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1. Introduction
If you are reading this guide, you have probably heard of WordPress. You might also think the only people who use WordPress are bloggers. In this guide, I’m going to show you how you can use WordPress to create a fully functional website to show off your art, your music, a photography portfolio, or even sell/promote your products. This guide is not to teach you how to start a blog, but to move your existing site to WordPress or create a new site on a totally different platform. Now, a little history lesson on WordPress. WordPress was created in 2003 as a blogging platform and since then has evolved into a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is the most widely used CMS on the internet today. What does that mean to you? A lot of people are using WordPress, which makes it easier to get help if you ever run into any problems. There is so much information on WordPress, and there are many communities solely based on WordPress, and the amount of support you can find is just tremendous.
1.1 Benefits of using WordPress
One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress is its capability. WordPress can handle almost anything from small sites to large, complex sites. Used by individuals and large corporations, WordPress is great for your business and can get your website up off the ground. Another benefit is that WordPress is open source so you don’t have to spend a lot of money to use it. WordPress is built upon PHP and MySQL, making it obvious to many web developers and business owners alike. Because of the high demand for WordPress, there are many web developers who specialize in WordPress. Using WordPress to build your site will most likely result in a cost reduction. It could also be beneficial for your search engine optimization. Because you’re able to edit the content that is on your site, you can use specific key phrases to make your site show up in searches relating to your company. WordPress is also very easily integrated with social media sites. In a technology-driven age where advertisement is essential, social media sites can be a great way to drive traffic to your site. By having these links, it’s easy for site visitors to share your content on these platforms and create more backlinks to your site. Step by step, WordPress benefits your site building experience and site visitors’ experience.
1.2 Ease of use and customization
The main advantage of WordPress is that it is Open Source. Think about a year ago – you had to pay someone to install a small script or add some functionality to your blog. Often it would be very expensive, and still not up to your expectations. With WordPress, there are over 200,000 community members and contributors developing it. These facts all combine to make WordPress an incredibly powerful publishing platform. Whether you are looking to run a small personal blog or a large corporate website, WordPress is capable of meeting your needs. And with so many blogs being created with WordPress, there is always the lingering question of how to stand out from the crowd. This is where WordPress’ versatility comes into play. Owing to the vast number of plugins and themes available, you can quite easily modify your blog to suit your needs. Whether you are looking to begin an online business or provide a more professional image for your offline business, there are countless themes and plugins available to enable you to do so.
Ease of use and customization is one of the highest qualities by which WordPress rules over various other Content Management Systems. It is used worldwide and its reputation is its own because of its ease of use. WordPress has an intuitive user interface that anyone can grasp. Logging in and adding new content is quite easy. WordPress also offers several plugins and widgets. Many of them are used for the display of affiliate banners, in addition to other advertisements. The high point of WordPress is the automatic generation of RSS feeds. This is another reason why a lot of webmasters are turning to use WordPress.
1.3 Wide range of themes and plugins
The benefit of this is clear. A website’s design (which is the UX and the branding, not the visual appearance) directly affects its conversion rate. Assuming that your content and Call To Actions are of a good standard, a bad design will mean a high bounce rate and a low number of content shares. Whether we’re making a site for ourselves or for a client, our aim is for as many end-users as possible to use and appreciate the site. High quality themes make this possible without the need for a graphic design or coding background. They often include demo content and shortcodes, providing a framework which can be adapted to give the exact layout or style required.
Themes are big. Really big. WordPress old-timers will remember the pioneers of DIY design, with their image slices and HTML tricks, and at the other end of the scale the early premium themes which, 10 years ago, could be slapped onto a self-hosted WordPress blog for around $70 and styled through an options page. Times have moved on. The thriving marketplace of today has pushed standards up and prices down. Whether free or premium, themes are now of such good quality that even the fussiest user will be able to find the perfect design to showcase their content.
2. SEO optimization with WordPress
Permalinks are the words that appear in the URL of your website. In WordPress, you can designate the permalink structure. By default, WordPress uses URLs with question marks and lots of numbers, which are not very search engine friendly. This means that it does not contain the keywords from the title. As you all know, search engines use keywords to determine what your site is about. Using clean URLs will improve your website’s ranking. With WordPress, you can set the URL; you should set it to /%postname%/. This means that the URL for the page will contain only the title of the page. This is the most simple and clean URL. It is proven that websites with clean URLs rank higher.
WordPress’s built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) features provide the tools for good optimization, which is essential for a website’s visibility and success. SEO is the task of making your website rank higher on search engine results pages. The higher your website ranks, the more likely prospective clients will view your site. Search engines look for certain things within your website to help determine how to rank it. WordPress is an extremely powerful platform for SEO. Some reasons why WordPress is excellent for SEO include permalinks, pinging, plugins, and clean code.
