WORDPRESS GUIDE 2021
Building a website is no longer a game of developers as of now millions of platforms offer free website building. With just a few clicks you can create an amazing business website. WordPress guide is among the most used platforms of website building. It has created more than 76 million websites and the count continues! Before we get into the building WordPress guide let us give you an overview of what WordPress actually is.
WHAT IS WORDPRESS?
It is a free and open-source platform that offers several themes, templates, plugins, and other features all for free. Although, you need to buy some storage or other features if you want a professional-looking website. It is free and supports all facilitating stages with PHP and MySQL. WordPress can control practically any sort of site, from a basic blog to a full-highlighted business site.
Utilize WordPress
You can even utilize WordPress to make an online store by utilizing the well-known Woo Commerce module. What’s more, is that it is a CMS platform that is continually refreshed with new forms that improve security, including new highlights, and improve generally speaking performance. By CMS in WordPress guide, it is conceivable to make a few authoritative clients, everyone having various advantages. WordPress is simple enough that anybody can utilize it. It’s likewise profound enough that many web experts pick WordPress as the beginning stage for custom sites.
WORDPRESS.COM OR WORDPRESS.ORG?
People often get confused in choosing between these two. The main difference in these is the hosting server.
WordPress.org allows you to host your website from which you can upload custom themes and plugins whereas wordpress.com doesn’t do this. It hosts your website for you which can limit features and also gives you a domain name that includes wordpress.com in the URL. It limits you from customizing your website and use third-party themes or plugins. As you can see that wordpress.org is ideal for your website hence this guide will be on wordpress.org building criteria.
Here are the keys to how to use WordPress guide. We’ll further discuss them below.
- Domain setup
- Hosting where files are stored
- Installation
- Choose theme
- Install plugins
- Create pages
- Customizing
- Optimization
- Secure your website
- DOMAIN SETUP:
A domain name is an address of your website from which users will get to you. In wordpress.org you create/buy your domain. But before creating a domain name you should know how to create it. Which included how short, branded, and customized it should be. Well, there is a lot of competition in the market hence creating a unique and original domain name would be difficult. There are ways to create an original domain name like you can add your organization name or if it’s long then just add its initials. You can also add the niche your website belongs to. Or you can add keywords of your brand’s look and feel.
Once you know what name you want, you can now register it on the platform. And this registration demands money. You have to buy your domain name and it can vary from $12 to $15 per year. But there are several ways to get a free domain one of which includes a hosting partner!
- HOSTING:
Hosting is significant because it impacts your site’s speed, security, and unwavering quality. It is the place where all your site stuff will store. It’s where your site sits and holds back to be gotten to by visitors. To keep your site on the web, you need to lease worker space from a web hosting organization. And WordPress widely uses Bluehost as its hosting platform.
The reasons why you should choose Bluehost as your hosting service are:
- It is cheap and provides you with a free domain.
- It’s a user-friendly with no complications.
- It is ideally designed for WordPress that makes sure your website’s flow.
Just when you start working on Bluehost, you have to choose a plan that varies from basic to pro. That is from $2.95 to $13.95 per month. The most common is a basic and choice plus.
After selecting a plan, you have to add the domain name. Either you add a domain name that you have already registered or create a free new domain.
Next comes some personal information to set up your account.
After setting up your credit card details, you’ll receive a verifying mail which will take you to the dashboard and this is where you install WordPress.
- INSTALLATION:
Whenever you’re signed in, Bluehost will show you a simple to-utilize wizard that takes you through the way toward introducing WordPress on your facilitating arrangement. All that Bluehost requires to introduce WordPress for you is the website name, password, and some other info. Now you need to tap on the ‘Establishment Complete’ connection, and it will take you to the screen with your WordPress login URL and secret key. Whenever you’ve finished the wizard, your site is introduced and all set!
- CHOOSE THEME:
After getting logged in, you first have to decide the visual look of your website. For this purpose, WordPress has designed hundreds of free themes that are templates to install. Themes have many features, different layouts, font style, color palette, and other appealing visual features. These themes can be free and paid according to the features they use. A lot of free themes are on the web on outsider locales, and there’s likewise an entire another universe of paid subjects that are circulated by autonomous topic stores and even topic commercial centers called ThemeForest.
WordPress comes with a basic theme that is of solid color and not so appealing and to change that you have some steps to go through.
To change the theme, head over to your dashboard, where you’ll find the option of ‘Appearances’ then to ‘themes’.
