Ultimate Guide: How to Build a WordPress Site from Scratch in 10 Easy Steps

1. Introduction

This ultimate guide will walk you through the steps necessary to build a WordPress website from scratch. This guide is for you if you are trying to develop a website but don’t have the technical expertise, are not a web developer, or a technical person. The guide starts from the ground up and assumes you have no prior knowledge of how to design a website. For the purposes of this resource, I will be using my own teaching website as the example, so you can see a real-world example of how to build a website. My website is located at [Link] This will also allow me to effectively teach someone how to create a website because they can just follow along. If you have a different web hosting provider and are not sure if it will work, don’t worry. If your web hosting provider has cPanel, you can install WordPress through cPanel.
WordPress is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to build a website without any technical knowledge. It is the world’s easiest to use CMS that still allows you an unheard-of amount of power and flexibility. WordPress is incredibly easy to learn, it powers a wide array of types of websites, and it has a very supportive community. Anything you want to do with WordPress is possible. The fact that WordPress is free means that the software (which includes themes and plugins) is free to download and install. You will, however, need to pay for a domain and web hosting. This guide will show you how to put your website on the internet in your own domain (like [Link] and how to get web hosting. Domain and web hosting are generally very cheap, and a good service can be obtained for about $50 per year.

1.1. What is WordPress?

With versatility and ease of use being its strong points, you can generate a website designed to your needs with ease. At the same time, someone else could use this tool to generate a completely different site. Gone are the days where static HTML decides the layout of your website. Static HTML is fine if you know what you want at the start and if everything goes right the first time. But this isn’t reality, things aren’t always perfect the first time, and you often decide to make changes to your website. Static HTML is not easily changed, and to completely change the layout of your site is a painstaking task. Dynamic server-side scripting like what WordPress employs is the way to go. With WordPress, the end product is a website that is easily maintainable, and you will have no problems making changes at short notice. A dynamic site is also essential for a small business whose target audience is internet users. Decisions often change in the business world, and responsiveness to the market is key. If you need to add new content to your product or service, this can be done easily with WordPress.

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that enables the generation and modification of web content. It is primarily used for building websites. It is open source and licensed under GNU General Public License v2 – basically this means that WordPress is free software. Whilst WordPress is free to use, you will still need to pay for things such as a domain name and hosting. This is a great thing for the consumer as it enables development and variation in the marketplace. With many companies trying to compete for your business, you can be sure to find a really good deal on a service. This is basic economics: when there is lots of competition for a consumer’s money, the consumer wins! This is exemplified by the amount of great deals that you can find visiting web hosting companies. Because there are so many web hosting companies, you can actually find dirt-cheap hosting. Web hosting is no longer expensive and the cheap ones usually offer better services than the really expensive ones a few years ago. Now that you have a good understanding of what WordPress is, you may be wondering why it is a fantastic tool for building a website.

1.2. Benefits of Building a Site from Scratch

Time for a reality check: how many times have you heard about someone building their blog or website off a WordPress template and all of a sudden become an overnight internet celebrity? It’s possible, but that’s the same mindset as winning the lottery. Avoiding the traditional website costs of a back-end web developer, a custom designed website, and taking it step by step building the website from the ground up, potentially WordPressing the site at a later date, this is how to be successful long term. You can’t have a money making vehicle targeting the long tail of search with no index because some webmaster copied and pasted in non-validated table driven layout and design. Search engines love fresh, dynamic content. How you build your website will determine how long you can keep and maintain a refreshing new look to the search engines. Dynamic websites with a content management system (CMS) are becoming increasingly popular over the legacy static HTML websites. WordPress is a great choice and here are 10 reasons why…

2. Planning Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a content management system that can be used for creating a website. Whether it is for personal use or for a business, the main thing you need to consider before developing your website is planning exactly what it is that you want out of your site. As with building any kind of website, you must think about your target audience. What sort of people are they? What are they going to the site for? What do you want them to do once they are there? You need to take into consideration the age and interests of your target audience and decide on what will grab their attention.

Using the example of a business website, the purpose should be attracting customers or sales. Generally, it is better to use a clean, professional-looking site with a simple navigation system. Most of your content will be in the form of text and images. A good ranking in a search engine will help to bring in more visitors. You might use your site to complete this by looking into it and using keywords as “meta tags” and submitting your site to search engines. This is a very basic form of SEO, but it’s better than doing nothing. Now, the people using a site like this will probably just be looking for something specific. Whether it is information on a specific topic or a product that you are selling. A simple site with quick load times and easy to find content will keep them happy.

