How to create a wordpress website for beginners: Complete guideline

To take your projects to the Internet you need to use tools that make it easier for you to start up and later manage content. 

Creating a website in WordPress is a very popular solution that gives you the possibility to start any website without the need for knowledge of programming or layout using HTML markup language. 

Affiliate Disclosure: Look, I’m working my ass off to deliver value to you. So, yes this blog is monetized through affiliate products. They are true recommendations and if you purchase them, I probably earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). 

WordPress is currently being used in more than 30% of websites made on the Internet, which gives it credibility and reliability making it the preferred tool of content creators for practically any type of website you can think of. 

In this guide, we are going to delve into this fascinating world to learn how to create a wordpress website for beginners.

Hey! I am Rakib Roky from Blog Zono dot com.  Let me tell you, How to create a website with WordPress? Details about making a WordPress website[Full Tutorial], whatever it is? Why it is needed and how does it work? Which are practically researched. Read things patiently and hopefully benefit confirm…. 

Let’s go started…

At first,

Need web hosting for your web project 

Choosing a Hosting to host your websites is not a task that you should take lightly, since it is the same as looking for a house, or a good Hotel to stay in during a vacation. 

There are good sites with a cost adjusted to the service you receive, and there are cheap sites or places where the “low cost” is present even in the service you receive, but you only discover that once you are inside. 

Analyze the following aspects well to choose your hosting provider: 

• What type of WordPress Hosting does it offer you (plans). 
• What is the elasticity that your Hosting can adopt depending on the requirements of your website. 
• Availability of Support 24/7/365 on Hosting in general. 
• Specific professional WordPress support. 
• Return Policy. 
• Backup Management. 
• Security Measures at Services, Hosting and CMS level. 
• Other added values that are focused on improving the service you hire. 

With these points, you should be able to evaluate and build a list of possible WordPress Hosting providers for your web project and choose the one that best meets your expectations. 

You can choose between the domain extensions .com, .net, .org, .eu, .info, .com.es, .org.es, .com.mx and.com.co. Promotion valid with the annual hosting contract. 

The monthly price is calculated based on the price of the annual payment. All prices are shown without VAT. 

How to choose a domain name for your blog  

The Domain shows the commercial, personal, or business name that will represent you on the Internet, which is why you should focus on choosing it, since it is like naming your offspring, and it is not something that arises at random. 

There are some aspects that you should always consider before choosing a Domain: 

• Check if the domain you are going to use is free, related to a brand or already registered. Check with. 
• What scope will your web project have (local, regional, national or international). 
• Define a domain name that identifies the project you are going to manage. 
• Avoid special characters, accented words, compound words separated by hyphens, as this will force you to use domains converted to IDN, which will cause you many headaches from the beginning. 
• The TLD should be according to the type of project (.it is for a project only with scope in UK , .com if it is going to be an international or ecommerce project, .org if it is going to focus on an organization and so on). 
• Try to put emphasis on the brand that the domain is going to represent. 
• Consider integrating (if possible) the keyword or main keyword of your project in the domain. 

Once you buy and register a domain in your name, of which you will always be the sole owner, there is no going back and you will have to live with the chosen name for the life of the domain for which you have contracted it. 

Choose well, with peace of mind and opt for domains with short and easy-to-remember names as much as possible, your future users will appreciate it. 

Next, let’s see how to install WordPress on a Hosting. 

How to install wordpress  

After contracting a Hosting, already purchased and activated the domain that is going to represent your project, the next thing is to install the CMS in the hosting that you have acquired to later see how to create a web page with WordPress. 

The manual installation of WordPress is one of the usual installation methods since from a packaged .zip file downloaded from WordPress.org you can obtain a clean installation to which you can later add a free or commercial theme and the necessary plugins for it. create WordPress. 

The summarized manual process is as follows: 

• Download the latest stable version from WordPress.org 
• Avoid creating the /wordpress folder by unzipping the zip file on your computer. 
• Inside the unzipped folder on your computer called /wordpress select everything and compress it into a zip file. 
• Upload the compressed .zip file to your Hosting to the folder where you are going to create a web page with WordPress. 
• Extract the .zip file in the Hosting with the “Extract” tool. 
• In the Databases section, create a Database. 
• Next create a User for the Database. 
• Assign privileges to the Database user so that they can use it. 
• In your browser load the domain url (or the temporary url) to install WordPress. 
• Follow the installation process as described in the video (below). 
• Once the installation is complete, check that the .htaccess file is correct. 
• Check the basic settings from Settings, General. 
• Check that you access the dashboard from your domain. 