2.1 WordPress’s built-in SEO features
A significant part of reducing a website’s dependency on a web designer is to increase the ability of non-technical personnel to control aspects of the site. WordPress excels in this area. For a start, the administrative interface is well designed and easy to use. Although it is quite intuitive, there is extensive documentation available for those who need help with the software. For many of our clients, search engine traffic is the lifeblood of their website. This is not surprising when over 1/3 of global internet users use Google. One of the most notable SEO features is pretty permalink structure which is customizable and has many benefits. Regrettably, the default setting is not very pretty. Another need for SEO is the ability to assign nested, meaningful categories to articles. This can also be achieved and also supports custom category templates. Trackbacks are a great way of alerting legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. They appear in the comments section of the post, but they have been abused by spammers and are usually disabled.
2.2 Plugins for advanced SEO optimization
Once your website is optimized for basic SEO, there are several advanced WordPress SEO strategies that you can use to improve your search engine rankings. The most important factor is still to acquire incoming links to your website. This is the single most important factor in raising your search engine rankings. The best way to get incoming links is to trade links with other websites in a similar niche to yours. You can do this by contacting the webmaster of the website you want to exchange links with. Another way is to write high-quality articles and submit them to article directories and guest blog posts. This is a great way to get links to your website and get your website known on the internet. It is always a good idea for website promotion to make sure your article content is directly related to your website. A better idea, and to make the website more well-known, is to write unique, well-written content on your blog. Then it is more likely that people will link to your blog and, in turn, link to your website. This is known as linkbaiting. This is a much better way to get incoming links than spending time trading links with other webmasters. Another way to get incoming links is to do a press release and submit it to press release sites. By adding a press release plugin, this will ensure that your content is easily visible to visitors. This method is another great way to get your website known and get incoming links. And finally, an alternative to help speed up the process of link building is hiring a company to do the link building for you. This is very critical, and spend some time to research the company and make sure that they only use methods permitted by search engines. Not doing so may lead to your site being blacklisted from search engines.
2.3 Importance of SEO for website visibility
This marketing term encompasses functions, methods, and also strategies that the company applies to guarantee that it is being found on the internet when potential customers key in words associated with that company. Over the years, business marketing has shifted dramatically to the web and online marketing, and applying a solid search engine optimization strategy in conjunction with a well-designed website has become a form of marketing that is vital to a business’s survival. Billions of dollars are spent each year by companies trying to make sure that their website is the first result that a search engine displaces with keyword queries related to their business. The search engine optimization process revolves around how search engines find information and the criteria that people key in when they’re looking for a certain item. SEO is also about what people are searching for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engine is preferred by their targeted audience. The optimization process involves editing and adding content, doing HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. This is referred to as spider/crawler friendly, HTML, and CSS design. It is an internet marketing strategy that considers how search engines work and what people search for. This strategy involves keywords that are being searched and which search engine is preferred by their targeted audience. With all this in mind, SEO allows the company to market 24/7 and potentially increase their market beyond a local store to a global audience. It is also an inexpensive and effective way to promote a certain product or service, with the website being the portal to the public, and it’s always open.
2.4 Improving search engine rankings with WordPress
SEO has a strong correlation with high quality, relevant content. Search engines love fresh content, so it is a necessity to keep a constant stream of new, well-written articles on your website. It is no easy task, but the hard work pays off when you see an increase in both traffic and search engine rankings. When creating new content, it is imperative to target specific keywords and phrases. This is to show search engines what the article is about and to increase the relevance when comparing it to similar articles. However, it is important not to go overboard with keyword usage. This is known as keyword stuffing and can be detrimental to the article’s search engine ranking. An ideal keyword density is between 1-2%.
Once the website is optimized for search engines, then it is time to focus on improving search engine rankings by making use of SEO strategies. The best choice here is to use WordPress in combination with a SEO plugin, to acquire the best results without over complicating things. All In One SEO Pack provides a complete set of easy to use SEO tools. WordPress SEO by Yoast is an all-round fantastic plugin for SEO, providing rich snippets and social sharing. XML Sitemaps are of great importance as well; WordPress SEO by Yoast has a feature for generating an XML sitemap. However, if you prefer not to use Yoast’s plugin, then Google XML Sitemaps is a great alternative that generates a sitemap which has been supported by the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
3. Security and reliability of WordPress
Community is the driving force behind the development of WordPress. Because of that, it has a large following and is active in the open-source development community. This is all good news for business owners. It means that when you build a website on the WordPress platform, you have an entire community working to improve the CMS. This leads to better quality and a greater number of features for its users. Support is not hard to find with WordPress. It is quite easy to find answers to questions, as well as learn from other people’s experiences with the WordPress platform. There are also a large number of communities and forums with topics ranging from WordPress customization to security and general discussion. This means that when you use WordPress, you will never be alone. With free support comes an increased danger of encountering security and reliability issues. But with the use of security plugins and a strong host, these concerns can easily be nullified.