2.1. Defining Your Site’s Purpose

When a person or a business creates a new website, the main goal for the website should be the driving force behind the site’s existence. Without a focused goal or purpose, a website will have limited success or none at all. Whether it’s creating an online community, selling a product, or providing a service, the website’s purpose should be clearly defined from the start. It’s often a good idea to write out the purpose in a couple of paragraphs for your records. This will help you stay on course during the design and development process. If you’re building a site for someone else, have them give you a clear idea of what they hope to accomplish with the site. If their ideas are unclear or too complex, try to extract the main goal from their thoughts and expand on it with examples. Once you’ve done that, provide a summary for them to look over and make sure you’ve understood them correctly. This will help avoid misunderstandings and it shows that you’re dedicated to building a website that meets their needs.

2.2. Choosing a Domain Name

Omitting any confusion from your site visitors is key. (i.e., brandnametshirts.com vs. brandname.com) This means that you should strive for a domain name that is relatively short, easy to remember, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce. Simplicity is great when it comes to a domain name, as it reduces the risk of potential visitors mistyping or misspelling it. This is also helpful for word-of-mouth advertising, as your site visitors will be able to remember and relay the domain name, allowing for better retention and more potential visitors. On the other hand, a complex domain name might create a puzzle out of finding your site and turn off potential visitors. This might not be relevant for all sites, and some may just be used for personal URL shortening, testing and learning purposes, but it is still a good rule of thumb to keep in mind.

It’s also important to think of what your domain name says about your website, and what kind of image it will convey. A domain name that includes your exact company or site name can contribute to branding, and can make your site appear even more professional, especially if the domain is also used for email. If you are trying to sell something, you may want to include common search keywords for what you are selling in your domain name. This can be helpful for SEO (search engine optimization) and getting visitors who are looking for what you are selling by typing the word into Google. This tactic can also be useful if your site is the official site for a certain topic, as it will attempt to “grab” visitors who are using search engines to find specific information on that topic. If you’re into personal branding, a site with your own domain name can be very crucial in getting your persona on the web, and can even be the central hub for all of your personal social media and other personal websites. This is especially true for job-seekers, as an online resume can be a useful tool in today’s digital age.

2.3. Selecting a Hosting Provider

One of the most important aspects of creating a site is its hosting provider. A hosting provider basically allows you to put your site onto the internet. Thus, a hosting provider is complicated like choosing real estate for a physical business. The market is overwhelmed with different hosting providers, all of them offering varying levels of features and prices. In order to pick the best hosting provider for your site, you need to prioritize what you are looking for and do some research.

First, you need to determine if the hosting provider is reliable. Reliability typically is measured in terms of uptime; how often the server is operational. There are many web hosting providers with cheap and almost free services but could be costlier in the long run. Imagine if your site was an online store and it frequently went offline. You would be losing a lot of potential customers and revenue. Pricing is related to the reliability of a hosting provider. A common saying “You get what you pay for” holds true in this situation. It is difficult these days to find a decent hosting provider that offers good uptime for a cheap price. Any type of free web hosting is very risky to get involved with because the company’s financial situation and the hosting quality could change at any moment. Any positive uptime or reliability should be backed up by customer reviews. A popular site, Webhostingtalk.com, offers user reviews for hundreds of hosting providers.

Another factor which you should consider is the type of technical support. This encompasses the methods of obtaining support, the speed of support, and the quality of support. Most hosting providers offer various methods of support including live chat, email, trouble ticket, and phone support. Phone support is the most favorable since it allows you to solve your issues directly through the phone. However, today many hosting providers offer subpar support and will try to avoid resolving issues or take a very long time to do so. Always ensure that the hosting provider has a good support response time. This is usually measured in terms of support tickets answered during a specific time period. Quality is the hardest thing to measure since it often varies from support staff to support staff. A good method of determining support quality is direct word of mouth from people who have used the hosting and searching for reviews.

3. Installing WordPress

Source: “Ultimate Guide: How to Build a WordPress Site from Scratch in 10 Easy Steps

Downloading the WordPress software Probably the easiest step in the whole process. Simply go to the WordPress official website, click on the download button, and save the file to your computer. You will get a .zip file that you can save to your hard drive. The package you’ve downloaded is actually the entire WordPress application. Now all you need to do is install the application. Step two will explain how to do this using FTP.

Creating a database This step is crucial. You need to create a database and assign a user to it with full permissions. The reason for creating a new database is simply to ensure that your site has its own unique database on the server. Uploading the WordPress software places all the files into the public_html directory. But the user will not be able to interact with the data from your website until a database is connected to it. Step-by-step guide to creating a MySQL database using cPanel. Open your web browser and navigate to [Link] Here you will be asked to enter your username and password, which you should have received from your host when you first opened an account. Enter this information and click OK. After entering your username and password, you will be brought to the cPanel main page. Different web hosts might have slightly different ways to access the cPanel, so if this method fails, you should ask your web host for direct access to your cPanel. The administrator should be able to supply you with a link, username, and password to access the cPanel.