Once these steps have been completed, you will have successfully completed the manual installation of WordPress. 

You are now ready to access the WordPress administration panel, called the dashboard, and familiarize yourself with its structure before you start creating content. 

Introduction to WordPress dashboard 

The WordPress dashboard allows you to have control of everything related to the administration and customization of themes, the installation of plugins, and the creation of content. 

The main part of the dashboard home page is made up of widgets, which are nothing more than blocks distributed on the screen that present internal information, coming from plugins or functions, and also external information coming from feeds or information channels. 

It is composed by default of the following sections or blocks: 

Welcome 

It is the block that you see once you install WordPress in the central part of the dashboard and that shows you several links to steps or actions that you can start to carry out on your WP website to customize it or add content. 

Take a look 

Here the number of Entries (post), Pages, and Comments that exist on the managed website is summarized in figures. They incorporate a link to specific content. 

In a simple informative line, it shows you the version of WordPress installed and the name of the Theme that your WordPress uses. 

Activity 

The scheduled publications are shown, as well as the recent active publications on the Blog, the last comments received with the possibility of moderating them directly from said block. 

fast draft 

It is a widget that gives you the possibility to write a quick publication or a draft publication, being able to put the Title and go directly to the text block that can be as long as you want, although it is not the recommended place to write long posts. 

Let’s say it’s more well thought out for microblogging. 

WordPress Events and News 

A dynamic widget that feeds information from a WordPress.org news feed or channel to display information about upcoming events that will take place around the world on WordPress. 

It also includes links to the latest articles published on the WordPress.org Blog. 

All of these blocks can be disabled or removed from the front end of the WordPress Dashboard. 

Depending on certain installed plugins, the number of visible widgets may increase and these will display information specific to the plugin that uses these information blocks. 

admin bar 

The upper bar that is shown by default in black is called the “Admin Bar” or administration bar and presents a series of icons or texts that can be linked to other areas of the WordPress management panel. 

If it is not deactivated in “My Profile” of the WordPress User, this bar will also be visible on the front of the web, both for the administrator and for users with lower access levels, also called roles. 

This bar shows contextual information depending on the role of the logged-in user. 

In the administration bar, the avatar of the user connected to the dashboard is shown on the right and when it is displayed, it is possible to see the quick access to the Profile and the option to “Exit” or Logout, which will disconnect us from the WordPress dashboard. 

Dashboard Options Tabs 

Just below the “administration bar” on the right, there are 2 tabs, which are “Help” and “Screen Options”. 

In the “Help” tab when displayed, links to documentation about the dashboard and the official WordPress Forum are shown. Sub-tabs are also displayed on the right side of this help with information specific to other sections of the desktop. 

The “Display Options” tab allows you to enable or disable certain boxes or widgets on the desktop to show or hide them. This tab will accompany us in almost the entire dashboard, in different sections or sections, and with contextual information adapted to the place where we are. 

Side menu bar 

This other bar contains access to almost all the content that is managed in the WordPress installation. 

From the management of Entry, Pages, Comments, or multimedia content, through the Personalization of the theme and other global configurations of the installation. 

In addition, the accesses to plugins installed after the initial installation of WordPress will be shown, being able to display second and third-level menus to access specific functions of some of the installed plugins. 

Depending on the user role with which /wp-admin or /wp-login.php is accessed, the left menu of the WordPress dashboard will present more or fewer elements than the corresponding user can access to manage the web. 

An Administrator user will see the total number of menus at any level and other functionalities available in the dashboard, as long as they have not been disabled with a plugin specifically designed for it; while a user with the Subscriber role (normal registered user) will only see in this menu the accesses to her Profile to configure it or modify data and some other option that the administrator may have enabled through a specific profile or role management plugin. 

The menu bar in desktop installations shows at the bottom, on the left, the option “Close menu” to expand or collapse the menu, that is, iconify it and thus free up horizontal space on the screen. 

Foot or footer 

At the bottom of the dashboard, the version of the WordPress installation appears to the right and in case there are new version updates, a link to the WordPress update section is included in the dashboard itself. 

In detail, this is the WordPress dashboard, or administration panel, which allows you to have a global view of the installation, with statistical data offered by some plugins and other information about WordPress and the website that we are managing. 

