It is safe to say that one of the most important factors in the success of any business right now is having a website. Once you understand the need to have a website for your business, how to design and set up a website has always been a major challenge. How to build a site with WordPress was completely overcome by the WordPress content management system. Today, building a website with WordPress can be done in less than an hour, and this is great! In this WordPress tutorial, we will teach you how to design and build a site with WordPress in less than an hour to introduce your business well on the Internet and increase your income many times over.
How to design and build a site with WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular website building platforms in the world. It is used by millions of people to create websites, blogs, and eCommerce stores. With WordPress, you can create a website in a matter of hours, with no coding or design experience required.
- Understand the importance and necessity of building a site with WordPress
- How to choose a website name and buy domains and hosts
- Install WordPress and get familiar with its user interface
- Initial configuration of site settings
- Choose a suitable WordPress template for designing a WordPress site
- Select the most essential plugins needed to design a WordPress site
- Build the main pages of the site
- Generate content and create a blog on the site
- Build a website menu
Understand the importance and necessity of build a site with WordPress
Before we teach you how to design a website for yourself, it’s good to know why WordPress is used to design a website? WordPress is a content management system that meets your site design needs. If we want to briefly introduce the Content Management Systems (CMS) in one sentence. We can say that in fact, CMS is a system designed on the web that provides you with a wide variety of tools to set up your site so that you can create and edit your site content without any coding knowledge.
Now that you are familiar with the concept of content management systems, it is good to know that according to information published in Wikipedia, there are currently more than 100 content management systems; But all the statistics clearly show that the flagship of all content management systems is WordPress. So that 34% of all sites built worldwide are designed with WordPress! This means that out of every three websites you visit, one is designed with WordPress!
If we want to summarize all the reasons for the importance of using WordPress, we can say:
- WordPress is 100% free!
- Is an open source system
- Ability to design any type of site without even a single line of code!
- High flexibility and personalization
- A fast, efficient and secure system
- Extraordinary adaptability and optimization for search engines (SEO) with the aim of increasing revenue
How to choose a website name and buy domains and hosts
Among the steps to build a site with WordPress, choosing a site name is one of the most interesting and important parts of the build a site that is usually left less time. It is not bad to know that at present (as of this writing) there are nearly 2 billion online websites on the web, which is a very impressive statistic.
The name and domain of the website express your main identity, so be sure to choose it carefully. But after choosing a domain, it’s time to buy it and buy a web hosting service. A host is a place where the information and content of your site are to be stored. This is just like storing information on your computer. With the difference that by purchasing web hosting services, users will be able to access your site from anywhere in the world, and it is enough for you to connect your domain to your hosts; Of course, you must know the features of a good host before making a purchase. Because providing a suitable WordPress host is one of the most important things before starting to build a site with WordPress.
Install WordPress and get acquainted with its user interface
After buying a domain and hosting from a reputable service company, now is the time to install the WordPress content management system on your hosting and start building a site with WordPress. Typically in WordPress hosts, we encounter two types of admin panel: Cpanel and Admin Direct
After installing WordPress on your host, enter the following address in your browser:
www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/
Of course, instead of yourdomain.com, you have to put your main domain address. For example (www honarsystems.com/wp-admin)
After entering the above address, you will enter a page like the one below
On this page, you must enter the username and password that you chose when installing WordPress on your host. To enter the WordPress Dashboard environment.
As shown below, after entering your username and password, you will enter a panel called WordPress Dashboard.
- Welcome Message: This section lists some of the most important sections of the admin page as shortcuts and quick links – these are usually your shortcuts to generating content and building a site with WordPress.
- Posts: To create posts, articles and any kind of content on the site, you must refer to this section.
- Media: Upload / manage images and other media files here.
- Pages: You must refer to this section to create a page and a subpage.
- Comments: In this section, you can manage user comments.
- Appearance: The design of the site, loading and selecting the template and customizing the site are in this section
- Plugins: In this section you can install and activate your plugins. Plugins help you increase the capabilities of your site.
