How to create a website with WordPress for beginners

In today’s world, no en­tre­pren­eur can afford to not have their own website. But what should you do if you lack the necessary coding skills to create one? A content man­age­ment system (CMS) can fix everything. Once installed, you can use this system to create, design and manage a website without needing in-depth knowledge of HTML. In this article, we’ll explain how to make a website using WordPress so that you can benefit from all the ad­vant­ages that the CMS has to offer.

How to create a website with WordPress

To create a website with WordPress, there are a number of things you need to keep in mind. Use the following list as a guide to ensure you don’t forget anything:

1. Install the CMS: You can either opt for WordPress packages in which the necessary files have already been deposited on the server, like Hosting for WordPress from IONOS, or you can carry out the in­stall­a­tion process on your own. To install the CMS on your own, you’ll need web hosting, FTP access, a domain and the latest version of WordPress. This guide on how to install WordPress can help you with this process.
2. Edit the general settings: Here you enter the site title, your site’s URL, your email address as the admin as well as other in­form­a­tion.

3. Edit content settings: To do this, make ad­just­ments to the read and write settings. Establish whether users can comment on pub­lic­a­tions and whether these comments require prior approval for pub­lic­a­tion. In this area, you can also specify whether pings and pingbacks should be activated when posting articles. This means that other websites will be informed when you link to them in a post.

4. Dis­trib­ute roles and per­mis­sions. If your project is going to be managed by several users, you can add users and establish who can do what with WordPress user roles.

5. Install themes: Your choice of WordPress theme will determine how your website looks and how the frontend content of WordPress is displayed. Third-party (free and paid) themes are also available, but make sure to check that the design is re­spons­ive and use widgets if necessary.

6. Use a menu to help your visitors with nav­ig­a­tion. You can link to static pages or display certain post cat­egor­ies.

7. Install plugins to extend the page’s func­tion­al­ity. Re­gard­less of whether they are free or paid for, it’s important to assess their effect on the page as a whole and take possible security risks into account.

8. Create in­di­vidu­al web pages whenever you need static content.

9. Publish entries. It is important to assign ap­pro­pri­ate cat­egor­ies and labels to pub­lic­a­tions so that users can easily find them.

10. Use the media library to store mul­ti­me­dia files used in pub­lic­a­tions. The images can also be ac­com­pan­ied by an al­tern­at­ive text that briefly describes what they show. In addition to being essential in SEO, al­tern­at­ive texts serve to make your website more ac­cess­ible.

How to create suitable content for your WordPress site

Different types of websites need different content. What content is right for your WordPress website depends heavily on your target group and what you want to achieve. Does your audience want more in­form­a­tion on a par­tic­u­lar topic? Or are you trying to share specific in­form­a­tion about your company? Try and put yourself in your visitors’ shoes or ask friends and ac­quaint­ances for their opinions. Re­gard­less of what you write about, there are some rules that apply to all website texts.

What to keep in mind when operating a WordPress website

Now that you have learned how to build a website with WordPress, it’s time to learn about main­tain­ing and backing up your website.

Relevancy

If you have created a static WordPress website with the purpose of providing in­form­a­tion about your company, you need to ensure that all the in­form­a­tion you provide is up to date. If your company changes location, you expand your range of services or your prices change, you need to im­me­di­ately change the in­form­a­tion on your website.

If you maintain a blog or a news site, it’s important to provide in­ter­est­ing content on a regular basis. In order to keep producing regular material in the long run, it may be useful to create an editorial plan. This is es­pe­cially helpful when you have a team working together to create content.

Security

There are a few steps you can take to ensure the ac­cess­ib­il­ity and security of your website:

• Install updates: In­stalling updates will help you minimise possible security breaches.
• Create regular backups: This may be of great help against possible struc­tur­al failures. You can create backups manually, through security plugins or with free or paid programs.
• Ensure password pro­tec­tion: WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. It is therefore often the target of criminal hackers. You can increase the safety of your password by choosing long passwords made up of letters, numbers and special char­ac­ters.
• Check ex­ten­sions: The vast majority of plugins and themes for WordPress are provided by in­de­pend­ent de­velopers, which means they may not always be safe. You can avoid risks by using tried-and-tested ex­ten­sions from well-known man­u­fac­tur­ers.

Analysis

To get the most out of your site, you should keep track of per­form­ance and visitor stat­ist­ics. This allows you to react promptly to poor results and adjust your strategy or tech­no­logy. To obtain visitor stat­ist­ics, you can use Google Analytics or one of the Google Analytics al­tern­at­ives. Most website operators rely on the open-source analytics tool Matomo (formerly Piwik) if they don’t want to use Google. To integrate this into WordPress, you can use the plugin, WP-Matomo (WP-Piwik). However, numerous other plugins can also measure visitor stat­ist­ics.

The term ‘per­form­ance’ describes the loading times of in­di­vidu­al web pages. Per­form­ance is important for the user-friend­li­ness of your website and is therefore also critical for Google rankings.

To test the per­form­ance of your WordPress website, you can use the free IONOS website checker. This will tell you exactly where you can make im­prove­ments on your site.

Scope

The higher your website is in search engine search results (es­pe­cially Google’s results), the easier it will be for visitors to find your site. Google will even­tu­ally notice your site on its own through its crawlers, but this can take some time. You can shorten this time by entering your website’s URL in the Google Search Console. In addition to sub­mit­ting your website to Google, which is the most widely used search engine, you should also submit your website to other search engines as well.

You can also increase your website’s reach by becoming active on other channels. Get involved in relevant dis­cus­sions on social networks and try to get backlinks from other websites. When link building, however, make sure that your links come from reputable and respected websites. Quality over quantity applies here.

Quick recap of what to consider when choosing WordPress for your website

WordPress is an easy tool to use and doesn’t take long to get fa­mil­i­ar­ised with. If you are running a website with regularly updated content, it is always advisable to use a CMS. You can use the backend to create, manage and publish your content, and thanks to numerous themes and plugins, your website does not have to look like an ordinary blog.

Beginners, however, will reach a limit in their ability to alter the design and make in­di­vidu­al ad­just­ments. But if you have a small amount of pro­gram­ming knowledge, you can customise WordPress to make it even more versatile. The source code of the themes and plugins can be modified in the backend editor, although it is better to avoid this option if you haven’t worked with CSS or PHP code before, as you can ac­ci­dent­ally jeop­ard­ise the content on your website.