Basic settings before starting 

One of the points to which you should pay special attention is the choice of the Theme that you will use on your website, since not only the design of the pages of your website will depend on the chosen theme, but also the structure of the site will be one or the other based on the distribution used by the layout you use. 

The issue is not only the visual identity of your project, your brand, or your e-commerce store, it is also the part of your installation to which you will possibly spend more hours, both in the customization part and in relation to the structure of contents. 

Choose a theme that you can master with some ease, that is not overloaded with features that you may not need later and, above all, that is light and favors the positioning of your content. 

There are hundreds of websites on the Internet where you can find commercial (paid) themes that are of quality and offer many features. use the previews of those themes, or demos that are available on the pages of their authors to be able to evaluate the behavior of the chosen theme before materializing the purchase. 

If your budget is very tight, remember from the WordPress dashboard, Appearance, Themes, Add new, you will be able to discover hundreds of free or “freemium” themes, more than 5000, that you can use in your web projects without having to invest an amount. cheap to use. 

The sections of the basic configuration necessary in WordPress are the following: 

• General 
• Writing 
• Reading 
• Comments 
• Media 
• permalinks 
• Privacy 

In the end, if you do not check these settings after installing WordPress, it is possible that sometime later you will have problems, for example, with the URLs that Google and other search engines have indexed, if for example, you did not enable more friendly URLs in Permanent Links, or that you do not receive emails notification from the dashboard if you did not change the default email from the General settings. 

There are many other customizations that you can make to the dashboard so that it behaves the way you want, but in many cases, they depend on plugins that you will have to install if you want to have more control, without having to resort to editing is hidden WordPress features, What better to reserve for when you are more expert in the use of the CMS.

 

How to install the WordPress theme of your site 

In order for WordPress to fit in the best possible way to your web project, you need, after installing WordPress, to make a series of adjustments so that the web works as desired. 

These settings are applied in the dashboard, from Settings, General, where you can configure aspects such as: 

• Title and meta description of the site (although with plugins like Yoast SEO you will do better). 
• The URL with which your website will load (with or without www aliases). 
• The dashboard notification email. 
• Geolocation and time zone. 
• What will you show by default on the front page of your website? 
• Visibility control for indexing bots. 
• Comment settings and blacklists of banned words. 
• Behavior of images in the Media Library. 
• Configuration of permalinks (important for SEO). 
• Management of RGPD (Privacy Policy basically). 

Depending on the theme you use, there may be other settings sections in this section of the dashboard. Do you already have a chosen or purchased theme? …let’s see how it is installed. 

Installation of a free theme in WordPress 

Always, before installing a Theme in WordPress, it is recommended, for your peace of mind later in case of problems, to make a backup copy, since some problem could arise in the installation of the theme and having a backup helps to go back quickly and easily. 

Once you have made the backup and you have it safe, it is time to access the dashboard, go to Appearance, Themes, and click where it says Add new. 

A view of the most prominent themes available on WordPress.org is displayed, which are generally free or released in “freemium” format. 

Browse through the pages of available themes and click Details and Preview of the theme that catches your attention until you find the one you want. 

You found it? Perfect, let’s install it! 

• Locate the desired free theme. 
• Click Install. 
• Click Activate to start using it. 
• Now you will see the Customize button, click it to start customizing the theme. 

The installation of free themes can also be done using .zip files with themes that you have downloaded from reliable Internet sources and install them from the dashboard or uploading them via FTP, although the most recommended method is the one explained in steps. 

Installing a Business Theme in WordPress 

Commercial Themes for WordPress are usually quite in demand for projects and are preferred by marketers and site implementers with this CMS. 

There are many sites on the Internet where you can buy professional themes, with a high level of visual development, SEO improvements to position the content well, and also 100% adaptable to any type of device. 

Commercial themes, as a general rule, when they are downloaded from the developer’s website, usually go in zip files that you must first unzip on your computer before proceeding to install it, since they usually include other files inside the main zip, including the file .zip of the theme that you have to install and others such as the license to use the theme. 

The installation of a Commercial Theme summarized is as follows: 

1. Access the WordPress dashboard. 
2. Make a backup. 
3. Go to Appearance, Themes. 

If you have the theme to install on your computer, unzip it and check if there is another .zip file (of the Theme) inside. 

From the dashboard, click on “Add new”. 

Click on “Install Now”. 

Once installed you can “Activate” the theme to use it. 
How you see the installation of a previously downloaded Commercial Theme to your computer does not differ much from the installation of a free theme. 

