid Software Solutions, a San Diego based web development company has been successfully utilizing WordPress CMS systems for their small and large clients.

With the help of a blog, you can simply create a perfect WP website that can drive more customers to your site.

Let us discuss the 15 steps that will help you create a compelling WP site:

Select a Domain:

website designChoosing a Domain is the most important step as it creates your identity on the web. Without it, users would not be able to find out your website. Therefore, it requires a lot of thought and the ability to make intelligent decisions.

Well, there are four vital elements:-

1. Top-Level Domain:

The top–level domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name. And, one of the most popular TLD is .com.

Well, there are various different TDLs that are created especially for companies or organizations (.gov.edu), some particular to countries (.in, .co, .us, .es) and some are used as the alternative to .com like .net, .info, .org, etc.

2. Root Domain:

You have complete control over the root domain. You can choose a root domain as per your business needs. While registering a domain, you need to remember that it should be unique and contain only of letters, hyphens and numbers.

3. SubDomains:

It is a domain that comes before the root domain. After purchasing a root domain, you can create subdomains at zero additional cost.

4. SubFolders:

It is indexed after the TLD, for example, domain.com/subfolder.

Select a Hosting Package:

One of the most important things for website upkeep and website maintenance is to choose the right host and package. A hosting company should enable you, never restrict you. Thus, it is necessary for you to choose a reliable hosting provider that can offer you the affordable and most suitable hosting package. website development

Configure the nameservers:

After getting both a domain and hosting package, you will be required to point the domain to your host’s nameservers, with the purpose to connect the domain name to the server. Once signing up, your hosting company would send you the names of the nameservers. They will look like ns1.nameserver.com and ns2.nameserver.com.

Then, you can navigate to your domain’s control panel and find for something along the lines of “change nameservers”. Here, you need to enter the nameservers.

After completing 24 hours, you will know that it’s working if your domain displays your host’s landing page when you write the URL in a browser.

Download WordPress:

Download the latest version of WordPress and upload it to your hosting account by making the use of FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It is a process of transferring files between a desktop and hosting server.

After connecting to your server through FTP, you can view the list of folders. Look for one named public_html or your domain name. It is the place where you can upload WP.

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If you want your site to be on the root domain, then you need to upload it directly. And if you want to activate WP in a subfolder, then you need to create the folder and then upload the files.

Develop a Database:

A database stores all your WordPress data that include content (posts, pages and comments), user data and configurations. Whenever the page loads, WP queries the database for all the necessary information, like a title, content, tags, categories, published dates, etc.

By using your host’s control panel, you can create a database and its username and password for WP to connect with.

Tweak wp-config-sample.php:

After setting up the database and its username and password, you can use the FTP client to edit the wp-config-sample.php file.

First, you need to rename the file to wp-config.php. Then by using a text editor, you can open the file.

Activate WordPress:

WordPress will ask for some basic information to complete the installation process and then, you can create an account. This process is short and simple.web development company

Once submitting the information, you will be able to access or log into the admin panel.

Select a Compatible Theme:

WordPress offers thousands of free and handy themes to make your website design unique and compelling. But, it is important for you to choose the perfect and most suitable WP theme.

In order, to get the perfect WP theme, then it should meet the following requirements:

  • Engaging design
  • Solid code
  • Valid HTML and CSS
  • Compatible with the latest version of WordPress
  • Excellent readability
  • Compatible with popular and useful plugins, etc.

Secure WordPress:

Security of your WordPress sites plays a potent role as it keeps your site protected from hackers. If you want to secure your WP site, then backing up is extremely important. There are few things that you need to follow to keep your site away from hackers:

  • Regularly Update your WordPress
  • Avoid using wp_ as the database table’s prefix
  • Remove the WP version from the header of a site
  • Remove the username “admin”.

Create Important Pages:

You want your visitor to find the things quickly when they land on your website. Obviously, your potential users access your site to view certain features. Thus, it is important for you to create some basic pages that will help them to quickly view the desired page. You can create:

  • Home page
  • About page
  • Products and services page
  • Contact page

Enhance for Search Engines:

In order, to survive in the online world, it is important to utilize the online marketing technique. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most productive technique to drive more traffic towards the site.

You can find a few themes in WP that come with built-in SEO features. However, you can use a plugin to make your settings uniform across all of your websites, regardless of the WP theme. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best SEO plugin.

Set up Analytics:

Analytics allows you to track your visitors, with the useful data on their browsing like:

  • How visitors landed on your site?
  • How long they stay on your website?
  • Which page did they view?

You can simply install it, as it gives easy to use a feature to a website owner.

Create a Google Analytics account and then put the JavaScript code you are given before the </body> tag in your WP footer file.

Backing Up:

One of the important steps is to back up the WordPress website. If something went wrong, then you can use the back-up system to protect your data. This should be part of any website maintenance plan.

Set Up Caching:

Every time when the user loads a page, WordPress processes that page on your server. It involves fetching the time and content from the database and executing other procedures.

W3 total cache is the best plugin that offers the feature like minification that uncovers whitespace from your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. In other words, minification makes your file smaller in size and thus, the user can load it quickly.

Conclusion

This blog post is written with an objective to make your WordPress website perfect. All the steps mentioned in the post will guide you in building a productive and quality website very quickly.