Are you a developer, marketer or a startup owner willing to grow your business across the internet? Well, WordPress has got your needs covered. It eases your web development journey by simplifying the way websites are developed and designed.
WordPress is open-source software that provides you with an easy-to-use platform to create your websites and incorporate user-friendly functionalities into your sites. It has become quite popular to the extent that it currently supports 43.1% of the total websites on the internet.
Getting Started with WordPress
Getting started with WordPress might seem to be an overwhelming task for you. However, moving step by step will ease your job.
Before you practically start developing your incredible websites, follow these few steps to get your thoughts precisely translated into a magnificent web design.
- Read necessary documentation related to WordPress Installation to have a seamless installation experience.
- Get a domain and suitable hosting plan to give an identity to your site and publish your site to an online network database.
- Plan your content and site details to craft your site accordingly. Be well aware of your site requirements, the nature of the site and the potential target audience.
- Install WordPress and set it up as you want it to work for you.
10 Things to Do After Installing WordPress
Once you are done with installing WordPress, you are all set to begin developing your sites. However, the site creation journey ahead might seem tiresome to you.
Breaking your journey into a few steps will make it easier for you to come up with incredible site designs and creative functionalities.
Here, we will discuss 10 things that you must remember to do after installing WordPress. Doing these things will streamline your site creation process and let you build a robust blog, website or E-commerce store that converts.
1. Add Site Title and Tagline
The first thing you should do after installing WordPress is to add a suitable title to your website and a tagline.
Site Title is the name of your website, brand or store. It provides a unique identity to your website and a way for your followers, audience and customers to search for your website.
To add a title to your website, go to Settings > General in your WordPress Dashboard.
The tagline appears right below your site title on your website’s header, depending upon the theme. It provides you with a way to express your brand’s purpose or mission.
If you don’t have a tagline to add to your site, you can simply delete the dummy text and leave it blank.
2. Alter Permalink Structure
Permalinks, also referred to as URLs, are the links to various pages, posts, and categories on your website.
They are a combination of letters, numbers and symbols that appear in your address bar and are unique for every content on your site.
WordPress offers various structures for permalinks to add to your website. You can even choose a customized structure as per your own choice.
Permalinks are highly crucial for the SEO of your website. The default permalink structure contains ambiguous combinations of numbers and symbols.
Hence, you must alter your permalink structure by going to Settings > Permalinks in your dashboard.
It is highly recommended to use the “Post name” structure for your permalinks as it improves the SEO of your website and helps rank your site content.
3. Update Your Profile
WordPress offers you a great feature to keep your profile as per your needs. Once you are done with installation, make sure to complete and update your profile.
In the admin panel, go to Users > Your Profile to update your profile.
The profile section is an opportunity for you to customize your WordPress experience. Not only can you choose the colour scheme as per your preferences, but you can enable or disable the visual editor, toolbar and keyboard shortcuts, too.
Furthermore, you can add your name, and brief biographical info and update your picture too. You can also update the password for your profile to keep it secure.
4. Remove Excess Content
The moment you first open your site interface on WordPress, you will find some dummy content already there. This content works as a default placeholder that guides you about how to use various sections of your WordPress site.
This content should be deleted to clear your website from this sort of excess dummy content.
You should first delete the sample posts and pages from your website. For deleting sample posts, go to Posts > All Posts select the dummy post and select the trash option to delete them.
Similarly, go to Pages > All Pages and select the sample pages. Use the trash option to delete them from your WordPress website.
Likewise, you will see some pre-installed themes in the themes section of your website. You can delete these unwanted themes to save some space on your database.
To delete a WordPress theme from your dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes and select the delete option. You can not delete those themes that are currently activated on your website.
5. Choose a Suitable Theme
WordPress themes are a collection of pre-designed templates that modify the front-end display of your website. WordPress themes are a potential way to design your website with convenient installation and one-click activation.
WordPress offers you a wide range of themes to choose from as per the nature of your website. You can download a theme by going to Appearance > Themes and click on “Add New”.