From here you have a lot of work ahead of you, which basically consists of configuring the theme with the identity of your website (your project), customizing the design, colors, menus, widgets, etc. 

In WordPress, as a rule, Themes are located in the /wp-content/themes/ folder and within this folder, there can be as many theme subfolders as you have installed, whether they are active or not. 

Remove installed WordPress Themes 

Uninstalling WordPress Themes is a simple and quick process that, after making a backup copy, should not pose any risk to your website. 

This elimination process should be fast, something that could be solved with a simple click, but no, the developers, who should be just UX, thought of putting it in a hidden place, as you will see later. 

In what ways do you have to uninstall WordPress themes? 

• From the dashboard, Appearance, Themes, Delete. 
• Via FTP, accessing the /themes folder 
• From the File Manager of your Hosting Panel. 
• Via SSH, executing a command through the WP-CLI interface. 

Basically, they are the common or usual methods, although the first of all is the one that is designed for normal users who, in normal situations, should be able to use it to eliminate unused installed themes. 

You can see the process referred to below, better explained by steps: 

1. Access the WordPress dashboard. 
2. Make a backup, you never know! 
3. Go to Appearance, Themes. 
4. Hovering the mouse over the theme to be deleted you will see “Theme Details”, click on it. 
5. The Delete button will appear at the bottom right. 
6. Click to permanently remove the installed theme. 

To be able to uninstall a theme, it must be deactivated, otherwise, it will not be possible to remove it. 

The following video illustrates the 3 commented methods so that you know how to eliminate installed themes that you do not need and that take up space on your Hosting. 

How to Create a Post in WordPress 

In WordPress there are 2 different types of content, although similar in structure, that you can create: 

• Tickets (or Post) 
• pages 

With the Entries, you can create content that is published as a general rule on the Blog, unless your site is designed as a Review, magazine, or newspaper, for example, and is published associated with Categories and Tags, so that the content is classified according to the structured manner and according to keywords or grouping of content through previously defined categories. 

It is important to understand that in WordPress it is not enough to simply publish a Post and then, sometime later, remember to associate it with a Category that identifies it or add tags to it, because your SEO will be affected and your publications will be more difficult to classify, mainly so bots or indexing robots. 

This means that before creating a publication you should dedicate an important part of your initial start-up time to designing the structure of the Categories so that when you start writing Entries there are already those categories to associate with. every new post you post. 

Well, this association of contents grouped by words that define them and facilitate their location is commonly called Taxonomies. 

It serves for this section dedicated to Posts in WordPress to understand that through taxonomies, mainly Categories and Tags, you can group related content so that they can later be located in a more grouped and specific way. 

Knowing that the idea is to have Categories created and then add Entries, let’s see how content is generated in WordPress for a Post or Entry. 

From the dashboard, using the left menu you can go to Tickets. 

Within the first level menu “Inputs” you will see the following second level menus: 

All Posts: Where you get an overview of all Posts created, published, or not. 
Add new: to create new Entries or Post. 
Categories: Where you create, modify, or delete Categories. 
Tags: Where you create, modify and delete Tags. 

Both the Categories and the Tags are something that you should always create before you start adding new content to your website, and as far as possible, do not change the category structure too much because that will affect the positioning of the indexed content. 

Define a structure of those Categories that you are really going to use and to refine the content filtering it is better that you use the Tags. 

A structure of 5 or 10 general Categories and the rest all managed by Tags is better than 20 or 30 Categories, many of them empty or with one or 2 entries per Category, which would impoverish your content structure. 

To create a Post go to the Posts menu and click or tap on “Add New”. 

You will see the Inputs box with relevant fields like: 

• Qualification 
• Body text block. 
• Widget “Publish” where you manage: 
• The status of the post (draft or pending review). 
• The Post’s Visibility (Public, Password Protected, or Private). 
• Post “immediately” or schedule post date and time. 
• On-page SEO options if you use specific plugins. 
• Categories: You select within the existing ones or create new Categories. 
• Tags: You select by searching for existing tags or create new ones. 
• Featured Image: If your theme manages the featured images of Posts, you upload them here. (Not all themes support featured image). 
• SEO options (if you use specific plugins). 
• Slug: Format of the title fragment that identifies the Post when search engines index it. 

The process of creating an Entry explained in the video would be as follows: 

You have seen that the creation of Posts in WordPress is an extremely simple process, where it is very important to consider aspects prior to the creation of content and during this process never forget about on-page SEO, necessary to position your publications well. 