By clicking it, you’ll see a colorful screen where hundreds of themes are available. Pick any theme which suits your niche. There will be an option of ‘install’ on the selected theme.
Once you install, activate your theme. There will be an option to customize it and hence begins your customization.
- INSTALL PLUGINS:
WordPress Plugins resemble applications for your WordPress site. They permit you to add highlights to your WordPress site. Think contact structure, photograph displays, and so forth they broaden the standard use of your site by adding some truly necessary highlights. As you’re sorting out some way to make a site all alone, modules are how you can get some extraordinary highlights without knowing any coding.
Free and Paid Plugins
There are free and paid plugins and you can choose whatever fits your need. They are available in the plugin directory. They are as easy to install as themes. Some of the most essential plugins are Seedprod, Monsterinsights, Yoast SEO, Optimole, WP forms lite, etc. through these plugins you can create custom designs and layouts or add a contact form to your website.
To install a plugin, go to the plugins option in the appearances column. Search the name of the plugin you want and the rest of the process is the same as themes. You’ll get an install button and then the activation.
- CREATE CONTENT:
WordPress allows you to create content through two types. What are pages and posts? The difference between the two is basic. WordPress posts can be arranged, labeled, chronicled. WordPress presents are utilized to distribute the time-delicate substance. Interestingly, pages are primarily for static, dateless substance. They don’t have classifications or labels. Like About pages are genuine examples of pages.
Now how to add these is a simple task. To add a post, there is an option named ‘post’ in the dashboard. Click it and a list of sub-options will appear. Choose ‘add new’. There you go. You can now edit your post. Choose a title, add images, insert links, and format just the way you want.
To add pages, see the ‘pages’ option in the dashboard. Click the ‘add new’, and the page editor interface will be on your screen. The look of the editor will depend on your theme. Here you can add title, and start adding content according to the type of page you want to make.
- CUSTOMIZING:
Your content will easily attract an audience if it’s visually appealing. Try to give a neat presentation of your website by adding some information and colors to it. Following are some steps to customize your website.
- Setup the home page– go to settings-‘reading’, dashboard page. You’ll see a ‘front page display’ option, from there choose ‘static’ and add pages and blogs you created before. You can choose a page titled ‘home’ for your front page.
- Choose a title– go to ‘general settings’ from the dashboard. Now add some basic information along with your good-looking title.
- Frontpage sections– underneath the customization panel, there is this section which let you customize other available homepages like feature through which you can tell the audience what you offer.
Then we have the ‘about’ section and ‘team’ where you can create a page introducing your team members.
- Setup comments– go to settings-‘discussion’ panel. Here you can set what type of people you want to comment on your website and how many. Also, the type of comments you want to be visible for all.
- Colors– you can set the color palette for your chosen theme in the customizer panel.
- Navigation panel– create a navigation menu for your audience to make it digestible. Go to appearance-‘menu’. From here you can choose the pages you want to add to the menu like the important ones, contact or About mainly.
Next, you will adjust the position of pages. There will be an option of location ‘primary’ or ‘footer’ choose one and click ‘save’.
- OPTIMIZATION:
After all these major steps, now it’s time for a little optimization process. It will enhance your website more and speed up the website more. It will guarantee that your pages load rapidly and effectively, subsequently, leaving your guests cheerful and needing to return for additional. The initial phase in advancing your WordPress site is setting up WordPress caching plugins like WP super cache and fastest cache. It will demand fewer records and data from the worker which eventually prompts snappier stacking. Secondly, you should use images of 100×100 size so that the visitor’s browser will not have to use heavy images. You can also zip your heavy images and for that, you can enable ‘GZip compression’. You can do this by installing the plugin named ‘GZip ninja speed’.
- SECURING YOUR WEBSITE:
The most important thing to do is to secure your website from hackers and cheaters. There are many steps but first, check the update of your WordPress. By keeping it up to date you can fix the vulnerability and prevent exploitation. To do that go to dashboard-‘updates’. Creating a backup will help you a lot. Again use plugins like ‘updraft plus’ to automate backups!
This was the basic beginner’s guide for setting up a website on wordpress.org. there are many other things you can play with on WordPress. You can create podcasts, an e-commerce store for your earnings, or another type of website like a review one or a job website. So, don’t let yourself be limited. Explore WordPress and find some good features to enhance your website. It is the easiest platform to build a professional-looking website all you need is to find those features and a creative mind to apply them in the right places!