Building your WordPress website is a lot like building a house. As you begin building a house you start by designing the house with blueprints. And once you have your design, you being to lay the foundation so that you can build the rest of the house on top of a solid base.
There’s a very wise and insightful parable in the Bible about how foolish it is to build your house upon a poor foundation. If you aren’t careful, your house will not stand the test of time. What is true for building houses is also true for building websites. Unfortunately, most people who are unfamiliar with WordPress only think about the design and give no thought to the foundation of the website. Perhaps these people have come from the world of static HTML and CSS websites, or perhaps they just don’t know enough about Dynamic CMS based websites like WordPress.
My seminar which was presented at the Oahu Online Business Meetup covers many areas of building a solid foundation for WordPress to run on. Some tips from the seminar include:
- Don’t use a cheap web host. WP Engine, Siteground, and Lightning Base specialize in WordPress and are better than the cheap guys.
- Use a good theme like anything from StudioPress or Elegant Themes
- Use high quality plugins (Premium plugins or Free plugins which have been recently updated for the latest version of WordPress, have thousands of downloads, and are highly rated with a 3.5 or better rating)
- Always have an off site backup of your website by using Vaultpress, BackupBuddy, or BackWPup
- Install a plugin like iThemes Security or Wordfence to protect yourself from hackers
- Speed up your website by using a caching plugin like WP Super Cache
- Optimize your images (resize them before uploading to your site, then use WP Smush it)
- Make your website known to search engines by setting up WordPress SEO by Yoast
- And of course, when in doubt, hire a professional like me. 🙂 Shameless plug.
We had a great time and answered a ton of questions from Multiple Languages on WordPress to marketing, and everything in between. If you would like my help with your WordPress website, I am available to help you. Click here and fill out this secure form and I’ll get in touch with you shortly…
