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It’s easier to build a WordPress website than you might think. You don’t need to be a tech genius or have bags of cash. It can be done quickly and look good, and I can show you how, in 3 simple steps.
3 steps to building a WordPress website
Choose a platform
The first step to build a WordPress website is to choose a platform which is the thing that you’re going to use to actually make your website.
Choose a name and a home
You’ll need to choose the name that you want to put in your URL and then where you’re going to save the files for your website. Now that might sound a little bit techy, but don’t worry, I’ll explain it more as we go through.
Build it
And then the really exciting bit is to build it. Literally, that’s it.
Choosing a platform
WordPress, as you might have guessed is my first choice for a website building platform every time. There are a few reasons for this:
Widely Used
So wordpress powers a third of the entire Internet. That’s like 75 million websites and if people have chosen to build 75 million websites with it, it must be half decent, right? But there are a few other advantages for it being so widely used.
So the fact that so many people use it means that there’s loads and loads of help and tutorials out there. If you get stuck with something, there’s a load of blogs, just like mine, out there to help you.
Further down the line you might decide that you some help. You may decide that you need to focus on being more strategic with your business or being a bit more creative.
So you’d be lookign for freelancer or a virtual assistant to look after your site and make changes to it. With WordPress you know that there are going to be loads people out there with the right experience who will be able to help you.
Plugins
Plugins are little apps that add extra features to your website. They can add extra security to your site, social media sharing buttons, and even specialists plugins to help you make sure that you’ve nailed you search engine optimization.
There Are over 55,000 wordpress plugins around, so chances are they will be a plug in somewhere that does the thing that you want to add to your site.
And not only that, there are loads of free ones as well. I’ve been using wordpress for about three years now, coming up to three and a half years. And I’ve only ever paid for two plug ins. One was just to add popups to my site and the other was to hook up my WooCommerce shop to my mailing list.
Read my top 9 WordPress plugins for business here.
SEO
If you’re setting up a website for your business, you want to make sure that you’re found by search engines.
When people type into Google the thing that they’re looking for, you need to make sure that your site is optimized for them to be able to find you for Google to be able to find you.
WordPress is one of the top platforms around for helping you optimize your site for search engine.
A lot of SEO revolves around getting the keywords that you want to rank for, the keywords that you want to appear in search results when people type them into Google, in the right places.
So it would be things like the file names for your images that you add to your site, the alternative text getting your keywords in the URLs as well. WordPress is one of the better website building platforms for this.
Cost
If you’re a small business staring out, chances are you’re not going to have bags of cash to fork out for a website. Which is why wordpress is a great platform for new businesses and websites.
First off, you need a domain name, and they cost as little as 99p from sites like namecheap and domain.com and wordpress hosting which , starts from from as little as five pound a month. So you could technically start a wordpress site for six quid.
If you went to another platform like Wix, you’d have to be a bigger monthly fee than that upfront. So it’s a great, great option for new business and more established businesses too.
E-commerce
So if you’re looking to build a WordPress website for business, you’re going to have something to sell. Whether that’s physical products, downloadable products, online courses or membership sites. You’ve got all these options available to you if you use WordPress.
WooCommerce is like is the daddy when it comes to setting up a shop on your site and you can sell physical or virtual products and your services.
MemberPress will set up members only areas on your site so people will have to have registered and then be logged in for them to access them.
Easy digital downloads is great if you sell just digital products and there are loads of options around for online courses too.
Choosing a name and a home
When it comes to what you’re going to call your website, we’re talking about domain names. The domain name for my site is kimscotland.com.
Domain names point to a special address on the Internet where the files for your website live, (more on this in a sec).
Choosing a domain name
- Memorable – you don’t want people to forget your website name is 10 minutes after you’ve told them what it was, or 10 minutes after they’ve seen it written down somewhere.
- Easy to say – you don’t want it to take half an hour, to tell someone what your domain name is
- Easy to type – the last thing you want is for people to get frustrated that they can’t land on your site because your domain name is so difficult to type and for them to just go to one of your competitiors instead.
Choosing a host
A host is a set of computers that are often called servers because they serve files needed to display different websites so that people can access them using their web browsers.
Every computer connected to the internet will have a unique address (IP address) made up of numbers and dots.
Once you’ve set up a website and you’ve bought your domain name, you will then point your domain name to the address of your host. So that when people type your domain name in the address bar, it will take them to the files that belong to your website.
Tips for choosing a host
- Customer service – when you have a problem you want to make sure that the help you need is there when you need it.
- Reliability – you want to make sure that when people visit your site that it’s actually there for them to see. If your host isn’t reliable then this could cost you money.
- Cost – you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting so always buy the best you can afford.
My recommendations for hosting are Lyrical Host and SiteGround. Both are very reliable and have great customer service.
SiteGround take annual payments only, so if you’re looking to pay monthly – Lyrical Host is the one for you.
Build your website
There are a few cogs that help the WordPress machine run. These 3 are the main ones.
- Themes – a set of files that determines how the site should look. there are loads around, free and premium. Check out my recent blog post which is a complete guide to WordPress themes for business.
- Plugins – there are some essential ones that every website should have including spam prevention and a security plugin. Find my top 9 WordPress plugins for business here.
- Content – you can add content via pages and posts. Pages are static content used for things like contact and about me pages, whereas posts are more timely content that appears as part of the blog roll. The Blog roll is a special page that displays all blog posts in reverse chronological order. The new WordPress block editor has made adding content to your website easier than ever before. Check out my complete guide to Gutenberg.
Want a bit more help?
Don’t worry if having read all this you’re still not sure whether you’re ready to build a WordPress website. It can be really overwhelming at first, which is why I’ve put together a free guide that will take you through the whole process.
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