The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started with WordPress in 2022

Essential Steps for Launching a New WordPress Website

So, you’re looking to set up a new WordPress website? It’s likely if you are reading this article that you already believe that WordPress may be the best solution, and well, you would be right!

In our ultimate guide to getting started with WordPress, we’ll cover everything that you will need for getting started with WordPress and help you to unleash the full power of the platform to build the website of your dreams.

But first, let’s answer a few questions we get from many of our clients.

Is WordPress Still Relevant in 2022?

Yes, WordPress is still relevant in 2022. The latest statistics reveal that WP accounts for about 39.5% of the entire Web and 62% of CMS-built websites. In other words, WordPress powers 64 million websites globally, and today is the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS) for building websites.

Technology is constantly being updated so there’s no way to know what changes may come in future versions. But this has never affected the need for WordPress. As long as people are writing blogs or building websites, they’ll continue to use WordPress and its customizable features, website templates, and more.

There are many reasons why WordPress continues to be so popular, and we’ve gathered some of those reasons below.

It’s Free and Open Source

Arguably this is the number one reason why WordPress is so popular. The fact that it’s easy to fully customize. When you combine this with the fact that WordPress is free, then it becomes clear why WordPress is such a fantastic proposition.

Lots of Themes to Choose From

There are literally hundreds of free and premium WordPress themes for you to choose from. No matter what type of business you have or what kind of product or service you offer, there is a theme for your needs.

Like plugins, WordPress themes are easy to install. The key difference is that a WordPress theme would typically be used for building, styling, and editing the front end of your website, normally with ease.

Themes also share another similarity with plugins, and that is the fact that there are thousands of them to choose from too. You can browse the WordPress Theme Directory, however, do consider that there are premium themes too, although these are paid for.

There’s a Plugin for That

Plugins have been vital to WordPress’s continued rise in popularity and adoption. There are countless WordPress plugins available to install, for almost anything you could think of. Furthermore, most WordPress plugins seamlessly run autonomously, and overall make the job of running your website that much easier.

Global Appeal and Ease of Use

The fact that WordPress is available in over 62 languages gives it that global appeal and reach. Translation plugins such as WPML make it relatively easy to translate your website content.

Moreover, it really is easy to install and use. WordPress is also supported by major web hosting companies worldwide.

Is WordPress Easy for Beginners?

Yes, WordPress is fairly easy for beginners to use and navigate. Many people, when they first start with their blog or website, may feel bogged down in the technicalities and features of a highly complex and customizable platform, but getting started with WordPress really isn’t that hard. Plus, it’s completely free!

To create an online presence, all you need is a domain name (which is the web address) and then install WordPress on top of that. It’s not as complex as it sounds and you don’t need to be a computer genius to master it.

But not everyone feels comfortable working on websites and computers. For them, even a simple task can quickly become overwhelming. As our friend Bob Dunn likes to say: “Yes, WordPress is easy, once you know how to use it!” If you don’t there are a lot of WordPress tools and resources available online.

The Difference Between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

Before we begin it’s important that you first fully understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

The key difference between the two is who is hosting your website and essentially all of its content. If you opt to use WordPress.org, then you will be hosting your own website, and will, therefore, need to find a suitable web host if you have not already. Think of WordPress.org as more of a DIY solution, which will have its own benefits, such as more flexibility.

WordPress.com, in contrast, is certainly less technical in terms of setup and more of an all-in-one package. For instance, you will not require third-party web hosting as WordPress will host the website for you.

For the purpose of this post, we will focus on WordPress.org only.

So, You Are Getting a WordPress Website!

WordPress is the most popular CMS, and many businesses and product brands, as well as countless individuals and professional service providers, have reasons for having a WordPress website. But there are a number of things to consider both before and after launching a new WordPress website.

Regardless of whether you are launching a new WordPress website, or simply redesigning your existing online presence using the WordPress platform, there are a few things to keep in mind before you get started. You will need a domain for your site. What about web hosting or a content delivery network for your site? Selecting just the right WordPress theme is a major consideration as well.