Pages in WordPress 

Pages are elements of a static nature, which typically have little or no change once they are created and published, depending on the type of page and the content that is present. 

However, with the arrival of builders or builders to WordPress, many Pages have been converted into authentic landings or landing pages rebuilt with builders such as Page Builder, Elementor, or others, allowing constant improvement and adaptation of content in a more dynamic way. 

There are some basic and very necessary pages that you should never forget to create on your website: 

• Privacy Policy. 
• Cookies policy. 
• Legal notices. 
• Thank You Page (Thank You). 
• Contact. 
• About (the famous Who We Are). 
• The Cover, which is still a Page. 
• Depending on the focus of your website, you may have more pages with static or slightly changing content, but you should always have the aforementioned pages on any website you manage. 

How to create a Page in WordPress? 

It is a very simple process, which does not require previous processes since it does not depend on taxonomies, you know, Categories or Tags. 

• Go to Pages (dashboard, left menu). 
• Click on “Add new”. 
• Fill in the required fields (title, body text). 
• Add a featured image if applicable. 
• Set the keyword (keyword) if you use any SEO plugin. 
• If it is for immediate publication, click Publish. 
• Link the page to a Menu from Appearance, Menus. 
• Check the loading of the Page from the front. 

The process of creating a Page explained in the video would be as follows: 

Pages are important, they also position and many users land directly on them from Internet searches, take care of them, do on-page SEO to enhance them, give them life, color, put images or graphics on them, also videos, everything goes if it enriches and contributes. 

Manage comments on your posts 

Thanks to the comments, visitors to your website can give their opinion about the content they consume. 

Through these they can add contributions on the topic covered in the post, ask questions, and provide feedback, giving the option of community interaction around the content. 

WordPress natively has its own comment management system that can be displayed on pages and posts. 

All WordPress themes are designed to manage comments; however, it is up to you to know how to attract users who visit your site and encourage them to leave them. 

Comments made through the native WordPress system are displayed on the comments page in the WordPress admin area (dashboard). 

By default, all comments are shown if you have not previously established moderation filters. 

Hovering your mouse pointer over a comment displays the action links for the comment. 

It is also possible to see which comments are waiting to be approved as they are shown highlighted with a light-yellow background, being able to change the view to Pending, Approved, Spam or send them to the Trash if they do not proceed. 

With comment moderation, you can prevent abuse by malicious users, or SPAM from being published on your website using the form. 

When using comment moderation, it is useful to implement additional spam protection via the A kismet plugin, as a way to significantly reduce the chances of any spam comments getting published. 

Meet the Media Library 

Images of Posts, Pages, and other WordPress elements are managed through the Media Library, directly from the dashboard, Media, or from the “Add Object” option available in the WordPress editor in Posts and Pages. 

It is a great store where all the multimedia files that you use on your website are stored. 

From Media, you can manage image files, audio, video, PDFs, mp3, etc., and use them in Posts and Pages from the native WordPress features. 

From Media it is possible: 

• Upload multimedia files with allowed MIME formats. 
• Modify some aspects of the images. 
• Check which page the files are associated with. 
• Permanently delete hosted media files. 
• Remove orphaned files not associated with posts. 
• Add important data for on-page SEO to media files. 
• Obtain data of weight and dimensions of the images (individually). 
• Run batch actions for one or multiple library files. 

So that WordPress does not interpret the images you upload and generate additional sizes with each new image, you must set the default sizes to zero in Settings, Media. 

Images in WordPress managing the correct sizes! 

How to create and configure Menus  in wordpress

Menus are an essential part of a website, among other reasons because they allow users or visitors to navigate through the visible structure of the web in a hierarchical and specific way. 

They are a fundamental part of the page to direct visitors to the content, being able to show first-level information, second-level, or other levels of depth on the web, depending on the structure of the site. 

The first level menus are the most common in any website that you visit daily, where you start with a “Home” and possibly end with a “Contact” and depending on the theme that the website uses, they are menus that are displayed in horizontal and on mobile devices, they become the classic “hamburger menu”. 

It goes without saying that a menu must contain access to all those first-level sections of your website, and that is usually located in the Main Menu and the second and third-level sections should be displayed either in dropdowns of the main menu or as second-level menus, or contextual, of the area of the web where it is required. 

