Building Your First WordPress Website

While WordPress.org is home to over 60 million blogs and personal websites, its WordPress.com sibling has become the world’s leading content management system for companies seeking a professional online presence. Providing the framework for 17 million websites – just over half the global total – it’s easy to understand why so many people choose WordPress when creating a new portal.

Building a WordPress website is a modular process which can be enhanced with add-ons or streamlined according to personal preference. Around 46,000 optional plugins have been created to handle specialised functions or complete particular tasks, ranging from mouse-click heat maps to table layout formatting. Some WordPress memberships are free, though customised domain names and technical support require subscriptions. Premium services also provide unlimited storage space and the ability to monetise sites without any WordPress branding. Some features are universal, however, such as anti-spam protection and options to radically adapt any of the pre-designed templates on offer.

Once you’ve decided which of the subscription models to adopt, the process of building a website begins by signing up – supplying personal and corporate details, any previously acquired domain names, and so forth. Existing domain accounts may require you to log into the control panel and install WordPress, though this could be as simple as downloading a new app onto your smartphone.

With WordPress installed, a basic website will be displayed at your chosen domain address. This standard theme is merely one template among many, with numerous other skins to choose from. This will be the public face of your new online presence, while the WordPress dashboard is the nerve centre where changes can be made. Firstly, go into the Appearance > Themes submenu to select a skin that suits your business. Sober colours and conventional fonts help to generate a sense of quality among service providers, whereas retailers may wish to make strong use of images and emphasise their ecommerce functionality.

With a suitable design installed and activated, it’s necessary to duplicate this across several pages to create different sections of the website. After clicking through to Pages > Add New, text and images must be uploaded onto each individual page; the more organised among you will have already prepared the content you wish to publish. Once a page has been populated and saved, it should be added into the main menu so site visitors can find it. By going to Appearance > Menus > Add to Menu, that page’s title will appear within the website’s main menu.

Crucially, website content should be tailored around being found on search engine results pages (known as SERPS). Using a variety of terms for your products and services is crucial, with analytics software like Google Analytics or SEMrush helping to identify the names and phrases people commonly search for. Adjusting the website’s tagline and page titles additionally boosts SERPS rankings, while links to your site from other websites can be beneficial if you can persuade third-party administrators to include hyperlinks in their own online portals.

And if all this sounds too complex, remember UK2’s Premium WordPress Hosting service can handle everything from domain name registration through to automatic updates and protection against malicious software. Our technical support teams are on hand 24/7, and we use the very latest technology to ensure your site consistently loads at lightning speed from anywhere in the world. With dedicated environments specifically created for WordPress hosting, we take the pressure out of site management and domain registration…