Getting started with WordPress and launching a new WordPress site is a fairly straightforward process. If you are working with a professional web designer or agency, they will take care of the entire process for you. But it never hurts to ask a few basic questions regarding their services after launching a new WordPress site. Will they optimize and promote your new WordPress site? And who will maintain and update your new online presence?

All of the above are important considerations when getting started with WordPress. Especially if you are doing this on your own the entire process can quickly become overwhelming. And even when working with a professional you should know the essentials of getting started with WordPress and launching a new WordPress website. Here are a few essential steps that will make a big difference.

Before Launching a New WordPress Website

Any effective online presence requires a good foundation. That is especially true for something as complex as a mobile-first WordPress website. At the onset of any WordPress project we discuss essentials such as website hosting, using a content delivery network (CDN), and a few other basics.

We always optimize our client websites with a few essential plugins, recommend optimized WordPress hosting, and basically help them understand how their new WordPress website works, and how to get the most out of it. That includes helping them meet their short and long-term business objectives as opposed to simply launching a new WordPress site for them.

Consider this to be your pre-launch checklist.

Website Domain

Especially if you are launching a new WordPress site you need to give careful consideration to your domain name. While there are many different available options a dot com domain is still considered to be the best in terms of usability and SEO.

Of course, some dot com domain names are very hard to come by, or very expensive. In that case, you may want to play around with the domain name a bit to see if another option might work better.

You should always avoid special characters such as hyphens or dashes, “kute” spellings, or overly long domain names. Check out these 10 tips for choosing a domain name from GoDaddy. We also recommend you use them to purchase and register your new domain.

Web Hosting

The first step to launching a new WordPress site is selecting your web hosting. And this is one instance where simply going for the cheapest option will definitely work against you. Any WordPress website is fairly complex and does better if your hosting provider specializes in hosting WordPress sites. For e-commerce sites, this becomes even more critical.

Modern consumers are impatient and will simply not wait for your site to load. A slow, unresponsive site will only increase your bounce rate, and send your target audience to your competitors.

Even worse, if your hosting provider does not offer some sort of website security and backup your site is at risk of getting hacked or taken down completely. And that alone can make restoring your website after it got hacked a lengthy and expensive process.

Your hosting will usually depend on the type of website you own. If you have a personal blog, for example, your hosting requirements may be different from if you have a larger business website or e-commerce store. So, be sure to compare different website hosting options, and consider your needs both now, and in the future, before you commit.

Before you make a decision regarding a hosting service provider, be sure to cover these questions:

• Do they have support for plugins, or forbid certain plugins?
• Do they offer any website speed optimization services?
• What type of website security options or services do they provide?
• What type of backup support do they offer?
• Is there a staging environment?
• Are there any bandwidth limitations?
• Which operating system are they using? Linux? Windows?
• Are their servers compatible with the latest version of PHP?

Here are 5 things to look for when choosing a web hosting provider.

Our Recommended WordPress Hosting Providers:

• Cloudways
• WPEngine
• Kinsta
• Bluehost
• SiteGround

If you want to consider more WordPress hosting options here is a list of the best web hosting providers for 2021.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

If you need a bit (or a lot) of extra page speed for your WordPress website, you should consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN.) A CDN changes the way your site handles static content like images, Javascript, and CSS. It caches your static content to create faster page loading, lower response time, and an overall faster loading website, which in turn helps you rank higher in search results.

We have found that having a CDN is one of the easiest and fastest ways to improve your site load speed, especially for sites that have a lot of images or other large files, such as self-hosted videos. An added bonus is that using a CDN can also improve your site security.

Our CDN Recommendations:

• CloudFlare
• MaxCDN
• Incapsula

Choosing a WordPress Theme

Another consideration before launching a new WordPress site is the theme or framework you are planning to use. There are literally thousands of available options. Lucky for you most of them are so bad you can eliminate them right away.

That includes any free theme and any theme that is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress or has not been updated by the theme author within the last few months.