Then there are those menu items that should be more or less visible and accessible throughout the entire navigation and that are usually located in the footer of the page or “footer” and that usually contain access to site policies, cookies, legal aspects, etc. 

WordPress since past versions has been progressively improving menu management and among other features added at a certain time the possibility of loading menus in widgets from Appearance, Widgets, Custom Menu. 

The menus have become clear that they facilitate navigation, so in addition to designing a usable structure, you must create the necessary access so that visitors can easily find the contents of your website. 

Knowing that menus are necessary for easy navigation, we can go to the next level and create menus and display them on the site. 

Widgets, what are they, and how to use them? 

Widgets are elements designed to display content generated in the CMS, either from the core itself, by some function, filter, or action, or from installed third-party plugins. 

From Appearance, Widgets it is possible to control all of them and display them in different areas of the layout. 

How to create a widget in wordprees? 

• Access the WordPress dashboard. 
• Go to Appearance and then Widgets. 
• From the available widgets on the left, drag one to where you want to place it in a widget area on the right. 
• Make any necessary changes or customizations to the widget settings. 
• Click Save. 
• Visualize the changes on the front of the website. 

The use of widgets allows you to display content in the installed Theme, in areas that have been designed to contain them, without the need to modify code or have to know programming. 

As a general rule, widgets are displayed in most themes on the right or left side area, depending on the layout design, and additionally in the footer, although many themes already include content in widgets that can be customized from a framework. or a builder. 

Widgets can include anything from a menu to code from an “El Tiempo” script, images, banners, audio players, and endless highly customizable content. 

Plugin Installation in wordprees

Plugins are functions written in PHP language that is used to display content, add functionality to the web, and have high integration with the CMS if they are well programmed. 

Many of the features added by plugins can be implemented directly in WordPress in files such as functions.php of the active Theme and thus avoid the massive installation of external plugins. 

It is true that the democratization offered to users by plugins means that almost all the functionalities imagined can be added to WordPress in a few clicks and quite safely. 

There are plugins for almost everything you can imagine, some to add functionality to the dashboard, others to improve content management, to secure the web installation, to offer rooms through reservations, to download files from a private area, and a long etcetera. that could not be mentioned in this guide. 

Plugins to Display an Image Portfolio in WordPress 

Plugins are installed from the dashboard, Plugins, Add New, locating the plugin in the list offered by the Official WordPress.org Plugin Directory by clicking Install and activating it later. 

This simplicity causes many users to feel attracted by the ease with which they can be installed and end up massifying the website with plugins that probably will not end up being used later, slowing down the site and over time leaving it vulnerable if the plugins are not kept up to date. plugins installed, even if they are not used. 

Change theme safely 

As a general rule, when a theme is chosen for a website, it is usually kept for a long time unless the user is restless or the initial choice of the template was not appropriate for the project to be managed. 

This leads to looking for new Themes until finding another one that meets the needs of the project, being clear that a change of theme implies many modifications, not only visual or aesthetic but also the relocation of the content blocks. 

It is for this reason that it is always recommended to invest more time in analyzing the candidate Themes in detail and evaluating not only the visual part but also the functionalities, availability of widgets in certain areas of the layout, that it be adaptable to any device. and that it complies in the best possible way with the W3C standards. 

What motivates a change of Topic? 

Naturally, there are as many reasons as you want to put on the table to justify changing your current Theme for another. 

If you have already decided that you want a theme change and you have also gone through the selection process and have even downloaded it to your computer, it is time to see how to do it. 

Steps to change the theme in WordPress: 

Adapting the contents after a change of subject is a laborious process, dedicate the necessary time to make the experience positive and enjoy the process and the results. Think that you will possibly have to live for a long time with that new image that you have chosen. 

SEO on-page fundamental to the position 

Without intending to delve into SEO since it is not the subject of this guide, if we address the part that is dedicated to improving the positioning of content, that is, on-page SEO, very necessary so that all the elements related to content that you generate on your website meet the requirements established by the search engines. 

For any project that uses WordPress as a content manager, issues such as on-page SEO and usability have to be on a par with the content, without forgetting that Google cares a lot about these aspects. 

Writing Entries (post) without thinking about SEO “is like putting on a basted suit or dress, sooner or later it will start to unravel”, and then it will take its toll on your website, and the workload to correct it later will be greater than if you build the contents thinking about positioning them better. 

Some points to keep in mind to improve on-page SEO: 

In the end, on-page SEO is nothing more than good practices of optimizing your content to get a higher ranking and more relevant traffic in search engines. 

