7 Setup Tips You Must Know for WordPress Beginners |
1. Picking and Learning Your Theme
Picking a theme can be daunting, especially considering there are hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. The good news for any WordPress beginner is there are a handful of tried and true WordPress themes that are extremely popular and customizable. Divi and Genesis are great options for beginners. They are user-friendly meaning they don’t require in-depth developer skills, they are affordable, and they have a large community to draw support from.
Beyond choosing the right theme comes learning how it works, and how you can customize it to your individual needs. This is accomplished in two ways:
2. Protect Your Hard Work By Backing Up Your WordPress Site
Being new to WordPress means you’ve likely never seen the white screen of death or have fallen victim to a malicious hacker who has locked you out of your site. Regularly backing up your WordPress site will ensure you can get back up and running when the day comes that you lose access, or your site breaks from some faulty plugin.
There are three ways you can backup your WordPress site:
- Carefully choose a WordPress hosting provider that offers backup services. Our partner, SiteGround, for example, has an auto-backup system which makes a copy of your site daily. They provide you with the flexibility to restore your data with just a few clicks.
- Back it up yourself using an FTP server and manually transfer the files between your server and your computer on a regular basis.
- Download a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy.
3. Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
With any WordPress site, your goal is likely to get more traffic, more readers, or more customers. One of the best ways to do that is through optimizing your site to rank higher on Google or other search engines. This tactic is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While WordPress does a good job out of the box with SEO, these two tips will put you far ahead of your competition with a minimal time investment:Download an SEO pluginWhile there are hundreds of SEO plugins, by far the most popular plugin is Yoast. Many other web-based tools like SEMrush and Moz will become familiar to you as your site grows, but for any WordPress beginner, Yoast is a great start because it is an all-in-one solution that has a clear and easy-to-use interface. To download a WordPress SEO plugin from the admin interface:Plugins > Add New > Search for ‘SEO’ > Click Install Now- Adjust your permalink settingsAccording to Yoast, a straightforward permalink structure is ideal for SEO. To take it up a notch add your main keyword somewhere in your post’s name. Adjusting your permalink structure in WordPress is simple:Go to Settings > Permalinks > Select ‘Post Name’
4. Beef Up Your Security
Strong security for your WordPress site doesn’t need to be expensive or take a long time to set up. These three steps will get you there in no time:Generate a strong passwordYour new WordPress site likely gave you a username and password and should be updated as soon as possible to thwart any hackers from using brute force attacks to gain control of your website. Generating a secure password involves using a differentpassword than any of your other logins and using a long string of multiple numbers, letters, and symbols. If you want a secure password quickly, you can always use a password generator to do the job for you.Update your site regularlyUpdate WordPress, your plugins, and your themes regularly to close any backdoors and vulnerabilities left open to hackers. Looking at the graphic below you can see that WordPress notifies you when any updates are available and makes updating as simple as clicking ‘Update’.- Install a security pluginMuch like your computer likely has some sort of antivirus or anti malware software built in, your website will need some similar defense systems. By far the most popular is Wordfence and All In One WP Security and Firewall. Both are free and robust security solutions. They have paid versions as well for more premium protection. To learn more about WordPress security check out WPBeginner’s Step By Step Guide.
5. Be Mindful About Must-Have Plugins
When you’re just getting started with WordPress, you are likely doing lots of research into best practices and troubleshooting some problems you may be having. Which is great, you should absolutely be doing that. Along the way, it is almost inevitable that you will come across some article about “Must Have WordPress Plugins”. While these articles may have great intentions, you should know that more plugins aren’t always better. In fact, the opposite is usually true. You should keep your plugins to a bare minimum to run your site and provide the user experience you desire. More plugins than necessary can slow down your site tremendously. Another issue with more plugins is they come with added vulnerabilities. Any plugin that isn’t up to date has the potential to be hacked or even become faulty. Only download high-quality plugins from trusted sources who update frequently.6. Gain Insights About Your WordPress Site With Analytics
WordPress is strong in a lot of areas but built in analytics and dashboards is not one of them. Luckily there are many plugins available that make it easy to track important things like where your traffic is coming from, how often people are first-time7. Encourage Communication
With any online presence, you will eventually have readers, followers, and customers reach out for a multitude of reasons. They have questions about your product, they want to praise you for an article that impacted them, they want to work for you, and much more. With that, you’ll need some easy ways for them to reach out.- Give them multiple optionsWhile it is great to give your customers and readers ways to contact you, it can also be difficult to weed out the spammers. If you’re wary about signing up for costly services or giving out personal phone numbers and email in the beginning you can use services like Google Voice and Google Suite. Google Voice gives you a free phone number that routes to your cell phone and Google Suite provides you with a custom email address for only $5 per user a month.Finally, a great option for online chat is the free Tawk.To plugin which lets your users chat with you and your team live from the website. The messages can even be sent to your mobile phone for added convenience.
