Key Points that Often Get Overlooked when Setting Up a WordPress Site

Setting up a WordPress site on your own is an incredibly creative and rewarding experience. Yet there are so many aspects that you need to keep tabs on that you are bound to overlook something. So, before you hit that launch button – and even after you do – revisit these best practices to make sure that you make the most of your site’s potential and that you keep it secure.

Keep Regular Backups of Your Content

When developing your website, it is important to identify your hosting needs early on and plan ahead. You must be prepared for the possibility that your WordPress site could suddenly gain unexpected traction and make your visitor count boom. A lot of attention is a great thing but too much of it can overwhelm your resources and create issues so always make sure that you keep copies of your content to be able to start again very quickly if something goes south. After all, your content is the most important part of your website.

Big companies know that all too well, and often employ load balancer solutions to make sure that they reduce server load, redistribute traffic in an optimal way across servers, and keep content live. Depending on the size of your company or the appeal of your site, you may not need tools like load balancing – but carrying out regular backups can save you a world of pain if you run into trouble. Having a backup of your site’s content and structure can mean the difference between spending days or even months to set it all up again and being ready to go live in a matter of hours.

Learn the SEO Basics to Boost Your Rankings

WordPress is one of the leading platforms for online content creators to gain revenue. According to the latest research data published on Statista, WordPress ranks fourth in terms of profitable platforms, accounting for $348 million in profit for the creators that prefer it. In first place is popular video hosting platform YouTube with a whopping $4 billion, followed by Etsy at roughly $1.5 billion and Instagram at $460 million, while Amazon Publishing completes the top 5 at $220 million. If you are into the profit game, as so many other WordPress users out there, then it is crucial to identify ways in which you can boost your site rankings and optimize your monetization potential.

You will find more infographics at Statista

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is a good place to start. In a nutshell, SEO focuses on ways to rank higher in search engine results in order to increase incoming traffic. This can be achieved by helping search engine algorithms better understand what your content is about and what to associate it with. You can make your WordPress site more SEO-friendly by encouraging Google and its peers to index your site under its visibility settings, as well as changing the default URL structures to contain content-related keywords.

Think of the Little Things

When you are trying to get your WordPress site to break through to your target demographic, every little thing counts. Research shows that consumers currently spend over fine hours on their smartphones on a daily basis, while up to 70% of all global internet traffic and at least 57% of US web traffic takes place through a mobile device. Mobile users are the target audience of the future, and they are a big part of who you should be trying to appeal to right now. Making sure that your site optimized for mobile devices is no longer a luxury.

Do not be afraid to seek help to maintain your website in perfect shape – after all, it is too much to handle on your own. Make sure that you offer the best visitor experience you can by investing in new, engaging content and checking older posts for discrepancies. For example, you need to perform regular tests to find out whether there are any broken links on your site – and you can do so by using dedicated online tools. Keep up to date with the latest WordPress plugins and choose which ones would better suit your needs. Do not be afraid to invest money in purchasing a few essential plugins, but make sure you read reviews first to increase the chances of you getting your money’s worth.

Managing your own WordPress site is a feat in and of itself – so it is important to allocate time and resources to ensure that everything runs smoothly and that you have not overlooked anything important.