3.1. Downloading the WordPress Software

Begin the installation process by downloading WordPress from the official website. To do this, visit the website [Link] and save the compressed file (in .zip format) to your hard drive. Next, navigate to the file that you have just downloaded, and use a program that supports .zip files to extract the contents of the file to a folder on your hard drive. If you are planning to install WordPress on a remote web server, download the files to your computer with a web browser and use FTP to upload the files to your server. If you want to use FTP, see the FTP Quick Start Guide. Note: If you downloaded the .zip file and are uploading to a remote web server, you must extract the files on your computer and then upload them via FTP. If you are uploading to a remote web server, you can most likely use cPanel and Fantastico to install WordPress. This is a quick way to install WordPress. If you are not sure how to create a database or where to upload the files, check out the new WordPress Tutorials. VideoPress – embedding video. The New Lightbox WordPress 3.1: Welcome to the Admin Bar wordpress.com Sign Ups. Simplified. With the files now extracted, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

3.2. Creating a Database

Before you install WordPress, you will need to create a database. In your hosting account, you will have an administration tool like phpMyAdmin to create your database. If your hosting service provides cPanel, it is a simple matter to find phpMyAdmin. This tool will be located in different places in various hosting services, but is typically quite easily located, and it provides an interface to deal with your databases. First, you will need to log in to your phpMyAdmin interface. Creating a database is quite simple and the first thing you need to do is to define its name. Choose a name that is unique and easy to remember, for you will need this information while installing WordPress. In the future, you may want to install more WordPress sites in the same database, so you should prefix each of your database names with something unique to your site, which you can easily remember. After you have defined your database, you can move on to create the database tables which will be used to store your data. Simply type the name of your database into the “Create new database” field, and press “Create”. This action will use your database, and a popup window will emerge. In this window, input “wp_” as your table name prefix, and also note to change this prefix to something else if you want to install other WordPress sites in the same database. Press “Go” and select “Privileges”. This is the final step to ensure that the actions you have carried out are done so correctly. Keep in mind whether you are running a local or a remote server, by default, users will require the CREATE privilege. This is more so for local servers – on remote servers you could upload the website via a user account with easily managed privileges and then update the account privileges. Setting up server environments will vary, it is important to understand the privileges correct configuration.

3.3. Uploading WordPress to Your Hosting Server

To install WordPress, you will need to upload the extracted files and folders to the desired location on your web server. Using a FTP client (such as FileZilla or SmartFTP), connect to your web server and upload the files to the desired location. If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. [Link], move or upload all contents of the wordpress directory (but not the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server. If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. [Link], rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like to use for your subdirectory and move or upload it there. Note: If your FTP client has an option to convert file names to lower case, make sure it’s disabled.

4. Configuring WordPress Settings

In this section, we will cover a few different settings that you can use to help optimize your WordPress site.

Set your permalinks. Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual pages and blog posts, as well as your category and tag archives. A permalink is the web address used to link to your content. The URL to each post should be permanent and never change, hence the name permalink.

By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers that are not human-readable. This is known as a query string. This setting is particularly useful if you would like to include the name of the article in the URL instead of the article ID. It is also useful for SEO purposes. Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a custom permalink structure in WordPress:

1. Login to WordPress. 2. Click on “Settings”. 3. Select “Permalinks”. 4. Choose one of the options other than “default”. 5. Click on “Save Changes”.

Customizing the site title and tagline. The next step is to customize your site title and tagline. This can be done by clicking on “Settings” and then “General”. For SEO purposes, it is better to have your site title set as an h2 header on the front page. By default, the title will be displayed as an h3 header. To fix this, simply customize the header.php file in your theme. Change the h3 tag in the title section to h2.

4.1. Setting Up Permalinks

The latest versions of WordPress have defaults to even more easy-to-understand permalinks. While this result in “cleaner” URLs, it may not be up to your requirement. You might want to modify them to increase their search engine friendliness, i.e. including index.php and/or a relevant .html. Perhaps you want to reflect a hierarchical structure to be employed in the post URL akin to using the category name. While this is not your first choice, I strongly recommend that you employ only one of the options discussed on the page. If you are not one hundred percent sure about the changes you want to make, test them with the Search-Links plugin first to see the results. Lastly, ensure that you backup your .htaccess file before making changes. This can be found in your root installation of WordPress. The file is hidden and can only be edited with an editor like Notepad. Making a mistake in this can result in a “500 internal server error” and not all pages being visible. A backup ensures you can re-upload the last working version. This file is very powerful and the method used for WordPress permalinks is only one instance of what it can achieve. Please refer to the Apache documentation to get a more in-depth look at what else is possible with this file. On the web server using Microsoft IIS, WordPress has a guide for friendly URLs using that server.

