Be it blogging or eCommerce, WordPress dominates the market. Every day more than 500 websites are built using this content management system.
This immense popularity is well-deserved because WordPress has revolutionized the way websites were made. You no longer need to be an expert in CSS or any other computer language to start a new website. The amazing range of plugins has made the functionality better over the passing years.
Although there are other competitors in the market, WordPress reigns supreme because of its simplicity and effectiveness. But can WordPress bring the results for every website? The obvious answer is no. You cannot expect it to work for you unless you adopt the best practices and learn from your mistakes with time. To see the required results, you must have some basic knowledge and a lot of passion to experiment!
If you are planning to get started on WordPress, we have compiled a brief and useful introduction and the top 5 tips and practices for beginners. Keep these under your belt and you would start deriving results from this powerful CMS sooner than you expected.
Anyone starting with WordPress must know that there are two types, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Both of these are so different from each other that some webmasters consider them incomparable. If you skip this step, it can impact the outcome you are expecting from your first website.
It is an open-source CMS that is fully customizable, speedy, SEO-friendly, and a dependable website development platform. This version is installed by more than 40% of the web-serves over the world.
It gives you the freedom to configure the server and customize your eCommerce site with more than 31,000 themes and 55,000 plugins. This one is cheaper as compared to WordPress.com. Most webmasters mean WordPress.org when they say WordPress.
This is more of a “built it yourself” platform. It is extremely simple to use but comes with its limitations. The software provides you easy to use customization options, with zero control over server configuration. Unless you are a complete newbie to website development, not ready to learn anything, and willing to pay more for simple features, investing in WordPress.com is not for you.
Now that you know the basic difference between the two versions of WordPress, let us talk about the best 5 tips and practices.
You need a hosting service for your website to go live on the internet. Know that the choice of your website hosting plan can make the whole difference in the world. The first step to success is to find the right hosting service provider which can provide you with enough resources to handle the website traffic and minimize downtimes for your website.
There is a wide variety of hosting service providers and plans with several WordPress-specific features. You can pick a suitable service according to your budget limits but if you want to run your website with ease, go for Bluehost. It is THE best hosting service for any WordPress website. Even WordPress itself recommends it!
Installing the right plugins not only increase the functionality of your website but help you rank higher on Google and other search engines. Some of the best plugins for beginners are Yoast and MonsterInsights. Go to the plugin directory and install these two plugins. Remember that too many plugins can make your website unsafe so start with as few plugins as possible. These two will suffice for beginners.
Yoast will help you with SEO. As SEO is critical for your website success, you must know that Yoast not only manages the basic SEO but it handles technical SEO implementations as well.
The best way to analyze the web stats is to install MonsterInsights. As you create your Google Analytics account on it, you will be able to track your data such as website traffic, time spent on your website an bounce rate directly from the WordPress dashboard. With all that juicy information at your tips, you can take better decisions to improve the performance of your website.
With over 31,00 themes, it’s hard to pick the right one. Pay attention to the quality themes and don’t be afraid to be picky at this stage. That’s because the choice of your website theme can affect the speed (more on that a little later) and a lot more.
Read the reviews and don’t hesitate to pay for any premium theme that goes well for your project. It will be one of the best investments you are going to make. If you want to provide a great experience for your mobile users (A Pro-tip: The majority of the users are mobile users), pick a mobile-friendly theme. Check the demo, test it and upgrade it whenever you find a theme ineffective.
Any webmaster will tell you this, your website loading speed is the holy grail of success. You want your website to load in minimum possible times, run faster, and take up as little storage space as possible.
Google Analytics will help you keep an eye on the speed and the factors affecting it. One of the best practices is to compress the size of images and video files. There are several online tools such as Optimizills and ImageResize that can help you compress the images and videos on your website.
Last but the most important practice is to keep yourself updated. WordPress is constantly working to make its software efficient and safe for its users. Stay in touch with the updates to avoid making your website outdated and vulnerable to minor bugs. If you are worried about how to keep up with updates, all you need to do is to go to the WordPress dashboard and see if there are any updates. It’s as easy as clicking the “Update Now” buttons.
Maintain backups so that you revive all the stuff in case things get messed up!
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