How to Build a WordPress Website | The Ultimate Guide to Build a WordPress Website

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Recommended Plugins

• Akismet Anti-Spam – a must-have if you have comments turned on.  This will weed out most of the spam comments automagically – you’ll never have to be bothered by spam again.
• Bloom (Premium) email opt-in plugin from Elegant Themes with a purchase of Divi or included free with any WP Design Lab web design course or service.
• Divi Coming Soon – Great for easily creating a coming soon or maintenance page
• Monarch (Premium) from Elegant Themes with a purchase of Divi or included free with any WP Design Lab web design course or service.
• Recent Post with Thumbnails – a super, simple plugin that makes it easy to create sidebar widgets with thumbnails
• Site Kit by Google – Site Kit by Google is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site.  Manage your Google Analytics from your WordPress Dashboard.
• UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – Sleep like a baby at night knowing your site is backed up and secure.
• WPOptimize – Clean, Compress, Cache – an all-in-one plugin that cleans your database, compresses your images, and caches your site.
• WPS Hide Login – a very light plugin that lets you easily and safely change the URL of the login form page to anything you want. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules. It simply intercepts page requests and works on any WordPress website. The wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page become inaccessible

How to Build a WordPress Website | Tips, Tricks and Secret Hacks

Here are 20 tips, tricks, and secret hacks to make your DIY WordPress Website awesome.

The goal of every website is to deliver information that is compelling, in a user-friendly way that incents conversion.

Keep it Simple – Forget clever copy, be plain and clear.  The best pages are singularly focused on a single call to action.

Make it Easy – make sure it is easy for visitors to buy, call, or whatever action they need to take to satisfy their needs. (not yours)

Focus on the basics and create a great user experience with a WordPress theme that complements your business and website content. 

Speed Counts – Make sure your site loads fast.  Visitors don’t want to wait for your site to load + Google ranks your site higher if you have lightning-fast speed. Neil Patel has a great article on scoring 100% on Google’s SpeedTest

It’s all About Your Target Audience – never has the statement “it’s not about you” been more true.  Everything you put on your website should be designed to solve the problem your visitor needs to solve.

Make it Mobile – Surprisingly between about 50 percent of all browsing is done now done on a mobile device.  For many lifestyle and food blogs that number can be as high as 80%.

Use Plugins Sparingly – Plugins are like apps for WordPress and they do all sorts of great things, but too many can slow down your site. And poorly written apps can create a security risk.

Learn from Experts – There are lots of experts teaching DIY WordPress design.  Learning from an expert can help you gain confidence quickly.  Instead of spending hours trying to build your site free tutorials, it can be valuable to take a course or hire a DIY Web Design guide.

Join Facebook Groups – There are tons of Facebook groups that make it easy to connect with other WordPress users.  Most WP themes have a group where the community can help you find answers to questions.  There are groups for beginners to share the journey with others and get help from Experts.

Keywords are Your Friends – Keywords are words and phrases that convey the ideas and topics of your content to search engines. They are the words and phrases that searchers use when searching the web for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems, you may hear them referred to as  “search queries”.  Keywords inform Google and other search engines about your content (posts, pages, and media).  They play a significant role in helping your site show up in Google search results.  Learn More.

Get Social – Create social profiles for the social media platforms that are used by your target audience. 

• LinkedIn is for professional business to business sharing.
• Pinterest is a visual search engine popular with DIY types, foodies, lifestyle, and work from home types.  About 70% of Pinterest users are female.
• Facebook allows you to capture the power of your “friends” + manage groups and pages.  Good for most demographics.
• Instagram is great for connecting in a visual conversation with a younger demographic.  With1 billion monthly active and over 70% are under the age of 35. Users spend an average of 53 minutes per day. 

Use dashes and not underscores when naming your files in WordPress. Google see them as one big word and won’t understand what the file means, therefore won’t be able to serve up your great content.  Correct Example: The-ultimate-guide-to-WordPress-Web-design  Wrong Example: The_ultimate_guide_to_WordPress_Web_design.  Google will see this TheultimateguidetoWordPressWebdesign.  Not helpful to Google.

Optimize your images and always use Image Alt Text to your advantage. Make sure your images are optimized for the web so they load fast and look great.  Additionally, all images should have an Image Alt Text that can help improve your SEO and Google rankings.

Only use a sidebar if it makes sense – it’s not 2004 anymore. A sidebar can be a major distraction from your primary message for the page.  If you choose to use a sidebar keep it neat and clean and make sure everything that’s included ads value.

Back up your website regularly – Try UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore.  You’ll sleep well at night knowing your content is backed up and if there should be a technical problem you’ll easily be able to restore your site without losing any content.

This plugin allows you to set custom backups to happen automatically.

Store your backups off your website – always store your backups to a 3rd party storage, like Google Drive, DropBox, etc.

Make it easy for Google to Love You always write with Google and SEO in mind, using keyword-rich content.

Get creative with your homepage.  Tell your unique story with a creative custom homepage.  Use words, images, and videos to tell the story and help visitors, know, like, and trust you. WordPress has a default homepage that is basic, but not very attractive. Make your website stand out and look professional by using a theme that helps to tell your story.

Get to know your website’s performance with Google Analytics add the Google Site Kit plugin to your website to make it easy to follow from your WordPress dashboard.

People Buy from People they Know, Like and Trust. Include an “About Us” page on your website to show your visitors you’re a trustworthy person and/or business.  A short video that shows your companies employees and personality is great for creating trust.

Navigation that Works – make sure that your top-level navigation (navbar) enhances the customer journey.  make it easy for visitors to solve their problems with the solutions you offer.

Make it Beautiful + Useful – Use visuals and video content to add context to your content and break up long pages of text. text on your website pages.

Keep Up-to-Date and Stay Current – Update your WordPress site and plugins regularly. WordPress will tell you when updates are released. This will keep your website looking fresh and working efficiently. There is a new feature that updates everything automatically – this sounds awesome but do not enable this feature.  Some updates may cause your site to fail, especially if you are using certain types of caching to speed up your site.

Use social proof and testimonials – Are you getting great reviews on Google? Do you receive grateful emails?  Are people raving about you Facebook?  Do you get repeat customers from word-of-mouth?  Add social proof and a testimonial section to your homepage to help new visitors get to know, like, and trust you.

Keep your site secure – there are lots of ways to keep a WordPress website secure, but there are some simple easy to do security hack you should do immediately

1. Hide your WordPress login.  It not hard to guess mygreatsite.com/wp-admin.  This can be easily accomplished with a simple plugin.
2. Use a secure user name and password.  You guessed it p admin is not a good user name (and neither is your name).  
3. Consider adding a security suite.  Ther is a free and paid version of this plugin.