Control of visits with Google Analytics 

Thanks to the use of such popular tools, and therefore democratized, such as Google Analytics, millions of websites can control their metrics in a very detailed way and in real-time at zero cost. 

These metrics are obtained thanks to the SEO optimization that website owners carry out so that search engines index the content based on guidelines that later help obtain values that are graphically represented in Google Analytics. 

With Analytics we can know the sources of the traffic we receive on the website, the countries from which they visit us, the devices with which they access our website, and a large amount of other data that, when well used, helps to build true marketing strategies to convert. 

Some values you get with GA are: 

• Number of users visiting your site (hour, day, week or month). 
• Number of unique visits received. 
• Number of sessions with date range. 
• Average number of pageviews by unique users. 
• Bounce rate (users who have left your site from the main page without interacting). 
• Average time spent on the site. 
• New users visiting you. 
• Countries from which they visit the website. 
• Browser and other technologies used to visit your website. 

To name a few, the list could be much larger and with very interesting statistical data to draw strategies. 

How to Set up Google Analytics on a WordPress blog 

In WordPress, you can use a plugin to insert the Google Analytics tracking code so that you can track it from your Google account. 

Although it is recommended to configure the UA-XXXXXX code (the one you have assigned in Google Analytics) in the Yoast SEO plugin if you have it installed in your WordPress. 

Control visits, and other statistical data of your website with external tools such as Google Analytics, not only help to lighten your web installation, they also offer you a greater amount of data than what you can obtain with tools from your Hosting Panel such as Webalizer, etc. 

Security in WordPress is important 

WordPress has a very secure core, as has been demonstrated throughout the versions that have been released since 2005, but it is the non-existent security policies that end up leading any stable website to have problems. 

What factors influence your website to be insecure? 

• Use an outdated and vulnerable version of the CMS. 
• Install plugins indiscriminately and then forget about them. 
• Exceeding the protection of the web with too many security plugins. 
• Do not make backup copies regularly, apart from those made by the Hosting provider. 
• Using plugins that are unreliable, incompatible with your current version of WordPress, or abandoned. 
• Access your dashboard from insecure connections (public Wi-Fi, bars, etc.) without protection. 
• Do not use second factors of authorization (2FA) for access to the dashboard. 

Vulnerabilities exist, which is unquestionable, so having prevention and containment policies against security flaws in a website should be part of your WordPress work checklist, especially if your focus is commercial and you manage a site with a lot of resources. visibility. 

That is why we propose a Security Checklist for your WordPress installations so that you can fortify them. 

This is just a brief list of the important points that, if well controlled, can significantly increase the security of your website. Put them into practice! 

On-demand and automatic backups 

Backing up makes the difference between monetizing your time after a disaster by quickly recovering from the problem or spending significant hours getting your website up and running again. 

You have already thought about what it costs you in time and money every time you have to restore a website to a previous state due to a blunder, an update that has come to screw up your theme or conflict with other plugins, a disaster! 

There are numerous plugins to make backup copies in WordPress, and possibly you are already using some of the usual ones, but if you are still not sure and your website does not exceed 512 MB, we recommend you use the All In One WP Migration plugin, which In addition to being free, and being translated by Webempresa, it allows you to make backup copies in less than 1 or 2 minutes depending on the number of images you store on the web. 

One of the possibilities of the plugin, which does depend on the disk space you have in your Hosting, and the amount you have free, is that you can store several copies that are marked with date and time, to have restore points available at different times. over time, useful during the web development phase. 

Like many plugins on the market, “All In One WP Migration” has PRO plans (paid) to expand the functionalities, although the FREE version is enough for most users who only need to have low-cost backups. downloadable demand. 

What you have to make backup copies of is something that at this point is more than clear, it is important and very necessary if you want to have restore points for your website that allow you to return to a previous moment where everything worked better. 

If you also plan to carry out this process many times a day, every week, or a month, it should be a simple and friendly process, right? 

Well, no more talk, what are you waiting for to give All In One WP Migration a chance to take care of your backups? More than 1 million users already have it running on their websites, the only thing missing is you! 

In short, if in the end, you don’t like it, you don’t adapt well to it, or you find it too simple, you will always have options like Duplicator, to name one that is also very popular. 

Are you one of those who make backup copies regularly or do you leave everything to free will and only remember them when they fall “chaos de punta” (It is said that when it rains, snows, or hails with special impetus. It also applies, in a metaphorical sense, to complicated situations)? 