Instead of simply going for a “pretty” design or “cool” functionality be sure to select a WordPress theme that will actually support your short and long-term business objectives. That means you should look for:

• Clean and fast code: With a clean code structure, you can decrease the page load time on pages and increase the crawlability of your pages.
• CSS and Javascript files: With Google, less is more, and having a limited number of CSS and Javascript files will help.
• Limited use of required plugins: The more plugins a theme requires in order to function properly the more bloated and unresponsive it will become.
• Simple layout: A simple design will make it easy for users to navigate from page to page.
• Responsive: As we know Google gives an edge to responsive sites in searches from mobile devices so choosing a WordPress theme that is responsive will give you an overall better user experience.
• Schema Markups: Schema Markups tell search engines where the most relevant content is on your theme.

There are two basic types of WordPress themes:

Free Themes

Free themes are what you’ll find in the WordPress directory.

If you click on ‘Appearance > Themes’, then you’ll see a big list of free themes that you can choose from. Once you’ve selected a theme you like, just click ‘Upload Theme’.

These themes are great for beginner websites and may be suitable for you if you’re just getting started with WordPress.

A word of caution:

There is nothing wrong with using a free WordPress theme. You want to cut costs and stick to your budget. But there are a few things you should know when using a free WordPress theme.

• Outdated Designs: Most of the free themes available in the WordPress directory have outdated designs that look especially awful on mobile devices.
• Compatibility Issues: Free themes are not always optimized to work with most third party plugins. You often find compatibility issues when trying to extend the functionality of your site with plugins.
• Used by many others: Free themes are always used by thousands of other sites, including substandard and fraudulent ones. When you use the same scam website theme, it will only hurt your reputation.
• No customer support or updates: Premium themes give you unlimited updates to take advantage of the latest WordPress features and even offer customer support to customize the theme to your preference.

Keep in mind that your website is an investment that will reward you in the future. Don’t be cheap when making a long-term investment.

Premium Themes

Premium themes, on the other hand, are a little more high standard. You will need to pay for them. But they can offer you much more, both in the way of choice and features such as advanced page builders or custom fonts.

Premium WordPress themes can be found online in marketplaces such as ThemeForest, GeneratePress, and Qode Interactive.

Of course, it’s still important to do your research before buying a theme and not every premium theme will be suitable for what you need. But premium themes are great for businesses and product brands that want to communicate their professionalism and expertise through design without having to hire a professional web designer.

Plus, some themes, such as Divi or Elementor, will also come with page builders that make building your website so much easier – especially if you are not all that familiar with code.

If you are not sure which theme is best for you and your business take a look at the best and most popular WordPress themes for 2021.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started with WordPress

Many people mistakenly believe that launching a new WordPress website is all it takes. After all, you just built a brand-new WordPress website, added SEO optimized content, checked to make sure it looks and functions great on tablets and smartphones, and selected optimized WordPress hosting.

The Dashboard

The first thing you need to do is to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. All WordPress sites use the same log-in URL: https://mydomain.com/wp-admin/ To log in you need to enter the user name and password you set when you created your WordPress installation. If you had your web host or designer create your install you need to get the required log-in info from them.

Now the fun begins, as you’ll now be within WordPress.

Whenever you log in you should be greeted by the dashboard. The dashboard will present you with an overview of your website. The information displayed here will typically include news about available updates, however, you will also be able to see any draft posts and any recent comments that your visitors may have left.

Uploading and Installing Your Theme

Now the magic can happen. Under ‘Appearance’ you will be able to browse or upload and install the theme that you would like to use for building and styling your very own website.

Installing a Free WordPress Theme

If you want to use a theme found in the WordPress Repository on your website, the easiest way to do this is on the backend of your website.

To start, log into your WordPress website and go to Appearance > Themes in the WordPress dashboard and click Add New.

From there, you can filter the results based on:

• Featured
• Popular
• Latest
• Favorites

Or, you can use the Feature Filter button to filter the theme results based on specific features.

Lastly, you can search for a specific WordPress theme if you know the name of it by entering the theme’s name into the search bar.

Once you find a theme you might want to use, you can click Details and Preview to see more information about the theme, Preview to see a preview of the theme in action, or Install to install the theme onto your WordPress site.

Then, click on Live Preview first to see how your site will look using the theme. This makes it easier to decide if the theme you’re interested in is the one for you or not. When you’ve made the decision, click Activate to finish adding it to your website.