From the themes directory, you can choose a theme either from a search box or by exploring the theme categories. You can download a theme and activate it to your website to get the front-end outlook of your website modified.
It is highly crucial to choose a theme that fits well with the niche and nature of your website. With a properly chosen theme, not only does your website outlook significantly improve but navigation gets easier for your website visitors too.
6. Add a Contact Form
Communicating and interacting with your audience is crucial to building trusted relations with your customers and visitors. WordPress makes it quite simple to let your visitors reach you.
WordPress offers you various plugins to create appealing Contact forms for your audience.
To create a Contact form, go to Contact > Add New.
Here, you can add fields like Email address, name, subject, message and others as needed. You can also add a captcha to prevent spam messages.
Using this form, your site visitors will be able to reach you and send their queries.
7. Monitor Analytics of your Site
Monitoring your website analytics is highly crucial to track your site performance. Analytics highlight key insights related to your website and web pages.
Various free and paid plugins are available to monitor your site analytics. However, Google Analytics is a highly popular one that lets you monitor your site performance free.
You can add Google Analytics to your site by creating an account on Google Analytics and getting a tracking code for your website.
With Google Analytics you get details about the number of visitors, real-time visitors and session duration of visitors.
Moreover, you can track the source of traffic, most visited pages as well and visitors’ breakdown based on gender, device and geographical location.
Precise interpretation of Google Analytics data helps you promote your website better. It helps you determine areas where further improvement is needed to stay ahead of your competitors.
8. Keep a Backup Plan
Backups are quite crucial in an online world where an unexpected glitch or technical error can lead to the loss of your important data.
Backups tend to be very useful in such a scenario as they let you keep your data secured. With properly built backups, you never have to lose your essential data, and you can retrieve your content whenever needed.
WordPress doesn’t come with any built-in feature to back up your website data. However, it does offer a wide variety of plugins to safely backup your databases and files.
To back up your site content, you can move to plugins and search for backup-related plugins. Some of the popular plugins for this purpose are BackWPup, BackupBuddy, Duplicator and many others.
Always keep a well-developed backup strategy as you continue your site creation journey. This will prevent you from the consequences of any mishap that leads to the loss of your data.
9. Strategize Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Plan
The world of the internet is constantly in a race for content ranking. With 1.13 Billion websites across the internet, the success of your website is highly dependent on the ranking of your content.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of ranking your content using different SEO techniques. With precise optimization, your site content ranks higher in the search results.
After creating your websites or blogs, you must not forget to incorporate effective SEO strategies. These include ON-Page, OFF-Page, Technical and local SEO.
WordPress eases your SEO journey by providing various SEO plugins that make it easier for you to implement SEO techniques. You can install these plugins, and after a brief setup, you’ll be good to go.
Some of the most popular and common plugins include Yoast SEO, RankMath SEO, Monster Insights and SemRush SEO.
10. Secure your WordPress Site
Websites are highly prone to security threats and potential attacks from cyber invaders. Without optimal security measures installed, your websites can easily be attacked by hackers leading to misuse and loss of your site data.
However, WordPress offers you loads of potential ways to keep your websites secure and protected. With continuous updates, WordPress keeps your website up-to-date and secure from malware threats.
WordPress offers you an opportunity to keep strong passwords and incorporate user permissions for authorized access. You can also enable two-factor authentication and security questions to prevent threatening login attempts.
Using WordPress, you can install various backup and security plugins to keep your website content secure. Common security plugins include Wordfence, Sucuri, Jetpack, Security Ninja, MalCare Security and many others.
Conclusion
WordPress is a highly popular and convenient tool to simplify your web development journey. WordPress offers you a platform to create impressive and captivating websites, blogs and E-Commerce stores.
However, a proper understanding of the tool is highly crucial to come up with quality content. You can use various features of WordPress to keep your site content secure and backed up. You can also customize your websites as per the requirements of your potential audience.
WordPress helps you incorporate creative functionalities into your website using plugins. Ranking your content, as well as monitoring your site performance, gets significantly easier with WordPress.
With optimal understanding and utilisation of the features, your web development journey becomes quite convenient with WordPress.
