Learn how to win at WordPress
Putting together a high-performance website requires more than a great logo and some killer website copy.
Developing a WordPress website is a multifaceted process that requires input from experts across various fields, including SEO, content writing, user experience (UX), graphic design, coding, and more. If you want your website to be the best that it can be, developing and maintaining it will require research, meticulous planning, and strategy.
But before you can begin developing a strategy to bring your brand to life online, it’s important to gain a thorough understanding of WordPress best practices. That way, you can weave these tried and tested practices into your strategy to give your project the best chance of success.
In this article, we will discuss some of the most important best practices for launching and maintaining a WordPress website. Integrating these best practices within your strategy will ensure that your new WordPress website is secure, user-friendly, and optimised for success, helping your business reach its goals.
Before you begin: Is WordPress the right platform for your website?
WordPress is a highly versatile content management system (CMS) and website builder that is popularly used to build and host business websites. In 2023, 45.8% of all websites used WordPress as their CMS. While WordPress is a very popular choice, it’s not always the most suitable platform. So, before beginning your project, it’s important to consider why you want to use WordPress and whether the platform is best equipped to meet your business’s needs. Think about the type of content you’ll be managing online and what your business needs from its website in terms of special features (like membership sites and eCommerce) and scalability.
At this stage, it can be useful to invite all shareholders to a web workshop to learn about WordPress’s capabilities and limitations. This will ensure that everyone understands and agrees that WordPress is the right platform before you move forward.
What are the best practices for migrating a website to WordPress?
The platform you choose to build your website on will significantly impact its functionality and success. So, if the platform you’re currently using can no longer meet your business’s evolving needs, migrating to WordPress could mark a turning point for your business. If you are migrating an existing website to WordPress, it is best practice to carry out these important steps pre-migration.
Evaluate and document your website’s performance before migration
Before you migrate your website, evaluate and document your website’s current performance metrics – such as bounce rates, user session length, and page load times. This data will come in handy for comparing performance post-migration.
Perform a content audit
Evaluate how all of your website’s existing content is performing and decide what needs to be migrated, deleted, or updated. Then, plan how your content will be organised once it’s been moved over to WordPress.
Develop a strategy to preserve SEO rankings
Your existing website will have already built up SEO rankings, and you want to improve on these, not lose them. To avoid losing visibility, you’ll need to create a strategy to preserve and improve your website’s ranking. This strategy could include using the same URL structure, setting up 301 redirects, updating all internal links, maintaining metadata, and ensuring that you re-submit a new sitemap to Google Search Console post-migration.
Best practices when designing and developing a WordPress website
For your WordPress website to perform well, it needs to have a strong foundation from which it can evolve and grow. Key elements like website hosting, legal compliance, and site architecture should be prioritised at the start of the project. Let’s explore best practices that can help set your website up for success.
Hosting and domain names
The hosting provider you choose could significantly impact your website’s performance, so it’s important to choose wisely and compare performance, scalability, and security features before committing. Many businesses find that the managed WordPress hosting option is of good value and provides the simplest solution.
Evaluate traffic expectations
Think about how much website traffic you realistically expect to receive. Make sure that you are choosing a hosting solution that can comfortably handle your expected traffic volume and peak loads without compromising your website’s speed.
Choose a domain name that reflects your brand
Choose a domain name that clearly reflects your brand to make it easy for customers to recognise and remember.
Keep your domain name short and simple
Keeping your domain name short and simple makes it easier to remember, reduces confusion, and minimises the risk of typos.
Check for trademark issues
Before registering your domain name, check for potential trademark issues to avoid legal complications later down the line.
Set up auto-renewals
Set up auto-renewals for your domain name to avoid losing it if you forget to renew!
Website architecture
Before you can begin building your website, you must map out its architecture. Website architecture refers to the way that information is organised and prioritised on your website. A clear and logical website architecture can benefit both SEO and UX.
Establish a clear hierarchy
Use broad main categories and more specific subcategories. Try to keep the structure no more than three levels deep to limit complexity and make it simple for users to find what they are looking for within as few clicks as possible.
Menus and navigation bars should be intuitive and clearly labelled using familiar terms to make it simple for users to find what they’re looking for.
Be consistent
Ensure that navigation and site structure logic remain consistent throughout your website.
Legal and Compliance
Complying with legal standards like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a no-brainer and should be a top priority when planning and developing your WordPress website. Integrating best practices to ensure compliance will help you avoid legal issues and enhance your website’s user experience. Demonstrating a commitment to adhering to these standards will enhance your brand’s credibility and reputation as a trusted business. Let’s learn more about the best practices for ensuring your WordPress website complies with important legal standards.
Inform users about the use of cookies and track their preferences.
Develop and publish company policies and legal documents
Create a comprehensive privacy policy and legal documents, such as terms and conditions, and make them easily accessible on your WordPress site.
Comply with WCAG guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an internationally recognised benchmark for website accessibility. Designing your website to meet these standards ensures that it is accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities.
Consider contrast ratios
Ensure that the text and background colours across your website have sufficient contrast ratios to make them easy for everyone to read, including those with visual impairments.
Ensure that all of your website’s interactive elements are accessible via keyboard navigation alone.
