WordPress is one of the most popular tools when it comes to building a website. Currently, about 35 percent of all websites use WordPress, with more being added every day. However, not all WordPress websites are created equal. WordPress gets you off to a great start, but if you want a truly great website, you need to add in a few extra things. Here are 7 things you’ll want to make sure your WordPress website has in order to get the most out of it.
A Great Domain Name
WordPress websites are no different than any other website when it comes to the domain name. If you don’t have a great domain name for your site, not only will it be more difficult for customers to find you, but it could even hurt your rankings in search engine results. To find the perfect domain name for your site, you’ll likely have to go through some trial and error. Find a provider where you can buy cheap domain names, then try out different options related to your website. With some patience, you should be able to find a domain that represents you well, is easy to remember, available, and affordable.
An SEO Plugin
Domain names can play a role in your search rankings, but there is a lot more that goes into them. To ensure you appear as high as possible in search results, you need to optimize your WordPress website to fit what search engines are looking for. The easiest way to do this is with an SEO plugin. A WordPress SEO plugin will make it easy to do things like changing your title tags, add image alt tags, and analyze your post content. If you don’t know much about SEO, or you don’t have the time to edit everything manually, getting an SEO plugin should be one of your first priorities.
A Search Feature
One of the best features of WordPress is how easy it is to add new pages and posts. The problem is keeping all of these pages organized so that your visitors can easily find them. A simple feature you can add to make life easier for your audience is a search feature. With a search feature, your visitors can simply type in some words related to what they are looking for and find pages or posts that match their results. If you want, you can even exclude pages from WordPress search results. There are plenty of plugins that can add a search feature to your WordPress site, so try one out and see if you like it.
Mobile-Friendly Design
These days about half of all search traffic comes from mobile devices. This means there is a pretty good chance your visitors are using a mobile device when they access your site. To ensure they have a good experience, you’ll want your site design to be mobile-friendly. A mobile-friendly design will shrink to fit the device’s smaller screen, while still being large enough to use with a finger.
The easiest way to do this is by choosing a WordPress theme that is ready for mobile. Most themes will include this in their description, so be sure to look for it. If you’re not sure, load it up, then open the site on your phone.
A Security Plugin
After spending so much time working on your WordPress site, it would be a major inconvenience if something happened to it. Unfortunately, there are malicious actors out there who may try to corrupt your WordPress site for their own purposes. To protect against any unwanted intrusions, you should install a WordPress security plugin on your site as early as you can. A good security plugin will monitor for unusual activity and alert you if there are any issues. Here are some great WordPress security plugins to get you started.
Visitor Tracking
Once you start getting visitors to your website, you’ll want to know more about them. Information like where the users are located, how they found your website, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed for is vital towards making the best decisions for your site. To learn this information, you’ll need something to track your visitors. Google Analytics is the most popular option for visitor tracking and luckily it is easy to integrate into WordPress. Google Analytics provides a ton of advanced information about your site all in one easy location. To get started with Google Analytics and WordPress, you can check out this guide.
A Backup System
Finally, you should have some system in place to regularly backup your WordPress site. Sometimes things can go wrong when updating your WordPress site or installing new plugins. To protect yourself against losing all your previous hard work, you should create a backup of your site. There are many plugins that help you do this, and you can set a schedule so that a backup is created automatically.
Then, if something goes wrong during an update or while you’re making changes, you can simply revert back to your most recent save. The last thing you want is to have to shut down your site for several days as you work to rebuild it from scratch, so grab a good WordPress backup plugin and regularly create a backup file.
Get Started with the WordPress Essentials
There are many different features you can add to WordPress, allowing you to customize it however you wish. But there are certain features that all the best WordPress websites have in common. To make the most out of your WordPress site, you should make sure that your site has these features too.
Thankfully, with WordPress’s plugin feature, it’s relatively easy to add new features to your site and get started with them. If you don’t have any of the features listed above, now is the best time to explore integrating them into your site so that you can have the strongest possible website going forward.
