Building a website on WordPress may seem like a daunting task, especially when you have no prior experience with this platform or website development in general. On the bright side, WordPress is an extremely user-friendly tool. In fact, the process of building a website on WordPress can be self-explanatory; provided you do your research and look at the features the platform offers. If this is your first time designing a website, this blog discusses a step-by-step guide on making a website using WordPress.
Let’s break it down.
Define Your Website
Before building a website on WordPress, you must settle for a specific niche. This includes defining your industry, whether you want your website to be just informative or an online shop, and the overall image of your brand. Another important aspect to consider is your audience, which will help you tailor the sitemap and visuals. If you can pull this off, it won’t feel like a tedious chore to update your content right now or months down the line.
Come Up With a Domain Name
Next up, you need a domain name. Remember, the domain name should resonate with the niche we discussed in the previous paragraph. Furthermore, it should be simple for the audience to remember. You can also do some keyword research in this regard. Let’s suppose you have found a domain name, but the .com suffix has already been taken. You can go for .net or .co instead.
Find a Web Host
Next up, you will need a web host to handle your WordPress website. While shared hosting is helpful with WordPress sites, you must do your research on different kinds of web hosting. Let’s take a look.
Shared Hosting
As the name suggests, your domain is housed on a server that contains other websites with the same hosting as yours in shared hosting. While shared hosting is economical, it can slow down your website’s load time.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is good for several reasons, such as reliability, flexibility, and enhanced resource allocation. However, it is a costly option compared to shared hosting.
Dedicated Hosting
This hosting is specifically for large companies. It is expensive, but it offers a better downtime, ease of customization, and no bad neighbors on the same server.
Choose a Theme
You can find a multitude of themes on WordPress. However, it is best if you go for the one that resonates with your brand, as well as the content you intend to publish. With WordPress, you get several theme categories such as beauty, fashion, food, photography, education, and the list goes on. This is where knowing your brand colors and general creative direction comes into play.
Install Plugins
A plugin is a program written in a PHP scripted language. These plugins make your site optimized while making it easier for your visitors to navigate. Some of the best plugins include JetPack and Yoast SEO. You can also find these plugins in your website’s dashboard.
After you are done with plugins, add administrative pages such as Home, About, Privacy, and Disclaimer. With these out of the way, start adding content.
Publish
With the theme, plugins, content, and visual content ready to go, all you have to do is publish. Make sure to add content regularly to your website. If you have a blog on your website, make sure it is well-researched and updated regularly. From an aesthetic viewpoint, add an image to each blog and make it as visually appealing as possible. When adding numbers, make sure to link them to their respective sources for added credibility. If content management is an issue, a content calendar can come in handy.
Market Your Site
Marketing your website should be done in two stages. The first part is SEO. Your web pages should have the right content, headings, and body text. In addition, WordPress has plenty of plugins and other website design options that will allow you to make your website more responsive. This is an important part of SEO as well.
In the second stage, you can use other marketing techniques such as PPC, social media marketing, and others to build your online presence.
If you want to build a website on WordPress but don’t know how to do it, EUA has you covered. We are a professional digital marketing agency that offers web design, social media marketing, SEO, and PPC services.
