Did you know that 62% of the top 100 fast-growing businesses use WordPress for their websites?
However, if you are unfamiliar with this open-source website builder, you could find it challenging to understand where to start building your website.
Keep reading our guide, which includes nine steps for creating your WordPress website.
9 Steps To Build Your WordPress Website
- Choose A Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is the first step in the WordPress website-building process. Your brand’s identity is reflected in your domain name, which also serves as the URL for your website. People will use this to find your business. So you need to make sure you select the right domain.
You’ll need to brainstorm an inventory of ideas for your website and ensure that your website domain reflects who you are. When you generate your domain name, you must ensure it is:
- Fitting with your brand’s identity
- Easy and simple for your audience to remember
- Unique to your brand
- Short and memorable
- Easy to type, spell, and pronounce
- Avoid hyphens
- Use a single domain
- Avoid numbers
Once you come up with a domain name, you may visit a website like GoDaddy or Name.com to see if the domain is available.
- Register Your Domain Name And Select A Web Hosting Provider
Once you have selected your domain name, the next two steps are: Register your domain and choose your hosting provider.
These two parts fall under one step. You can use a website host that handles both tasks for you, making it easier to create a WordPress website. For example, Bluehost provides you with domain name registration and web hosting.
If you don’t utilize an all-in-one provider, you’ll need to find a website to register your domain name and a website to host your website before linking them together.
For example, you can use Google to register your domain and WP Engine to host your website. You can take either path for your website.
However, make sure to invest in website design services that can make your every step easier in building a professional WordPress website.
- Install A WordPress
Once you have selected a web server and a domain, you must incorporate WordPress into your website. This work will depend upon the host you use. Website hosts, like WP Engine and Kinsta, will install WordPress for you.
Other web hosts may require you to install the WordPress app or something likewise. You can easily Google your website host to find out the procedure for installing WordPress.
- Choose A WordPress Theme
When building a WordPress website, you want it to represent your company and provide your viewers with a unique experience. So, you need to select a theme that best fits your business. WordPress provides 8000 themes of multiple categories that you can look at for your website design.
When deciding on a theme, look for ones that offer the features you need to create your website. You can check the “Tags” section on WordPress to see some features of your theme. Above all, make sure you select a theme that is responsive.
Responsive themes enable your website to adjust to all devices, ensuring all users have a great experience on your site regardless of the device they use.
- Add Pages To Your Website
Once you select your theme, the next step is to add pages to your WordPress website. Your website is a hub of information for your audience. So make sure you include all the information you need they need about your company. At a minimum, you should have:
- Your homepage
- Your About Us page
- Your product/service pages
- Your Contact Us page
When adding pages to your site, also make sure you build an intuitive navigation with it. Navigation is what users use to move all over your website As you add more pages, think about where to place them in your navigation so it is organized and easy to use.
- Customize Your Pages
Once you’ve built your page structure, the next is to customize your pages in such a way that they look and feel consistent. All your product pages should mostly have the same format because if similar pages don’t have a consistent look and feel, your website will look chaotic and disorganized.
To ensure your website design looks cohesive, create a style guide that will help you determine the:
- Color schemes
- Fonts
- Image style
- Element placements
- Page formatting
- Add Plugins
If you want to know how to build your website effectively, add plugins to your website. Plugins allow you to add functionality to your site that conveys a better user experience to your audience.
WordPress offers 58,000+ plugins that you can use on your website to help enhance it. You can add multiple plugins to your site. But make sure they can integrate with each other because if they don’t function together, it will cause more problems on your website.
- Check Website Load Time
The next step is to assess your website’s load time after you’ve added content and integrated your plugins. When you create a WordPress website, you incorporate a number of components that can slow down your site and harm performance.
Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to determine how quickly your site currently loads. This tool helps you check how your site loads on mobile and desktop. Then, it provides you with suggestions on how to speed up your website.
You can improve site load time by:
- Removing plugins you don’t need
- Optimizing image file sizes
- Enabling browser caching
- Using a content distribution network (CDN)
- Test And Improve Your Website
Once you’ve finished creating a WordPress website and launched it for the web, your work is not done here. In order to provide a better experience and drive better results, you must keep an eye on the performance of your website. Working with a top web design company can help you complete this step successfully.
You can use A/B testing to test your pages and experiment with one element at a time to observe how the changes affect your site’s functionality. Testing each element separately will help you identify the factors that affect your page’s performance so you can gradually improve your website.