Uploading a Premium WordPress Theme

If you’ve purchased a premium WordPress theme, you’ll need to use the upload method from your WordPress dashboard to install your theme:

1. To start, download the theme you purchased from the theme marketplace or the company you bought it from. Save the downloaded zip file to your computer.
2. Next, log into your WordPress website and go to Appearance > Themes in the WordPress dashboard and click Add New.
3. Next, click Upload Theme to upload the zip file of your premium WordPress theme to your website from your computer.
4. Click Browse to select the zip file from your computer.
5. Then, click Install Now to add the theme to your website.
6. WordPress will install your premium theme on your website. If you want to see how your website will look using the uploaded theme, click Live Preview.
7. Lastly, click Activate to make the theme ready to go on your website.

The upload method will work for any premium WordPress theme you have saved as a zip file. It will also work when you need to import a theme from ThemeForest, GeneratePress, or any other theme repository or developer. Just download the zip file that’s saved on your computer and follow the same steps above.

But there are still a handful of things that you should do right after launching a WordPress website to set yourself up for success:

Change your Site’s Basic Information

The first thing after launching a new WordPress website is to make sure all of your basic information is current and accurate. This includes changing some basic settings that come with a new WordPress site. Here is what to do:

1. Log in to your wp-admin Dashboard
2. Go to Settings / General
3. Update your site’s title, tagline, time zone, email address, site language, and date and time formats as required
4. Go to Appearance / Customize / Site Identity
5. Upload your site’s favicon
6. Go to Appearance / Customize / Menus
7. Set your primary and secondary (if your theme supports it) menu
8. Go to Appearance / Customize / Homepage Settings
9. Set your home and blog (posts) pages

Update Your Permalinks

Permalinks are another important factor that is sometimes overlooked. By default, your WordPress post and page URLs will be rather ugly, and certainly not SEO friendly.

We highly recommend navigating to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Permalinks’, and selecting Post Name, which will give you a clean URL structure.

Change your Logins

The easiest way to break into your WordPress site is to just guess your login and password. As abstract as it sounds, it’s really the case. There are software scripts and bots that go through hundreds of thousands of passwords and try their luck with each one.

That is why you need to make sure that your login details are strong enough as part of launching a new WordPress website. At the very least you should:

• Remove any user labeled “Admin”
• Ensure the use of strong passwords; use a password generator if necessary
• Create a new user profile for all editing purposes – the role of “Editor.” You can do it in the wp-admin, Users / Add New.
• Limit the login attempts allowed before the site is locked down. You can do it with a plugin like WP Limit Login Attempts.
• Use only safe passwords.
• Store your password data with LastPass.

Creating Pages in WordPress

To get started adding a new page to your WordPress site, find the Pages menu in the WordPress Dashboard Navigation menu. Click Add New.

You’ll now see the WordPress page editor. WordPress 5.0 introduced an entirely new editor with a new approach to adding content to your new page called the WordPress Block Editor. In the WordPress editor, each paragraph, image, or video is presented as a distinct “block” of content.

Each block comes with its own set of controls for changing things like color, width, and alignment. These will show and hide automatically when you have a block selected. All of the blocks available to you live in the Block Library. You’ll find it wherever you see the + icon.

Add Page Title

Next, add the title of the page, like About. Click the Add Title text to open the text box where you will add your title.

The title of your page should be descriptive of the information the page will contain. Choose a helpful page title.

Start Writing or Choose a Block

After you add your page title, it’s time to add some content. Content can be anything you choose … from text, headings, images, lists, videos, tables, and lots more.

To see the available blocks for your page, click the plus sign button (+) at the top of the page.

WordPress Content Blocks

Blocks are the basis of all content within the WordPress page editor. Here are some of the blocks you can use on your page:

Paragraph: The paragraph block allows you to easily craft content and is the default block type for text added to the editor. It is probably the block you will use most.

Image: The image block allows you to insert an image into your content via upload, Media Library, or from a URL.

Heading: Adds heading text (h2, h3, h4, h5, h5) to introduce new sections and organize content to help visitors (and search engines) understand the structure of your content.

