What You Need To Know Before Building a WordPress Website

Learn what you need to know before building a WordPress website and see how to create and make it a success in the following steps

By Claudio Pires
Updated on July 8, 2023
What You Need To Know Before Building a WordPress Website

WordPress might as well be the Walmart of the web, so dominant it has become in the online marketplace. In the early days of open-source blogging platforms, WordPress emerged at the front, thanks to a tasteful balance between ease of use and flexibility. Learn what you need to know before building a WordPress website and see how to create and make it a success in the following steps.

While it isn’t the perfect solution for every web need, it’s gained enough ground that every website starting out must consider it before building a website. Herein you can read a mini-primer on WordPress considerations.

Before Building a WordPress Website

#1. Before Building a Website: Do you have your domain?

WordPress is not a hosting service on its own. It is a content management system (CMS) that needs an online domain from which to function. This is almost a trivial detail in these days of web hosts offering registered domain plans for less than coffee money. But having a domain for your business is crucial to this process.

#2. Does your online business have a content strategy?

It’s best to decide on your blog’s “mission statement” rather than just launching one and then putting with it.

Blogging is an example of engagement marketing, in which you engage customers by building a brand, establishing yourself as an industry expert, promoting your business, and otherwise using your domain to reach out to your customer and potential customer base.

#3. Before Building a Website: Who’s going to maintain it?

Running a blog is like running any other streaming media channel. It’s “showtime” for 24 hours a day. Even the most creative mind will eventually run out of material.

The best standard is to create a schedule for posting and decide who your blogger will be. You can quickly fill this position with a freelancer online, of course. Your blogger should understand the company brand and what its potential customers are and have guidelines for what kind of content to produce.

#4. Does your hosting plan provide adequate bandwidth for traffic?

What if your blog gets popular? That’s a good thing, but what if it gets so popular that its server becomes overloaded and the site goes down? Even without a massive herd of swarming visitors, if your blog is dedicated to serving media files such as video, your traffic might become unwieldy.

A new popular solution to the bandwidth headache is the WordPress CDN – “Content Delivery Network,” This functions as a mirror for your website for locations worldwide. With a WordPress CDN, visitors in China get served a copy from China, the UK from the UK, and so on, avoiding high traffic spikes in one location before building a WordPress website.

#5. What are your competitors doing with their blogs?

It’s advisable to do some market research before setting up a new business in any industry. Blogging is no exception, and it’s quite easy to look up your competition to determine their content strategy. Note their level of engagement and posting schedule.

Perhaps you can offer something the competition doesn’t? If you have a very saturated industry around your business, you might want to work extra hard to stand out, perhaps even break with tradition and try for something original to learn how you can create a WordPress website with those steps.

#6. Do you need more than just a blog?

A blog is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every type of business. It happens to be an essential marketing tool for 95% of them. But your online business might need more, such as shopping carts, inventory listings, a media gallery, and other non-blog parts.

It is possible to push WordPress to build a site with these extra content features, but it’s a chore. You might be better off going with a more sophisticated CMS, such as Joomla or Drupal, for a site that looks beyond mere blogging.

#7. How is your blog going to pull in business for you?

In the modern-day, blogging is not the entire equation. Social media plays a role now more than ever. After you post to your blog, you must turn to Twitter and Facebook to blast your post out to the world. Your social media channels can be easily outsourced to freelance labor as well. The other way blogs pull in traffic is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

To-do Checklist

  1. Define your website’s purpose.
  2. Choose a suitable domain name.
  3. Secure reliable web hosting.
  4. Install WordPress.
  5. Select a responsive theme.
  6. Customize the appearance.
  7. Install essential plugins.
  8. Optimize for search engines.
  9. Create essential pages.
  10. Set up user-friendly navigation.
  11. Install necessary security measures.
  12. Regularly back up your website.
  13. Test website performance.
  14. Implement analytics and tracking.
  15. Ensure legal compliance.
  16. Regularly update WordPress and plugins.
  17. Test across different browsers and devices.
  18. Create a backup plan.
  19. Regularly monitor and maintain.
  20. Learn and improve.

There’s no need to overthink this; create enough content that talks about the subject naturally and in-depth, and that’s all the cue Google needs to index your site and return it in response to queries to learn how you can create a WordPress website with those steps.

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.