10 Tips for Rolling Out a New WordPress Website

10 Tips for Rolling Out a New WordPress Website

Rolling out a new self-hosted WordPress website isn’t difficult, doing it right though takes experience.

Why not jump those awkward teething problems and hire a website developer and designer to help you?

Neogain can you roll out a WordPress website smoothly and get your website off to the right start.

However if you want to roll out a website yourself, the ten tips below are only the ‘tip’ of the iceberg, but should help you get off to a steady start, rather than falling at the first hurdle.

Tip 1 – Not too many plugins.

You find the right hosting, setup a beautiful website and then litter the WordPress website with plugins, that seem to be recommended in every other WordPress related article you read on the internet.

Resist the urge to install all the ‘fancy pants’ plugins and instead draw up a list, evaluate what the plugin will truly do for you, and whether it will help you meet your objectives.

Tip 2 – Choose your categories wisely.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to create numerous categories for their blog posts, then within a month visitors find the categories are still pretty empty as there are too many.

Your need to reduce your visitor clicks to finding content when possible, and make sure you have fewer, but richly populated categories could help. Plus make sure the category names are chosen after keyword research, and not just because you thought the name was suitable on the spur of the moment.

Tip 3 – Install a cache system.

A cache system isn’t just for when a blog post goes ‘viral’, which probably won’t happen (sorry).

However when the MySQL database is under heavy demand and you’ve got some decent traffic, it can give your WordPress website the oomph it requires.

Tip 4 – Prepare for busy periods.

Today you might be twiddling you thumbs, tomorrow you are snowed under with work and ever conscious you’ve got to roll out a new post or edit an image for your draft.

Why not draft a few posts early on, ready for such moments? Plus build up a library of optimised images uploaded and ready for when time is a precious resource. This will help you keep posting, even during business times.

Tip 5 – Get the URL strategy right from the beginning.

How many young WordPress websites start with no search engine friendly urls? Too many!

Get those custom permalinks setup from the get-go and establish your URL strategy from day one.

Tip 6 – Lock down your blog comment policy.

The trickle of comments you receive in the early days, could turn into an avalanche later on, including cartloads of unwanted spam.

Make sure you put a blog comment policy / strategy in place, such as approval settings, plugins and / or akismet.

Tip 7 – Avoid the bandwidth heavy WordPress theme.

That glossy looking WordPress theme with a large area for header images, a footer a mile long and inbetween multiple columns with dazzling java font effects and high quality icons is probably a step too far, no?

There is where a season designer can really make a difference, else using a theme you’ve researched heavily, consider bandwidth, visitor flow, objectives, branding, house style adaptability and more.

Tip 8 – Get a designer on board from the beginning.

A designer whether modifying a stock theme or building one from scratch can help you get off to a good start.

Now we are suggesting experienced designers such as we have available, not your neighbours teenage daughter or son who have little experience, and who learnt how to put together a basic theme over the summer holiday!

Tip 9 – Don’t be scared to launch your advertisement campaign early.

Many people take too much of a breather in-between website roll-out and marketing.

Running a low budget Google AdWords campaign can not only bring much needed traffic, but the data from the campaign could help you focus and improve the website’s SEO strategy.

Tip 10 – Put website statistics monitoring in place at the start.

The WordPress website is up and running, but nobody is monitoring statistics. Often people think that the small amount of data won’t really be beneficial early on.

However you need to evolve the website rapidly to becoming a well-oiled site, and learning what works and what doesn’t, where people are coming from and where they are leaving, and this should be looked at from the very beginning.

If you want to hire WordPress development or design services, please get in touch.

Hire a WordPress developer and designer.

Hire Neogain.