Gallery: Display multiple images in a rich gallery.

List: Adds a bulleted or numbered list.

Quote: Give quoted text visual emphasis.

Audio: Embed a simple audio player.

Cover: Add an image or video with a text overlay — great for headers.

File: Add a link to a downloadable file.

Video: Embed a video from your media library or upload a new one.

WordPress Document Settings

On the right side of the WordPress page editor, you’ll see Document settings for your page. This area contains some important settings for your page, so let’s go through them.

Status & Visibility

The status and visibility section contains details about how and if your page is viewable.

Visibility allows you to select between three options:

• Public – Visible to everyone
• Private – Only visible to site admins and editors
• Password-Protected – Make the page only viewable with a password you choose. Only those with the password can view this page.

Publishing Your Page

The Publish settings allow you to either choose “Immediately” or a date in the future for your page to be published.

If you want to schedule your page to be published in the future, you can use the time and date picker to choose your preferred publication time.

If you want your page to publish immediately, then leave this setting to Immediately. This means when you hit the blue Publish button at the top of the screen, your page will immediately go live.

Featured Image

Depending on your theme, the featured image of your page may be used in several ways (like on your home page, for example, in a gallery-style listing of pages). Upload an image that “describes” your new page here.

Featured images are also used by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as the preview image for the page if you share a link to your new page.

Discussion

If you’d like to allow comments on your new page, you can enable them here. Otherwise, leave this setting turned off.

Page Attributes

The Page Attributes section applies a parent page and template to your new page.

• For the Parent section, you can arrange your pages into page hierarchies. For example, you could create this new page with additional pages under it. Or you could place your new page as a child page beneath an existing page.
• Template – Some WordPress themes have custom page templates, so the next Template section allows you to apply a template to your new page.
• The Order box allows you to order your page numerically. Pages are usually ordered alphabetically, but you can choose your own order by entering a number in this field.

Save Draft or Preview Your Page

As you finish up work on your new page, you have a few options. Using the left-hand links at the top of the screen,

• You can Save a Draft of the page, which will save the page and your work on it into a draft.
• To Preview the page one last time, click the Preview button. This will open a new tab in your browser where you can view how your page will look once it is live. You can also preview your page on Tablet and Mobile devices.

Publish Your WordPress Page

Once you have finished adding content, sizing images, and proofing your page, it’s time to publish! Preview it one last time and then click the Publish button.

You’ll be able to double-check your settings one last time before publishing.

Once you’ve published, you’ll see a confirmation that the page is now live, along with the page address. Click View Page or Copy Link to save your new page’s URL.

Different Types of WordPress Pages

Homepage

Possibly the most important page on your website, your homepage will often be the first page that people see when they visit. It’s usually designed to catch their attention and convince them why it’s worth staying on your site.

About Us

This page is crucial in differentiating yourself from other businesses both in terms of what you do but also who you are.

The ‘About’ page of a website is actually one of the most visited pages as the audience is usually curious to see what a business is about before purchasing from them.

So, ensure that this page showcases who you are and what sets your business apart, as it tells the story of your company.

Contact Us

This is another key section on your site. Make sure it’s easy for visitors to find so they know how they can get in touch with you if they have any questions or concerns about your business or offerings.

The contact us link should be clearly displayed somewhere on every page of the blog so when readers need help they don’t struggle to find it.

Blog

A blog is a great way to keep your audience engaged and in touch with the latest news and trends in your industry. A lot of websites will have a blog to help promote their knowledge and help their audience – in fact, some websites are just a blog and build their entire site around articles.

Your blog page is also another opportunity to promote your business and create a following. Posting frequent blog articles can help increase site traffic and search engine rankings as well.

Shop

If you own an e-commerce business, you’ll likely need a shop page for your site. This is where you’ll list your services, your prices, and your payment methods, plus take orders, complete payments, and engage with customers through this page.

You’ll also want to make sure this page is easy for visitors to find so they can get in touch with you for purchases or questions about your offerings.

Here is a comprehensive list of website pages you should consider adding to your site.