- Users: In this section, you can manage your site accounts
- Settings: In this section, the main settings such as language selection, date selection, settings of some sections of the Dashboard are located.
Initial configuration of site settings
At this stage, it is good to pay attention to some basic settings when building a site with WordPress that will improve your site.
1 – Set up permalinks
Permalinks define how site page URLs – or URLs – are structured on your site. The optimum and best option for permalinks is the “Post Name” option. To select this mode, you need to go to the settings section of the permalinks section as shown below and select the “Post Name” option.
2 – Publicize the site or display it in search engines
In order for other people to be able to find your site on Google and Google to store your site pages in their database, you must allow them to do so. To enable this, go to the Settings and Writing section in the WordPress dashboard, and make sure the “Show in search engines” option is not checked. If you check this option, your site will no longer be stored and displayed in search engines, and only if you enter the full site address in the browser, it will be possible to access the site.
Note: At the beginning, if you have not put content on your site yet and the site is launching, we recommend that you enable this option (check) and click the “Save Changes” button. Then, after you have completely designed and launched your site and put the posts and pages (content) inside the site, go back to this section and disable this option (uncheck it) and click the “save changes” button.
3 – Enter the title of the website and a short introduction of your site in WordPress!
To do this, go to the settings section and enter the information you want in the general section, in the site title, and in short introduction sections.
4 – Enable or disable user comments on the site
Whether you want your users and audience to be able to share their views on your website is up to you and you are in complete control of it. Now to set the comments section of the WordPress website, to manage the comments section on the site, and apply the desired settings, go to the dialog section in the WordPress dashboard. There you can set whether user comments are active or inactive, and apply other features you want.
5 – Select time zone
By setting the time zone correctly, the publication of new tabs and posts will be more regular. In general, you can adjust the time zone based on where you are, or based on your target audience area. Choose the one that is better and more logical for you. To do this, go to Settings and enter your desired time zone in the public section.
Choose a suitable WordPress template for designing a WordPress site
Today, with the growth and development of WordPress templates, site design with WordPress will be extremely fast, low cost, or free. So that you go to the template seller sites and watch a preview of the templates, select and purchase the template you want, and then in Your site will upload that template. In this way, the appearance of your site will be designed just as easily and in less than 10 minutes!
After selecting the template, go to the display section in your WordPress dashboard and click the “Add” button in the theme section. According to the figure below, in this section, you can click on the upload button.
Now upload your template zip file to the site and then click install and activate.
Select the most essential plugins needed to design a WordPress site
Plugin is the name of the tools you use in building a site with WordPress to increase the capabilities of WordPress and increase the possibility of customizing the site for you. To better understand the concept of the plugin, let us give you an example; For example, if we consider WordPress as the operating system on a mobile phone, the plugin plays the same role as the applications that you install on your mobile phone so that you can put more features in your mobile phone. There are many plugins for WordPress today, and in this section, we will introduce the most essential and most useful ones.
Wordfence Security plugin: This plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins to increase site security that you must install at the beginning.
Yoast Seo Plugin: This plugin helps you optimize your site for search engines, especially Google, and generally makes your site more accessible to search engines.
UpdraftPlus Plugin: This plugin is responsible for backing up your website.
W3 Total Cache Plugin: This plugin is using to increase the speed and optimization of the website.
Akismet Plugin: This plugin is very useful and protects your website from spam and spam comments.
WPForms Plugin: This plugin allows you to add interactive communication forms (such as membership forms, logins, contacts, etc.) to your website.
All the plugins mentioned above have a free version and you can easily download them from the WordPress repository and install them on your website to design a site with WordPress. According to the figure below, to install them, just go to the Plugins section in the WordPress dashboard and enter your plugin title in the Add section. Once you find the plugin, install it and then activate it.