4.2. Customizing the Site Title and Tagline

This next step is short and sweet. This will walk you through how to customize the WordPress site title and tagline.

1. First, login to your WordPress admin area. 2. Now, go to the left-hand sidebar and click on “Settings” and then “General”. 3. Now, you are at the WordPress General Settings page. You will see the Site Title and Tagline settings at the top of the page.

Customizing the Site Title and Tagline

1. First, login to your WordPress admin area. 2. Now, go to the left-hand sidebar and click on “Settings” and then “General”. 3. Now, you are at the WordPress General Settings page. You will see the Site Title and Tagline settings at the top of the page. 4. Type in your site title and tagline, then click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Now that you have customized your site title and tagline, it is time to move on.

Setting Up Permalinks

After you have changed your site title and tagline, click the “Permalinks” link in the left-hand sidebar. This will take you to the Permalinks options page.

4.3. Adjusting Reading and Discussion Settings

After you have set the site title and metatags, the next step is to adjust the reading settings of your site. This is where you decide what appears on the front page of your site. If you want a static page (e.g. an About page) as the front page, and have your blog posts appear on a separate page, you can also do that. If you want your blog to be the front page of your site, and the site to show a list of posts, you can also do that. After all this, WordPress also gives you the option to select how many posts you would like to be displayed on each page. These reading settings give you great control over the layout of your site. The last setting on the reading settings page is to select what content appears in the RSS feed. By default, WordPress will show the full text of your posts in the feed, but you may prefer that it only shows a summary. This is useful as it can bring more traffic to your site, as users will have to visit your site to view the full post. This can also increase the chance of the visitor exploring your site and becoming a regular reader.

4.4. Installing Essential Plugins

Once you have completed the general initial set up of your website, it is now time to get into some more specific details that will help you improve your website. In this section, we will be trying to improve the overall functionality and features of the website. A plugin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is just an add-on to the website that can help improve the overall performance as well as help features a certain area of the website, e.g. SEO. Plugins are very useful whether you are using it to customize certain functions of the website or to improve your overall experience of WordPress. There are over 11,000 plugins available under the WordPress plugin directory and you could also try installing the Google Code search plugin, which will give you an extra line on your post editor. What it does is simple: anything you type, it will Google that phrase without having to open another window. This is also useful if you are developing ideas and are not sure if you are reusing old material. Overall, I believe that plugins will help you to solve and improve any features on your website, as well as improving the experience of developing your website using WordPress.

5. Designing Your WordPress Site

To design a website, the choice of its appearance is vitally important. The first thing you should do is to find and install a new theme. The standard theme may be good in terms of functionality and ease of use, but let’s face it, they are not the best looking themes out there. Many of you will want to create a site which looks good and is easy to use, so this is why a new theme is necessary. The theme you choose will greatly affect the look and style of your site; there are many themes to choose from, ranging from the flashy and colourful to the simple and elegant. The best thing is, you can get all this for free; simply choose a theme and press the install button. If for some reason you change your mind or do not like your new theme, you can simply uninstall and reactivate your old theme, your site will not lose any content or functionality. Now let’s move onto customizing the theme you have just installed. One thing you will notice with a newly installed theme is that it will most likely look nothing like the theme site you got it from. This is because the theme has probably been set to its default settings. To access the settings for your current theme, you need to go to Appearance > Theme Options. Depending on the theme you have chosen, there will be various settings available to change such as the color scheme, background, header, and layout. These options will vary greatly depending on the theme, but this is a great way to get your site looking exactly how you want it. If you are not happy with your new theme at any point, you can simply delete it as themes do not affect the content on your site.

5.1. Choosing and Installing a Theme

A theme is the fundamental component of a WordPress site. It contains the design and layout of a site including the header, background, color, font, and also includes dynamic features such as widgets and menus. The choices are also vast, there are thousands of themes out there from all capabilities and styles, so consider carefully what your needs are in a theme and what you are drawn to visually. Keep in mind the objective of your site and the audience. Do you want a modern site or a professional site? Do you want to appeal to a young audience or to older people? All of these things you should be aware of when considering a theme. Installing a theme is a simple process. Just log into the admin panel and go to Appearance > Add New Themes > Upload. Select the .zip file of the theme and press install now. Alternatively, you can upload the unzipped files to your /wp-content/themes folder. After installing a theme, enabling it is a simple process. With the right theme highlighted, press “Live Preview” to see your site with that theme or press “Activate” to set it live. This is also useful for changing the theme at a later date, with the Live Preview function allowing you to make sure the new theme is looking good before making it live.