What are the essential security measures to protect a WordPress website?
Robust security is fundamental to the success of any website. If you don’t take security seriously, it could cost you customers or even your business. It is your responsibility to secure your WordPress website, not just to protect your business from security breaches and data loss but also to protect your users’ sensitive personal information. Failing to provide adequate WordPress security measures could have serious legal consequences. Have you got these four WordPress security best practices covered?
Secure your site with an SSL certificate
An SSL certificate protects sensitive information by encrypting the data exchanged between your server and your user’s browsers. Implementing an SSL certificate will help you gain trust and credibility with users and improve your website’s SEO ranking.
Set up WordPress backups
Your website should be set to automatically backup everything on a regular basis. These backups should be stored in multiple locations, including on the cloud and in an off-site physical location, to prevent data loss if one storage solution fails.
Install WordPress security plugins
Visit the WordPress plugin store to install and configure trusted security plugins that offer features like firewall protection, malware scanning, and intrusion detection.
Schedule regular WordPress updates
Create a schedule to manage WordPress updates and install updates for WordPress core, themes, and plugins to maintain your website’s security and functionality.
What are the best SEO practices for improving a WordPress website?
Search engine optimisation is a process that helps to ensure your new WordPress website is visible in search engine results pages (SERPs) and can be discovered by your target audience. If there are three WordPress SEO best practices you can’t afford to overlook, it’s these:
Conduct keyword research
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to identify relevant keywords that align with user intent and incorporate them into your website copy. Use your keyword research to create content that meets user intent and incorporate less competitive long-tail keywords into your content.
Improve WordPress mobile design
Ensure that your WordPress website has a responsive design that adapts to the device and screen size it is being viewed on. WordPress mobile responsiveness is an important Google ranking factor and helps improve user experience and conversion rates.
Implement schema markup
Schema markup is a type of code that helps search engines like Google better understand the content on your web pages and produce richer search results, including snippets and carousels, to improve click-through rates.
How can you optimise the speed and performance of your WordPress site?
Optimising your WordPress site’s speed and performance will help your business win more conversions without increasing its advertising budget. By fine-tuning every element of your website, you can enhance WordPress site speed, improve UX, and maximise revenue potential. Let’s learn more best practices for optimising your WordPress site for success.
User experience (UX)
A slick UX helps users navigate your website, find what they’re looking for, and checkout easily, offering benefits for both you and your website visitors. If users are impressed with the UX your website offers, they are more likely to return again and make repeat purchases. UX best practices to help you achieve this include the following:
- Create a user-centric design – Conduct research to develop a clear understanding of user needs, then create a user-centric website design that incorporates intuitive and logical navigation, fast page load times, and a mobile-friendly layout.
- Provide feedback mechanisms – Implement clear feedback mechanisms for your website’s interactive elements, such as buttons or forms. For example, change the button colour once it has been clicked or display confirmation messages like “form submitted successfully.”
- WordPress speed optimisation – Optimise image and media files for the web by compressing them to reduce load times.
- Align content with user intent – Make sure that each piece of content on your website serves a clear purpose and helps to meet the user’s needs.
- Conduct regular testing – Conduct comprehensive usability testing throughout the development process and again before launch to identify usability or accessibility issues.
Conversion optimisation
Whether you want your website visitors to make a purchase, submit a contact form, or sign up for your mailing list, implementing conversion rate optimisation techniques can help you keep visitors engaged and increase the number of users who convert into customers or leads. The following CRO best practices will help you fine-tune your WordPress website and win more business.
- Create dedicated landing pages – When running ads, link them to bespoke landing pages designed to match the ad’s messaging and objective to maximise the ad’s ROI.
- Use clear calls to action (CTAs) – Write strong, clear CTAs that tell visitors exactly what you want them to do, then display them prominently above the fold throughout your website.
- Integrate trust signals – Integrating trust signals like customer testimonials, positive reviews, and trust seals throughout your WordPress web design can help increase your brand’s credibility and boost conversion rates.
- WordPress analytics integration – Integrate analytics tools like Google Analytics using WordPress plugins to monitor real-time website traffic and visitor behaviour. The data you gather can help you to make informed changes to your website to boost its performance and drive more conversions.
Code quality and standards
Building your website using high-quality code that adheres to established coding standards helps to create a reliable website and a high-quality user experience. Low-quality code is prone to bugs and unexpected issues, which can seriously affect your website’s performance.
- Adhere to coding standards – Ensure that all code is clean, well-documented, and adheres to WordPress coding standards. These standards include guidelines for proper indentation, naming conventions, and file organisation.
- Minify CSS and JS – Use tools to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Reducing the size of your files will help reduce load times and improve your website’s overall performance.
Partner with Create8 to build a winning WordPress website
Whether you want to build a brand new website or migrate your existing website to WordPress, our team of web designers and developers can help the process run smoothly.
We can recommend the most effective strategies, best practices, and WordPress plugins to help design, build, and optimise your new website for success. We’re committed to delivering a substantial return on your investment while significantly improving your brand’s credibility and visibility online.
Contact our team today to discuss what to expect from your WordPress project or to learn more about our work.
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