Build the main pages of the site
No matter what your field of work is, there are some pages on every website that are usually necessary and fixed. Like Home, About Us, Contact Us, etc .; That’s why in this section we want to teach you how to create a page in WordPress so that in addition to creating the necessary pages, you can easily add any page you need in the future.
To create a page in WordPress, go to the Pages section at the dashboard and click on the “Add New” option. After doing this, you will see the page as shown below. Note that the default WordPress editor is the Gutenberg Editor, and to have the editor as shown below, you must install the Classic Editor plugin.
- Page Title: Write the title of the page in this section
- Text Editor: The main content (text) of the page in this section should be typed and entered. You get all the basic text formatting features (in a text editor, you will have almost a lot of the features you are familiar with in Microsoft Word).
- Media: By clicking this button, you can add your images, sounds and videos to the text of the page.
- Visual and text editor: In the text editor, there are two sections for you, visual and text. In the visual section, exactly what you enter will appear on your page, but in the text editor, you must enter the html and css codes. (If you are not familiar with html and css coding, just use the same visual part of the editor)
- Publish: With this section you can watch a preview of your page before publishing it, or draft it or publish it.
- Featured image: In this section you can select an image to preview your page. The featured image is using more in posts than in tabs.
- Discussion: In this section you can specify whether the page you are writing will receive a comment or not.
After completing the page design, click on the publish option to place this page on the site and publish it.
Pages typically found on any website:
About us: This page is where you can tell your business story and tell why your users should pay attention to you. This page is basically essential for anyone who wants to learn how to build a website.
Contact: This page is where you can put some contact information along with a contact form, through which people can access you directly (To create a contact form you can use the WPForms plugin).
Portfolio: This page is to display tasks and projects you have done in the past.
Blog: To generate content and write articles, you can create a page called “Blog”.
Store: This page should be created when you want to sell something on your site. To do this, you must use the WooCommerce plugin, which is the most popular WordPress store builder.
Generate content and create a blog on the site
A blog is one of the most effective ways to increase traffic and promote not only the website but also any product you want to sell through your website. Statistics show that blogs are a great tool for online marketing. Because 55% of marketers say that blogging is the best and most important marketing priority. Setting up a blog is a simple but practical process. All you have to do is publish articles related to the subject of the website on a regular and continuous basis. It is interesting to know that WordPress is initially introduced as a powerful blogging system. That’s why it’s the best platform for blogging and content production.
To create your first post, go to the Posts section of the WordPress dashboard and click on the “Add New” option. As shown below, the process of creating a new post is exactly the same as creating a page that we taught you in the previous section. One of the most important differences between a post and a page is that posts have a tag and a category, but not on a page.
After you finish writing your first post, click the “Publish” button. For easy access of users to the post, you should specify one of your pages as a “Blog” to post. To do this, go to the Pages section in the WordPress dashboard and add a page with the name of the “Blog”. Then go to the dashboard settings “Reading” section and set the “Posts page” in the reading section.
Build a website menu
Menus contain pages that you have already created so that the user can access them more quickly. This part of the site is very important in terms of SEO and the most important pages of the site such as product categories, pages such as about us or contact us pages are located in the menu section.
To create a menu for your website, go to the Appearance section in the WordPress Dashboard, and in the Menu section, enter your menu name and click the “Create Menu” button.
After creating your site menu, you now need to add site pages to the menu. To do this, select the pages you created in the previous sections (on the right side of the page) and click the Add to Menu button. As shown below, after adding the pages to the menu, add the page display location in the menu settings. Then click the save menu button. Of course, on this page, you can drag and drop the pages to change their order in the site menu.
How to build a site with WordPress
As we mentioned at the beginning, one of the most important factors in the success of any business is having a website. In this article, we have taught you everything you need to know to build a site with WordPress.
Note that success in online business, like any other activity, requires constant effort. So start building a site with WordPress as soon as possible and start earning money from the site. Finally, thank you for your attention to “How to build a site with WordPress”.