Regular updates and constant security patches are what make WordPress a reliable platform for business owners. In the fast-changing online environment, it is important for a website to stay current with the latest trends and technologies in order to remain competitive. WordPress makes this easy with its one-click update option. This, in turn, helps to prevent your website from becoming vulnerable to security threats that can compromise your business. With WordPress’s approach to updates, business owners can have peace of mind knowing that their website will not become outdated and suffer as a result.
3.1 Regular updates and security patches
WordPress updates and security patches are a crucial part of maintaining a WordPress website. An “update” is a new version of the WordPress software and it contains a number of enhancements and fixes. Security patches are similar to updates but are specifically aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities. WordPress releases updates and patches on a regular basis, it is the user’s responsibility to update their website when these are released. The most important thing to do is keep informed and regularly check the WordPress site for new releases. WordPress provides a development blog for every new release; this is an ideal way to see what each new release contains. An informed decision can then be made on whether to update the site then and there, or to wait. It is important to note that if older versions of WordPress are still widely in use, this can appear as an enticing target to hackers. A hacked website is a very unpleasant experience that some have compared to having your home burgled. Prevention is the key, backed up by a good understanding of what can be done to restore a website if it is hacked. There are various methods of hardening a WordPress installation to make a hacking attempt more difficult. This is a complex topic and there are many different views on what is the best method to use. During our use of WordPress we have tested several security plugins and methods, we will be sharing our results on what we believe to be the most efficient way of increasing the security of your site. Even with prevention above all else, make sure your site is being backed up regularly. This is not a method of prevention in itself, but having a full and partial backup of your site can mean the difference between a 5-minute task and a week-long job spent restoring a hacked site. In addition to backing up and prevention, having a good understanding of the WordPress codex and files is extremely useful if your site is hacked or if a customization goes wrong. If you are new to WordPress, it is likely you have invested a lot of your time and possibly money into your website, this is not something you want to do twice so make sure you are well informed on the above.
3.2 Community support and resources
WordPress, being open source, has a huge community working on safeguarding security threats and releasing new updates to remove security loopholes. As WordPress is a self-sustained system and does not require complex coding for updating content, this makes it vulnerable to security threats as the login for the administrative panel is universally accessible from everywhere. But this can also be easily taken care of by regularly updating the WordPress installation and backing up your WordPress blog. With every new WordPress release, there is a file with a list of bugs and security vulnerabilities that were fixed, which are easily accessible to the public, thus making WordPress more secure once the update is complete. Measures to enhance security include changing the default “admin” username and instead using a different combination of username and password, which will, in turn, block the trials of hacking through the login credentials. Also, the information for WordPress version can be masked from the source of your blog, as there are plugins or themes which are compatible with a specific version and this can make your blog prone to attacks. Now, these are just examples of how users can maximize the potential of secure WordPress usage. Seeking advice on security measures from the WP community will definitely give you more insights into handling more advanced security threats.
3.3 Implementing security measures for your WordPress website
Your group can implement security measures in your WordPress website by adding security applications and plugins from the WordPress community. You can find a variety of plugins and applications for security at your WordPress administrator that will enhance security for your website. One of the best rated security plugins for WordPress is SecurePress. SecurePress adds on a web application firewall, which monitors and blocks malicious traffic, an IP address blacklist, malware scanning, and much more. Another popular security application for WordPress is CloudFlare. CloudFlare adds on a security application by adding a firewall, DDoS protection, and many other security features. When utilizing a security application or plugin it is important for your group to do your research and read reviews to ensure that the security application or plugin is effective for enhancing security. By adding security applications and plugins your group can enhance security in your WordPress website. Another effective method for enhancing security in your WordPress website is requiring a secure connection when accessing your website. A secure connection is established when traffic between the server and browser is encrypted. An encrypted connection will prevent any data from being intercepted or compromised during transmission. A method for enabling a secure connection is changing the site URL in your settings from HTTP to HTTPS. However, this method alone is not enough to force a secure connection and is not recommended due to a variety of mixed content issues that may occur. The recommended method is adding an SSL certificate to your server. An SSL certificate will bind a cryptographic key to your website details, enabling an encrypted connection when accessing your website. An SSL certificate is available through a variety of vendors and comes in different levels of validation and pricing. By requiring a secure connection on your website, you are effectively preventing any data from being intercepted and compromised.