5.2. Customizing the Site’s Appearance

Customizing a WordPress site goes way beyond tweaking a few settings or adding a custom header. It signifies making meaningful changes to the site’s presentation overall. In this section, you’ll be looking at the customizer and the theme options. There are also in-depth settings for individual elements of your site, such as changing the color or typography of a specific element. This is often the case when using a theme with many built-in design settings.

WordPress has a built-in theme customizer allowing you to preview changes to your theme. It is accessed by clicking on Appearance > Customize. This will load a preview of your site with options to make changes to the current theme.

The customizer is definitely the way forward as it gives theme developers the option to include all settings from the theme options page directly into the customizer. This means you have a live preview of all changes without having to visit the frontend to see how something looks before going back to make further changes.

5.3. Creating and Managing Menus

Creating a menu in WordPress is simple. But managing a menu and understanding the important role the menu plays in your site structure is critical, which will be discussed in this section.

First, prepare your menu. Before you prepare your menu, I would suggest you list down your pages and know their flow. After that, decide the placement of your menus. You have to know which menu is primary and which are secondary. Usually, primary menus are placed on top and secondary menus are placed on the sidebar. Once you have decided, you can start creating your menus.

In WordPress, the creation of menus is under Dashboard -> Appearance -> Menus. You can create a custom menu for your site just by giving it a menu name. Once you have created a menu, you can add pages, posts, and custom links into your menu through the options given on the left side of the menu. After you add the items into your menu, you can arrange the items by dragging them to your desired place, and you can also create a hierarchy item by making it a sub-item of a parent item.

5.4. Adding Widgets and Sidebars

Once you have chosen a theme for your WordPress site, you may decide that you would like to try and further personalize its design. Widgets and sidebars can be a great way to do this. They allow you to add various functions and features to your site so that you can arrange and display content in a particular way.

If you are using a theme that supports widgets, there will be a ‘widgetized’ area which will typically be found under Appearance -> Widgets. Each widget area will be defined by the theme, for example, there could be one widget area for a sidebar and another one in the footer. You can see in the screenshot below that this theme has two widget areas, one is being used for the left-hand sidebar and the other is being used for the footer. By dragging a widget into these areas, you will be able to display it in the corresponding location on your site. Note that not all widgets are equal, some may only be designed for use in the sidebar and if you drag them into a different widget area, it may cause formatting issues.

6. Creating and Managing Content

Now that your WordPress site is looking good, it’s time to add content. WordPress comes with two default content types: Posts and Pages. Posts are generally used to add regular blog entries or news items. On the other hand, Pages are more static and are usually used to create content such as “About Me” or “Contact Me”. You can create and manage the content of your site by clicking on the relevant links on the WordPress Administration Panel.

6.1 Adding Pages and Posts Adding a page or post is very simple. If you are writing a new post, you can do so by clicking Posts > Add New. This will take you to the post editor where you can enter the title and content of the post. After writing your post, you can click Publish and the post will be live on your site. If you are creating a static page, you can do so by clicking Pages > Add New. This is very similar to adding a new post. Static pages are often shown in the navigation bar of the site and can be used to display information to all the readers of the site. Once you have added a few pages or posts to your site, you will see the URLs of these pages listed in the form of a permalink. This is usually located just under the title of the page or post. A permalink is automatically generated based on the title of your page/post. This is WordPress’ way of creating search engine friendly URLs.

6.1. Adding Pages and Posts

Adding pages and posts is straightforward and easy. Both are vital to a beginner and the following person that has a small familiarity with WordPress. What is the distinction between a post and a webpage? A post is temporal in nature and is usually used to be part of information. Think of it like a piece in a newspaper. On the other hand, a webpage is a static and timeless and is something like what would be in a newspaper’s section. A great instance of a webpage is the ‘About Me’ section. Whether you are writing a private blog or a company website, using posts and pages you will want to organize your information, so user can find it. This is whenever categories and sub-categories comes in. He went to define sub categories and then categories. Introduced it may be confusing, however by the tip of the chapter you will be a professional at using categories and sub-categories.

6.2. Formatting and Styling Content

Formatting content in WordPress is an important task for many reasons. It serves as a way to separate your content so that it is easily readable and gives you the ability to control the presentation of your data. This can give your content a consistent style and professional look throughout. WordPress’ posts and pages formatting are one in the same, but the way you format them differs. This is due to the themes can be different between the two on your blog, but it is still controlled from the one “Write” admin area.