Installing Plugins

Like themes, there are countless plugins available. Below are just some examples of what plugins can do;

• Protect your website from hackers and spam
• Help you to learn basic SEO
• Help you to create a range of contact forms
• Convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers
• Improve your website speed and performance

These are just some examples, of course, the list is seemingly endless.

To add a new plugin simply select ‘Plugins’ and then ‘Add New’ from the menu. Moving forward you can of course, also manage existing plugins in the form of updating, deactivating, and removing via the ‘Plugins’ page. Here is a complete guide to managing your WordPress plugins.

However, it’s worth noting that, although installing every plugin under the sun may seem tempting when you’re getting started with WordPress, too many plugins could slow down your website. Due to some of Google’s latest updates, this could end up affecting your SEO and your rankings. So, as a general rule, only install the plugins that you actually need for your website to properly function.

Here are a few of the top plugins on the market today:

RankMath SEO

RankMath SEO is a free SEO plugin for WordPress. It helps you to write better content through several useful features, such as:

• Adding meta tags and schema markup to your sitemaps and blog posts
• Optimizing your permalinks
• Improving the readability of your articles
• Detecting and improving your keyword density in articles and pages

Overall, it can go a long way to helping your site rank higher in a search engine and increase your click-through rate. There are several features of RankMath that are available for free, but you can also upgrade to a paid version to unlock even more great features.

Askimet

For all websites, spam can be a problem. It can affect your bounce rate and is something that you want to avoid. Askimet is a free spam protection plugin for WordPress that can help prevent this.

It’s considered one of the best at what it does and it works by checking each comment that is submitted for spam. Once it has been confirmed as spam, the commenter will never be able to post a comment again.

Monster Insights

Often considered the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, Monster Insights is a great tool for WordPress sites that want to track visitors and improve their website.

This plugin allows you to collect analytical data and track your website visitors in real-time. You can view your bounce rate, page views, sessions, and more every time you log in to your WordPress dashboard.

WooCommerce

If you run an e-commerce business, you’ll likely need WooCommerce. This is one of the top e-commerce plugins for WordPress and it allows you to create a beautiful online store. You can easily complete payments and display your products cleanly and efficiently through WooCommerce.

In fact, WooCommerce has become more of a system not than purely a plugin as you can add themes, hosting plans, and other plugins dedicated to working seamlessly with WooCommerce.

Uploading Media

The ‘Media’ section within your WordPress dashboard is, as the name suggests, where all of your media will be stored, which includes images, videos, PDFs, and more. You can upload supported files from your computer here by simply selecting ‘Add New’.

The Media section will also allow for you to add files by including an existing link if your file already exists and is hosted elsewhere.

Before you upload your media files be sure to optimize them for page speed, and use an image compression plugin like Smush, Imagify, or Short Pixel.

The WordPress media editor can also be accessed by selecting an asset in the library and then ‘Edit Image’. The editor has some features which not all folks are aware of, such as the ability to crop, resize, and scale images all within WordPress.

A word of caution: If you edit images in WordPress you simply create a new version of the original image. For best results, and to ensure your page loads as fast as possible, you should always use an external photo editing program like Photoshop.

SEO Basics

Make Sure You Are Visible to Search Engines

The first thing you need to do is to allow Google to index your WordPress site. Even though in most cases WordPress sets this up correctly on its own during install, checking if things are in order can never hurt. Here is how to do that:

1. Log in to your wp-admin Dashboard
2. Go to Settings / Reading
3. Look for “Search Engine Visibility” and make sure that the checkbox labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” remains unchecked.

Integrate Your Site with Google Analytics

The next step after launching your new WordPress website is to connect it to Google Analytics to help you improve your search visibility. It tracks your audience and their actions on your site. It comes with detailed information about everything related to your site’s content and visitors, such as the most viewed pages, conversion rates, the number of visits per day, in-depth user profiles, bounce rates, and lots of other essential stats.

The tool is free and can be easily integrated with your WordPress site through an embed code provided by Google. Alternatively, you can use a plugin like Google Analytics by MonsterInsights to connect it to your site.

