Obviously, I can’t cover everything you need to know about WordPress in one blog post; this was just a clickbait to get you started and explain some principles to think about while developing your WordPress website.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to create a stunning website, blog, or app. WordPress has a plugin architecture as well as a template system. WordPress started as a blog-publishing system but has since evolved to support other types of web content such as more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS), and online stores. WordPress, one of the most popular content management system solutions, is used by 42.8 percent of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021.
To setup a WordPress website you need a domain and a hosting provider, let’s look at what these mean.
Hosting Provider
This is the location of your website’s files on the internet. The hosting company and plan you select have an impact on the health, speed, dependability, security, and other aspects of your website.
Consider your budget and must-haves while weighing your selections. Is an SSL certificate required? Backups every day? A specific quantity of bandwidth? With a list of must-have features in hand, you may select the provider and package that best matches your requirements.
Recommended hosting provider: Namehero
Domain
A domain name is the name of your website (where people can find you on the internet) such as facebook.com. You cannot acquire hosting and begin developing your website until you have a domain name. It is an important part of your brand’s identity.
Themes
Themes enable users to change the appearance and functionality of a WordPress website without modifying the core code or site content. Every WordPress website must have at least one theme. WordPress users may install and switch between a variety of themes.
Recommended theme: Astra, Hello Elementor
Plugins
Plugins are software components similar to apps that make you add certain features and functionality to your website. The plugin architecture of WordPress enables users to expand the features and functionality of a website or blog. Plugins also represent a development method that may turn WordPress into any variety of software systems and applications, limited only by the programmers’ creativity and imagination. Custom plugins are used to create non-website systems such as headless WordPress applications and Software as a Service (SaaS) products.
MUST HAVE WORDPRESS PLUGINS (The 5 S’s)
Plugin’s every WordPress website needs. I have grouped them into categories
- Style
- Security
- Speed
- SEO
- Statistics
Style
To improve the look and feel of your website it is important to install a page builder plugin, while there are other page builders out there, in my opinion I consider elementor to be the best in terms of the ease of use, pricing (pro version) and some dynamic functionality it provides. If you are looking for some widgets and you didn’t find it in elementor pro there are a lot of third-party plugins both free and paid that can also be integrated with elementor to give you the desired look and feel you want such as Ele Custom Skin, Croco block
Recommended Plugin: Elementor
Security
After creating your website, you wouldn’t want it to be hacked. Before looking for a security plugin, it is important that the foundation of your website is okay, make sure you are using a good hosting provider. Secondly by default, WordPress uses /wp-admin as its default URL, you can change the URL using WPS Hide Login plugin.
After this, you can install a security plugin which would help provide additional security layer in Active security monitoring, Firewalls, Brute force attack protection, Notifications for when a security threat is detected, File scanning, Malware scanning, Blocklist monitoring, Security hardening, Post-hack actions.
Recommended Plugins: Wordfence Security , Sucuri Security, iThemes Security
Speed
Website speed is very important as a slow website can be a way to discourage users/visitors from coming to your website.
- Again, the foundation of your website is very important, make sure you are using a good hosting provider.
- Make sure you are using a lightweight theme.
- Images on the websites should be optimized, you can use smush to optimize your images.
- Use Content Delivery Network.
- If you are not using a plugin, make sure you deactivate and delete it. Make sure all plugins are also updated.
- Install a caching plugin.
Recommended Plugins: LiteSpeed Cache, Wp Super Cache
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search is often the key source of web traffic for businesses, complementing other marketing methods. Greater visibility and higher placement in search results than your competitors may have a significant impact on your website traffic.
SEO is becoming the norm, since everyone wants their website to appear on Google’s first page when a search term relating to their website is entered.
To get the best results, you may need to go with the pro versions of these plugins.
Recommended Plugins: Yoast, All in One SEO
Statistics
Having a way to check data and statistics of your website is very important so you know if you really need the website or plan how to drive more traffic to it. Having spent so much resources (Money and time) in creating your website it would be good to know the number of visitors at a particular period, where your visitors are located, who referred them (search engine) and the pages of your websites that interest your visitors.
Recommended Plugins: MonsterInsights, WP Statistics
Resources
YouTube
Websites
This is just to give you an overview of what WordPress is and some basic plugins you would need. But of course, you would install more plugins depending on the functionality you want on your website.