3.4 Ensuring website uptime and performance
Although the servers used by WordPress.com VIP are of the highest quality, it’s inevitable that they do go down at some point. With this in mind, a good quality host should provide a minimum uptime of 99.9%. This is generally a feature of managed WordPress hosts and would be specified in the SLA. For example, WPEngine guarantees at least 99.95% uptime. If your website is being hosted on a shared platform, then there may be no uptime guarantee available, so it’s always best to host with a provider that specializes in hosting WordPress websites. This generally comes with a higher price tag, but when it comes to keeping your site live, it’s worth shelling out for the assurance of higher uptime. If you’re not sure what your website’s current uptime is, there are various free tools available online that provide this information. Uptime Robot is an example of a free service that you can sign up for. This site will ping your website at specified intervals (e.g. every 5 minutes) and if it’s down, Uptime Robot will send you a notification. Google Analytics can also provide data on this.
4. WordPress as a versatile content management system
Page: Pages are static one-off type content such as an about page or a contact page. This is one of the features that makes WordPress a suitable CMS. Pages are not time dependent and are often used to provide timeless and convenient access to information. Like posts, pages can also have certain social features.
Post: This is the default content type. Posts are regularly updated content displayed in reverse chronological order on your home page. In many themes, posts are also displayed in the archives and in search results. It is possible for a post to have certain social features such as comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks.
WordPress is not just a blogging platform; it’s a versatile and powerful content management system. It helps you create, manage, and update a variety of types of content. You can use it for managing a simple personal blog to managing a large organization website. At the time of writing, with version 3.3.1, WordPress supports the following content types:
4.1 Creating and managing different types of content
The creation and management of different types of content is key to the maintenance and updating of a successful site. WordPress has this area covered. Not only does it have the features that are necessary to create and upload content quickly and efficiently, but it also has features to enable the systematic organization of your content. This is made possible by WordPress’ Posts and Pages. These features are very similar but are used to display different types of content. Pages are generally used to display static content, but what defines static is open to interpretation. Pages do not have a time stamp and are often used to display information about yourself or your site that is timeless. Pages are displayed in the order which they are published but it is also possible to set an order using the Page Order feature. Posts are used to display time specific content. News posts are the most common example of a post. They are displayed in reverse chronological order on your front page.
4.2 Integration with other platforms and services
But for a project or organization with modest content management requirements, where ease of use is more important than comprehensive functionality, there is rarely a need for the off-the-shelf or custom-built CMS. There are several inexpensive ways to use WordPress as a content management system. With free plugins like s2member or paid services like Digital Access Pass, it is easy to restrict access to content to authenticated users. Various plugins can be used to restrict access to certain content based on user role. And with features like taxonomies and custom post types, it is getting easier to organize and control access to various types of content.
While high-end content management might be the last thing from someone’s mind when they are looking at a web-based solution for a tool like Salesforce or a new SharePoint site, it can be a very important factor that decides whether the tool is adopted by the team and how effectively it is utilized. People generally find it easiest to create and manage content within a familiar environment, and it can be quite frustrating to manage content in one place and systems in another. High-end CMS might mean different things to different people.
It is not uncommon for a company to have a presence on the web and use a number of other systems to aid their business processes. Whether it be a social networking tool, a customer relationship manager, or another content management system, organizations need to be able to integrate WordPress into their existing infrastructure easily. WordPress comes with a number of extensions that can be used to connect to external systems, APIs to make it easier for developers to integrate, and a simple data import/export function. This allows for WordPress to act as a central hub for your online presence, making it easier to communicate with the rest of your systems.
4.3 Scalability and flexibility for future growth
Flexibility is the ability of software to change the entire look of a website in just a short period. Less time to accomplish the task, less cost, and brings maximum results. WordPress is known as a platform that builds a CMS for a website. It can change the entire look of the website just by installing a new theme. A theme is a collection of templates and styles for a specific framework. Most themes include index.php (the main template), single.php (for a single content), page.php (for a page), and style.css (for styling the view) to fundamentally change the look of the website. This can be done just by selecting the new theme that will automatically change the entire look of the website. So it will save more time and it’s so easy. Users can also add functionality to the website by installing a plugin without changing the core system. This is much safer and brings great results to the website.
A website that is built from WordPress will bring an easy way for administrators to manage the content. Thousands of plugins and full support from WordPress developers will give a big benefit to the site owner. For example, if a site has 500 articles and the owner wants to create a book review website from those articles, with just a simple installation of a plugin, they’ll get a new look for their website and an easy way to manage the content. There’s no need for extra cost to hire a web developer and it really saves more time.
Scalability in WordPress means that it can support the site to keep running well even if it has a large amount of content, like hundreds of articles and more. It is the capability of the software to support the site to keep running well. Being able to handle a growing amount of work and the ability to accommodate growth is the true definition of scalability.
WordPress is a platform that can be good software for beginners who intend to develop their business into a large-scale organization. This platform will be good to create a site that is really personal, whether it’s a simple personal blog or a business website. It can be built with higher scalability and flexibility.
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