You Can Build a WordPress Site in 24 Hours
WordPress is a fantastic platform for building websites on the fly with little to no development time required to get up and running. In addition, WordPress has fantastic customizability ranging from being able to fully customize your theme, to finding plug-ins that have the functionality to do just about anything you want:
- Choose a Good Domain Name: This should go without saying, but choosing a good domain name is half the battle toward creating a good website. A good domain name should generally be short, catchy, describe your business, and be keyword-related.
- Choose a Good Host: Choosing a good web host for WordPress presents several challenges. A web host should be a positive addition to your website's arsenal.
- Inventory Your Existing Website: Here, you can figure out whether or not you want to start over. If your existing website is so horrible you want to start over, I totally get it. I would not want to add that site to my portfolio either!
- Download WordPress: Go to WordPress.org and download the install files for WordPress. After downloading, you can unzip the files.
- Create a MySQL Database: Before proceeding with the WordPress installation, it will be necessary to create a MySQL database in Cpanel. Without a MySQL database, your WordPress installation will all be for naught.
- Install WordPress in 15 Minutes: There are some changes you need to make to the WordPress install files before you move forward with installing WordPress. First of all, it is necessary to make changes to wp_config.php in order to ensure that your installation will work. Without these changes, your installation will have problems. Using your FTP solution, let's navigate to wp-config-sample.php. We have to re-name this file to wp-config.php for the file to work. Next, we are going to make changes to some items in the file: the database name, the database username, database password, and database host. The Database Username will be "username_db1". Enter your password. Now, the Database Host is set by your hosting provider. It will be necessary to contact their support and obtain this information for that wp-config.php item. This entire process should take around 5-10 minutes total.
- Find a Good Theme: Now that WordPress is installed, it is important to find a good theme for our project.
- Install the Theme: When you do find your theme, it's generally a simple matter of downloading the files, extracting the files, and uploading them to your server. You can then go into WordPress themes and change the theme over to the new one so you can test it out
- Customize Your Theme: Looking at customizations of your theme, it is important that you can customize everything. There are different levels of customization available that can make or break your website efforts. If you have a theme that doesn't let you customize your content with your own coding, or you have to code in such a way that mimics the coding being used on the theme, then the theme is not coded well.
- Find & Install Good Plug-Ins: Finding good plug-ins is necessary to make sure that you not only have the functionality that you need, but that enhanced functionality runs smoothly.
- Permalink structure: In order to implement effective SEO, the first thing that should be changed is the structure of your permalinks. You can find these settings under Settings > Permalinks. I prefer using the following permalink structure: domainname.com/category/postname/ where category includes the blog post's category (keyword-optimized for the topical focus of your blog), and then a keyword-rich postname.
- Changing From WWW To Non-WWW: If you are migrating an existing site over to WordPress, I recommend that you use the existing site URL. Changing from WWW from non-WWW in that instance will only cause more harm than good, and you can introduce serious SEO performance issues as a result.
- Make Sure You Allow Search Engines to Index Your Site: This is a biggie and can lead to SEO performance issues if you don't configure this. You can find this setting in Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility.
- Site Speed: Speed is king and can make or break your website performance, especially where conversions are concerned.
- Be Sure to Noindex, Follow Archive Pages and Disable Archives You Don't Need: Archive pages are the king of duplicate content in WordPress. They can make or break a site, especially when the site reaches hundreds of pages.
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