Keep in mind that most Hosting providers make backup copies on a scheduled basis, whether daily, weekly or monthly in all or any of these modalities, which allows users to be able to restore websites to a specific point (the one from the date of the available copy) in case of problems in the Hosting. 

You are one of those who make backup copies regularly or leave everything to free will and only remember them when they fall sharply 

How to make a complete backup of the Hosting from CPanel? 

• Access your Hosting Panel (CPanel). 
• Go to the Files, Backups section. 
• In the “Full backup” section, click Download a full backup from the website. 
• In the “Backup destination” option, leave the Home Directory by default 
• In “Email address” put your email to be notified. 
• You can also choose to check the option not to receive notification. 
• Click Generate Backup. 

When the process begins you will see a notice such as Full Backup in Progress… and if you checked to be notified you will receive an email when the backup is finished. 

Cpanel backups are stored in the /home/user folder (the user being the name of the ‘username’ of your Hosting account) which is a folder prior to /public_html where your websites are stored. 

This method of backup copies is highly recommended when there are problems of making backup copies with WordPress plugins created for this purpose or the space of the Hosting is insufficient for making copies by other procedures if your Hosting allows the temporarily overquoted. 

WordPress theme, plugin, and core updates 

Keeping your websites created with WordPress always up to date, as well as the plugins and themes you have installed, allows you to have a more secure website and always enjoy the latest improvements incorporated into this excellent CMS. 

WordPress has a plugin system that gives you the possibility to expand its capabilities, allowing you to have a much more flexible CMS. 

Through the Themes, you can build sites with a high aesthetic level, which have an excellent behavior for SEO, as we mentioned above, but which often tend to accumulate in the dashboard, without subsequently being used. 

Both in the case of plugins and Themes, their ease of installation makes them attractive elements for users who have not yet defined the visual part of the web and spend part of their time installing and testing one or another theme, or plugin, forgetting to uninstall later those that are not going to be used, with the consequent security problem that this can generate. 

In addition to posing a problem for the stability of a website, both plugins and themes gradually take up space, both in the database and in the Hosting itself, and what could initially be a website of 100 or 200 MB in size, it can end up in 300 or 500 MB if the malpractice of installing, testing and not removing what is not needed is maintained over time. 

Backups, before removing Plugins or Themes, are essential to ensure a restore point to return to in case of problems. 

Both the removal of Plugins and Themes must always be done from the CMS dashboard, and not manually by removing their files or folders from your Hosting Panel or by FTP. 

WordPress Theme Removal Process: 

• Always make a backup! 
• Access the dashboard, Appearance, Themes. 
• Disables the theme to be deleted if it is active by activating another theme by default. 
• Click Details of the Topic to delete. 
• Click on the lower right button “Delete” 

The same, in a very similar way, applies to WordPress plugins from the Plugins, Installed Plugins section, proceeding first to deactivate the plugins and then delete it. 

It’s possible that for some reason your version of WordPress is stuck in a branch that no longer receives maintenance updates, and possibly no security updates either. In these cases, it is best to force the update so that you can go from a “stalled” or “ended” version to the current stable one. If you have not disabled automatic WordPress core updates there should be no need to force a “version upgrade” and you will be using the stable version. 

However, if this is not the case, check if there is any “define” in your wp-config.php file that prevents these updates, since if it appears it will be a sign that the updates will have to be done manually, that is, on-demand, and not automatically. 

define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false ); 

In these cases, it can be false or minor depending on the type of updates you are limiting. 

Or the following defines: 

define( ‘AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED’, true ); 

The recommendation is that the WordPress core updates are always MANUAL, supervised, and previously backed up, thus avoiding many surprises and unexpected 500 errors. 

Plugins and themes generally do not auto-update, although you can. 

It is clear that keeping the website updated is an important task, but it is equally or more important to keep the installed plugins duly updated and always download them from reliable sites since currently outdated plugins or plugins with programming problems are responsible for 80% of WordPress vulnerabilities. 

Conclusions 

After everything addressed in this guide to creating a WordPress website, it is quite clear that it is a really simple process, which naturally involves time and organization to advance in phases in each of the areas or sections of the website and so on. being able to build an attractive website that positions and fulfills the mission for which you created it. 

Starting a web project with WordPress is a fascinating adventure, in which each step is learning and the result usually ends in success. Enjoy every moment, it is unique!