By default, content in WordPress is displayed in a normal paragraph. This is ideal for textual information, however, if you are copying and pasting from Microsoft Word or another HTML document and you have formatted beforehand using line breaks and spacing, you will need to reformat your content. This is because when pasted, WordPress does not display the HTML spacing or breaks. To do this, you should change your visual editor to “HTML” mode. This can be found in your post/page editing area at the top right, there are two tabs, “Visual” and “HTML”. Now you can edit the HTML of the posts/pages to control how it is displayed. For example, control spacing between lines and paragraphs.

6.3. Inserting Images and Videos

When you add images and videos to your WordPress site, you want to be sure that you’re placing them within your post in a visually appealing way. Not all images were created equal and while some are stunning and interesting, others are incredibly boring. The best and most effective way to integrate media into your site is to place the more visually appealing images of your post in the post itself, and place the less visually appealing ones towards the bottom of your post, or not at all. Videos work the same way since not all videos are entertaining or informative. Think of the images and videos like the seasoning to a soup, you want to add enough to bring out the flavors but you don’t want to overpower it. The best ways to add images to your post are to either have them in the post itself, or to get some that are relevant to the content and place them in a text widget on your side bar. Having pictures all throughout your site will make it look more active and the reader will feel more visually stimulated. If you do place images within a post it is important to align the images to the left or right so that the text will wrap around the image. This allows for better flow of the read and the reader will not get stuck on a certain part of the post. Although having the text wrap around an image looks better, the best setting for the image itself is no alignment. This will ensure that there is a small amount of space above and below the image, making the image stand out more.

6.4. Managing Comments

Many people feel that comments are a great way to grab readers’ attention and increase the number of visits on their post. With a large number of comments, you may also be encouraged to work harder on your site as new content draws more comments. However, this thought doesn’t always come true. At times, managing comments on your WordPress site can be a cumbersome task, mostly if you get a large number of comments regularly.

In the early days of WordPress, spam was a huge problem. Most of the early comment systems were not designed to be friendly to the site owner. The default settings allow anyone to add a comment to a post. It is difficult to control or sort the good comments from the bad. Spam was a very big problem. But fast forward to now, the default setting is for a comment to be held and approved before it will show publicly. A great improvement in comment control. With a lot of improvement in the default comment system, it lessens the burden of sorting good and bad comments. However, when you have a large number of comments, sometimes you need to utilize certain features to keep track of comments that have been replied to and the comments.

For a more advanced comment management on WordPress, there are a lot of plugins available to make your life easier. However, before we begin, it is important for you to backup your database or at least the wp_comments table. Because if there’s anything wrong during the process, you wouldn’t want to lose your comments data. These are among what I think let you manage comments effectively.

7. Enhancing Your WordPress Site

Although WordPress alone is a very powerful content management system, its potential can be magnified many times over with customization. There are many ways to enhance a WordPress site, ranging from simple content and display customization to custom PHP scripts and the creation of custom plugins. The simplest and fastest enhancement can be achieved by installing various plugins, with 10 discussed in this article including WP-DBManager, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, and WP-Polls. The more complex forms of customization require some knowledge of PHP, CSS, and WordPress functions. This ranges from creating your own custom plugin, customizing your theme, creating your own custom theme, and creating your own custom content types. This article will provide an overview of the various methods of customization and enhancement and discuss how they can be used to enhance your WordPress site. SEO is an important aspect of enhancing a WordPress site, making it easier for people to find your content not only through search engines but also through social media. This is achievable with the WordPress SEO plugin, which gives you complete control over the SEO of your site, the social cards plugin, which improves the way your content is shared on social media, and the Google sitemap plugin, which is one of the oldest and most reliable XML sitemap generators for your WordPress site. These plugins help index your site with a minimal impact on the user of the site, and because search content on your page and pages are stored in their own database tables, work automatically with custom content and/or custom taxonomies.

7.1. Installing and Configuring SEO Plugins

SEO plugins are a convenient tool to cultivate organic traffic or visitors from search engines such as Google. These plugins are an excellent adjunct to writing articles with good content, meta optimization, joining or getting links, social media and so on. Though using WordPress you may not have to do this; there is a built-in URL feature that is quite SEO friendly. However, by using this plugin it will automatically set up permalink to make it user friendly and according to the title. Also, the title that is created will be cut at a certain number of words to maintain its keyword density. Another notable feature that is useful is to avoid duplicate content. Usually WordPress themes are quite SEO friendly, but with the use of an SEO plugin, it will make the article editor more optimized for writing an article according to SEO. Usually, in the article editor for WordPress there are no guidelines or instructions on how to write a good article. This plugin will add a META box to the post page allowing you to customize the post page title and URL. This is only a small part of what should be done when writing an article, and it has features to check whether the article is focused on keyword, meta description and so on. By using this plugin, it will make it easier to set up everything. This plugin has quite a complete feature regarding SEO on an article or a page which is quite valuable for the user. This plugin is widely used by a blogger to SEO his articles because it is quite easy to set up and there’s quite a complete instruction.

