What Makes WordPress Different
WordPress is a platform that services as a content management system or CMS that gives the everyday internet user the ability to easily create their own blog or website. There are tons of CMS on the internet to choose from but WordPress has worked hard to separate itself from the pack. WordPress may have simply started as a blogging site in 2003 but it has grown immensely since then and can now handle any different type of website that you may need to build.
One of the biggest ways that WordPress is different than other tools like it is that it is extremely user-friendly. Nearly anyone, regardless of any background in web design can go onto WordPress and build a basic simple site. Actually, over 30% of sites on the internet are built using WordPress software. This includes everything from government sites to knitting tutorials and everything in between. WordPress makes user-friendly software that builds amazing secure sites and that is a match made in heaven.
Firsts Steps to Building a Great WordPress Site
The first step to building the site of your dreams on the WordPress platform is to purchase your domain and hosting. Your domain can commonly be bought right along with your WordPress plan but remember WordPress itself does not host websites. The most highly recommended web hosting options are Godaddy, Bluehost, Dreamhost, and SiteGround. You can choose any hosting service you want as long as they have a PHP version of 7.3 or higher.
The next step is to actually begin building your site. Make sure to give yourself ample time and try not to rush the process. In a digital world, a website is often people’s first impression of you. WordPress has a large library of themes to choose from that help build out the skeleton of your new site. All themes are fully customizable and you can add or remove pages as needed. Take the time to choose the theme that will work best for your content. Different themes are available when you upgrade to a premium membership.
The next step is to have a way to track the growth and progress of your site once it has been completely built out is to start building the behind the scenes aspects of your website. Do not fall into the habit of adding in too many plugins at once but do take the time to add in some key plugins that will help your site be more productive and faster as well. The first plugin that I recommend adding is going to be the Yoast plugin. This plugin gives SEO and readability scores throughout your website. This is extremely helpful because along with the scoring, Yoast also gives you helpful ways to increase your score. The other main plugins that I always add when building or editing a WordPress site are WP Smush and Hummingbird. These three apps manage sites on a daily basis and cut down on a lot of maintenance time as well.
Smush is a plugin available on WordPress that optimizes the images on your site. With the bulk smush option when you opt for the pro-level plugin, image optimization is just a click away. By automatically scaling and resizing your images you can increase your page speed immensely. Without any visible changes to the images on your site, Smush will format all of your images into a next-gen format that is 25% smaller than PNG or JPEG.
Hummingbird optimizes the speed for your website using cache, and code minimizers. This is another great way to not change anything visible on your site but work in the background to improve your analytics that can be found on Google Analytics. Hummingbird will do an initial scan of your site and give you a report on anything that may be slowing it down. The ideal website load time is under 3.5 seconds. Hummingbird also has its own caching suite so that all of your pages will load faster. Hummingbird is a great plugin that works in the background to optimize the speed of your website.
Monthly Website Maintenance
Having a good checklist for your monthly maintenance on your WordPress site can save you a lot of time and help keep your site up and running smoothly. The first thing to do is make sure that you have backups of your site available if anything goes wrong. This is extremely important because no matter how persistent you are, no one can predict everything that can possibly go wrong. There are many plugins to choose from to create daily backups so that you never have to worry.
You also want to check in on any plugins that you do have installed to make sure that there are not any updates that you have to do. First, you install your WordPress updates, then the updates to your theme if any and then lastly the updates to your plugins. While you are checking through everything on your site, make sure to go over all the data in your Google Analytics to check on the progress and traffic on your site.
Conclusion
WordPress is an amazing platform for anyone who is going to make the decision to build a website. There are so many ways to fully customize any site that you want to build from e-commerce to a simple blog. When you utilize all that WordPress has to offer and maintain your site on a monthly basis, you can count on having a secure platform for your blog or business. You can also have a professional build your site and handle all the monthly maintenance for you.
MK Website Design and SEO offers Professional WP Help and SEO services. Get Monitoring, Speed Optimization, Security & More. Fix your WP Site and Grow your Business. Personal Support, Speed Optimizations and More. I offer Full Website Customization, WP Plug-in Evaluations, Assistance and Consulting, All websites need maintenance and regular updates, once it’s live. Best WP Maintenance. Website Maintenance. Website Optimization, call today to learn more 719-351-7150 ask for Monica. Monica is a GoDaddy Freelance pro and Featured on Godaddy’s website.