Set up Google Search Console

Another important step after launching your new WordPress website is to set up your Google Search console. Google Search Console (GSC) should be a must-have item on your list. It will help you optimize your site for SEO and help you identify any search-related shortcomings on your site you need to fix.

More specifically, with GSC, you can learn about things such as the health of your internal link structure, external links pointing to your site, any sitemap problems, your popular keywords, the indexing status of your site, any crawl stats and errors, security issues, and much more. A true goldmine.

Activate Caching

After launching your new WordPress website, it may be a bit slow. And since modern consumers are getting ever more impatient that can be a big problem. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of people abandon it. Luckily it is fairly easy to fix this.

Many WordPress hosting providers provide caching as part of their hosting solutions. Another solution is to install a caching plugin to reduce the overall page loading times. There are free caching plugins out there, including W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, or more comprehensive solutions like Autoptimize and even premium plugins like WP Rocket.

Create a Sitemap.xml File

Another thing to do after launching a new WordPress site is to create a sitemap. Sitemap.xml is a file that lists all of your website’s URLs. Google uses this file to understand how your site is organized and what sort of information is there. As a result, it will be easier for Google to index everything.

To create a sitemap, all you have to do is install a plugin such as Rank Math, Yoast, or Google XML Sitemaps. Just a few clicks and you’re good to go.

Security

Install a Backup Plugin

You spend a lot of time and money building your new WordPress website. Obviously, you don’t want to repeat this process again any time soon. So, after launching a new WordPress website you should install and configure some sort of backup functionality. Many WordPress hosting providers offer regular backups as part of their service. Another way to do this is by installing a backup plugin.

Backup plugins will keep your site content in a safe place, in case anything bad ever happens and you need to restore your site to a previously working state. This is especially important if your WordPress site ever gets hacked and you need to restore it.

Improve Site Security

Another essential step after launching a new WordPress website is to improve site security. There are a lot of bad things that can happen to any WordPress site, such as hacker attacks, malware, viruses, etc.

Protecting your WordPress website from all that with a firewall of some kind is always a good idea. Be sure to ask your WordPress hosting provider what kind of security options they provide as part of their hosting solutions.

Sucuri is one of the best WordPress security services out there. It provides malware detection and cleanup, monitors your site for hacks, mitigates DDoS attacks, and more. For free solutions, check out Wordfence Security or iThemes Security. Both offer more than adequate protection for most WordPress sites.

Final Thoughts on Launching a New WordPress Website

That sums up our top recommendations for what you need to do before and after launching a new WordPress website. These simple steps should be an essential part of any WordPress design or redesign project. Without them, your new or redesigned WordPress website will lack essential features and functionality.

By implementing these essential recommendations, you will have a WordPress site that right from the day you launch it will perform better in search rankings and support your actual business objectives. It will also provide a better user experience and functionality, which in turn will help you attract, engage and convert your mobile target audience.

Of course, there are many other things you could do, and lots of plugins to add new and exciting functionalities to your site. But be careful, many WordPress plugins are outdated and could potentially hurt your site. And having too many plugins can slow your site. A good rule of thumb is to focus on the basic functionality your target audience will expect.

WordPress is free, responsive, secure, and highly customizable. In case you are looking for a digital publishing platform with ease of use, try WordPress. It is a highly effective tool for creating the best possible consumer experience.

It’s not as hard or complex as some people think so don’t be intimidated by the features of this amazing platform. With this guide to getting started with WordPress, you’ll be up and running in no time! We are here to help!

We Can Build Your WordPress Website For You

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of WordPress website consulting and design services for businesses and product brands, including custom web design and development, e-commerce solutions, search engine optimization, and WordPress optimization.

If you want to learn more about our WordPress design and support services, let’s talk! Our team will listen to your concerns, evaluate your needs, and determine the best way to launch and optimize your new WordPress website or online store.

Did You Launch Your WordPress Website?

Have you launched your own WordPress website? If so, have you followed any of our before or after launch recommendations? If not, what is your biggest obstacle to launching a new WordPress website? Do you have other problems getting started with WordPress?

Please feel free to comment below so our audience can benefit as well and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By PixoLabo
Not Your Average WordPress Web Design Agency
@pixolabo