7.2. Optimizing Site Performance

Ultimately, optimizing site performance is about providing the best, fastest user experience. Amongst many reasons, site performance is important to achieve good conversion rates, to make sure search engine spiders can index your site properly, and it’s also said that faster sites can rank better in search engines. In the age of the internet, speed is king. How do you do it? Below are the suggestions provided by Yahoo’s performance team, compiled with a few of our own.

Optimizing your site, and front-end in particular, often involves a bit of a trade-off in functionality or looks. Given that the main factor that influences how many page views a site will get is speed (faster sites get more page views), the trade-off is often more than worth it.

2. Optimize Images

Unless it’s necessary and beneficial to the style of your website to have high-quality images, you should try and keep them as small as possible. This will speed up load times. If you’re displaying many images on one page, it might be a good idea to lazy load the content, and only play the images when the user scrolls down.

7.3. Adding Social Media Integration

Social media integration is a very important step in the process of bringing more traffic to your site and engaging your visitors. With the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, this tool has become a key player in the marketing world. By giving visitors the ability to share your posts with their friends, you are essentially receiving free advertising. According to a TechCrunch article, in 2010 WordPress.com blogs accounted for 28 million shares from 24 million unique posts. While this is only shares from WordPress hosted blogs and not the total number of shares and likes, it is still a stunning number. This statistic shows how powerful social media sharing can be and why it should be used. While there are many social media plugins that provide similar functionality, I would recommend using AddThis. This is because the AddThis plugin not only provides you with a nice clean-looking set of share buttons, but it also gives detailed statistics on how your content is being shared. AddThis also uses what it calls “smart sorting,” which puts the most used services at the top of the menu, and it is the service most likely to be updated with the newest features.

7.4. Implementing Security Measures

When working with websites, security is an important issue. You want to ensure that your website and its data remain safe. WordPress itself is a very secure platform. However, by taking a few added precautions and being mindful of a few common security threats, you can help keep your site even more secure. Note: This is an advanced article for people already comfortable with installing and modifying themes. If you are new to WordPress, the single most important measure a person can take when building a WordPress site to increase security is to have a unique username and a strong password. This is especially important if you have multiple people with access to the admin panel. Far too often, WordPress sites are hacked due to the admin username being left at “admin” and the password being too weak. An easy way to create a strong password is to use an online random password generator. If you have a blog with multiple contributing writers, then it’s a good idea to ensure that each author’s username is kept private. Only the authors should know these, and they should certainly not write them on the blog publicly. A way to do this is to make their nickname the name that is displayed publicly on the blog. Then WordPress automatically creates a new username based on the nickname. This will be the name they use to sign in, but it will be different from their author name.

8. Launching Your WordPress Site

When you complete your site, it’s good to check for the proper functionality of the site and check for broken links. You can perform a spell check and grammar check. There are various tools and methods to test for site functionality that varies depending on the website’s purpose. However, basic testing involves clicking on all the links on your site and try to find any programming errors such as bad script location, image errors or bad links. After successfully testing your site, you can now announce your site’s launch. This involves letting everyone know that you now have a web presence. This can be announcing it to friends and family, on online forums, using social networking sites, informing customers etc. This is also a good time to start a blog, which can also be submitted to blog directories and syndicated. This will help create a buzz about your site and keep it fresh in people’s minds, so they will keep coming back.

8.1. Testing Site Functionality

After your site has been fully created and content has been inputted, it is time to test its functionality. Ideally, you would have been testing your site as you built it to ensure that all of the site’s components were working properly, but this can serve as a condensed final run-through.

In order to test your WordPress site, we suggest that you use the WordPress theme that your site is currently using. The reasoning behind this is that theme developers design their themes with specific features in mind. Some themes flat out will not work with certain plugins. So, in using your current theme, you will be able to see whether or not a plugin that you are using is conflicting with your theme. If this happens, you should keep the conflicting plugin activated and simply switch to another theme that you have installed to see if the said plugin works with that theme. A different scenario could be that all of your plugins work fine, but you have a custom script that is not working properly. This is an ideal situation, as the site developer will be able to single out the custom script and troubleshoot it. The script can also be removed and then re-implemented after some adjustments have been made.

8.2. Setting Up Site Analytics

One essential tool for determining the success and areas of possible improvement for your site is a method for gathering site-visitor data. Analytics software can provide a wealth of information about the visitors to your site, such as how they found it, how long they stayed and what they looked at, and whether they came back. Two of the most popular and reliable methods of adding analytics tracking code to your site are using either a WordPress plugin, such as Google Analytics for WordPress, or simply pasting the tracking code into your site’s footer file.

