We all know that building a website has never been so easy as it is now with WordPress website development.
All you need to do is either hire a WordPress developer who can help you to build a professional website in just a few days or learn yourself WordPress development and create a basic website on your own.
Having said above, it is still important to build a website that looks professional and work flawlessly.
To achieve this, you or your website developer must follow certain website development practices.
In this blog, I have shared 5 such practices that must be followed while building a WordPress website.
#1 Using reliable plugins & themes
For any WordPress website, its plugins & theme plays an important role. Wrong plugins or theme can even break your website abruptly. In other words, the collection of plugins & theme can be considered as a backbone of any WordPress website.
It is therefore, always suggested that you must hire a professional & experienced WordPress developer who knows how to choose appropriate plugins & theme for your website.
In case you are building your website yourself, here are but few important tips to choose right plugins & theme for your website.
- Always pay attention to the last updated date of your plugin or theme.
- Always ensure that the developer of your plugin or theme is responsive to the your queries.
- While choosing an appropriate theme for your WordPress website, do make sure to check the loading speed & responsiveness of your shortlisted theme.
- Checkout the reviews of existing users of the plugins & theme that you intend to use for your website development.
#2 Taking care of security
When I meet my clients and propose WordPress for their website development, they ask me doubtfully if WordPress is really safe & secure. My answer to them is always same “None of the open source CMS can be considered as fully safe, until your website developer do something about its security.”
Yes, it’s true that your web developer do need to take some precautions and put some additional effort to make your WordPress website secure.
Here are but few things your WordPress developer can do:
- Always update WordPress to its latest version.
- Always update WordPress theme & plugins regularly.
- Choose plugins carefully.
- Take care of important file permissions.
- Setup website lockdown.
- Rename login URL & change admin default username.
- Change database default prefix & disable file editing.
Recommended post: 10 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Website From Hackers & Malicious Codes
#3 Taking care of loading speed
Loading speed of any website is as important as its existence in the very first place
Here are 2 major drawbacks of a slow loading website:
- It gets higher bounce rate which means the slow loading speed affects the user-experience badly.
- The SEO score of this website will be affected because search engines don’t like slow loading websites.
WordPress websites, if not optimized properly, can result in slow loading speed.
Here are few ways to improve the loading speed of any WordPress website:
- Delete unused plugins.
- Optimize the images on your website
- Caching & CDN (content delivery network)
- Minify CSS & JS
- Clear trash
Recommended post: 7 Actions To Improve Loading Speed Of Your WordPress Ecommerce Website
#4 Taking care of SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is perhaps one of the best mediums to get targeted traffic on any website. Therefore, SEO must be on your priority list while developing your WordPress website.
Although, there are several ways in which you can optimize your WordPress website for search engines, here are some of the important ones:
- Integrating SEO-friendly themes only.
- Using best SEO plugins like Yoast.
- Using appropriate tags (meta tags and header tags).
- Taking care of website’s responsiveness.
Recommended post: 5 Ways In Which Web Developers Can Help In Your WordPress SEO
#5 Reliable website hosting
The selection of web hosting is crucial for any website development. It won’t be wrong to say “A website hosting can either make or break a website.”
Although, there are plenty of options of web hosting to choose from, the selection process must be done carefully.
It’s not necessary that all the cheap web hosting options are bad, while at the same time its not true that all the expensive web hosting options are good.
There are few things which you must consider while choosing a web hosting package or company.
You must subscribe with a web hosting company that provides you with below:
- High configuration servers
- Secured web servers
- 24/7 support
- Online chat
- Technical staff to handle troubleshooting
- Minimum downtime
- Fast loading speed
- Data backup plan
Recommended post: All You Need To Know About Web Hosting