If you prefer a more simple way of doing things, or are looking to track data across your entire site rather than just with Google Analytics, using a plugin is a good solution. The “Google Analytics for WordPress” plugin by Joost de Valk is an excellent choice, as it allows for easy-to-understand data collection and analysis, is regularly updated to work properly with the most recent WordPress version, and has a user rating of 4/5 as of the time of writing. Any of the most popular analytics services have plugins available, although you may need to consider the price of the service against information provided by the plugin and its effectiveness and ease of use on your site.

8.3. Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

This often overlooked step is what is going to get your site indexed in the major search engines so that it can start getting organic traffic. There are many search engines out there now, but you really only need to concern yourself with the big three: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Others such as Ask.com and search.aol.com pull their results from the big three, so if you are listed there, you will likely be in the smaller search engines as well. To find out if your site is already indexed in a particular search engine, do a search for “site:yourdomain.com” in the search bar. Replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name. If results come back, your site is indexed. If not, it isn’t.

For Google, the first thing you will want to do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and sign in with your Google Account. If you don’t have a Google Account, you will need to create one. At the Dashboard, there will be a button that says “Add Site”. Click this and you will be prompted to enter the URL of your site. After you do this, click the button that says “Add a site”.

After adding your site, you will need to verify that you are the site owner. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest way is to click the link that says “Use your Google Analytics account information. If you do not have a Google Analytics account yet, you will want to do that first. It is beyond the scope of this document to explain how to set up Google Analytics, but it is a very useful tool that will tell you how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from. After clicking this link, you will be prompted to sign in with your Google Account and allow Google Webmaster Tools to access your Google Analytics account. Do this and your site will be automatically verified in Webmaster Tools. Now back at the Webmaster Tools dashboard, you should see your site listed with the message “verified” next to it. Click on your site and you will see a button that says “Optimize”. Click this and a menu will drop down. Now click “Submit a Sitemap”. In the box that appears, enter “sitemap_index.xml”. Now your site has been added to Google and is ready to index. Google will improve the frequency at which your site is crawled if you have good content and high-quality backlinks to your site.

Yahoo has a similar site that does the same thing as Google Webmaster Tools called Yahoo Site Explorer. Log in with your Yahoo Account and enter your site, and you will be prompted to enter a verification code in a text file named ykey.html. Place this file in the root directory of your site (the same place as your index file) and click “Authenticate”. Now click on your site, and you will see a button that says “Submit Site Feed”. In the box that appears, enter yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml and then click “Submit Feed”. This will submit your WordPress site to Yahoo and it will be indexed in their search results.

There is also a similar tool available at Bing for Microsoft. It is called Webmaster Center. This tool is still in beta, but it is fully functional and gets the job done. Sign in with your Windows Live ID and click “Add Site”. You will then be prompted to enter your site URL. After you do this, you will see the message “Next, you need to prove that you own site”, so click “proving that you own the site” and you will see instructions to download an XML file named “BingSiteAuth.xml”. It is the same deal as Yahoo, just place this file in the root directory of your site and click “Authenticate”. Now click your site and you should see a message that says “Your site ownership has been verified”. Now click “Submit a sitemap” and in the box that appears, enter the same thing you entered for Yahoo: yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. Click “submit” and your site has been submitted to Bing.

8.4. Announcing Your Site’s Launch

There are a number of different ways that you can announce your site’s launch. Let’s start with the simplest way to the most detailed one. The simplest way is to use your Facebook account and share the news with your friends. Make a simple status update mentioning your site’s launch and ask for help to spread the news. If you have some spare cash, you can utilize Facebook ads to promote your site’s launch. Since Facebook ads is very detailed, you can specify the group of people who are going to see the ads thus it will increase the chance of these people to visit your site. Another simple way is by using Twitter. Tweet about your site’s launch and don’t forget to use trending topic hashtags to make it more visible to a wider range of audiences.

Moving on to a more detailed way, you can write a formal article regarding your site’s launch and post it to article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, or Article Base. Writing an article is considered effective to get organic traffic from search engines, but it may require some writing skill. If you are not confident with your writing skill, you can hire freelance writers to do this for you. Don’t forget to put a link back to your site in the article’s resource box. Email marketing is also a detailed and effective way to announce your site’s launch. You can start by collecting friends and family members’ email addresses and tell them to spread the news about your site. This method is very viral and can get a huge amount of traffic if done properly. The key here is to give a brief description about your site and put a link back to your site with a call to action sentence like “visit our site now” or “find more information”.

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Building a WordPress Site: Common Questions Answered (webcasa.com)

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