Nowadays, everybody seems to own a website. Indeed, most people probably wouldn’t be surprised if they found out their next-door neighbor started a lifestyle blog or a small e-store.
After all, WordPress and other CMSs make it easy for anyone to mould their part of the internet and use it to share ideas with like-minded people. Who wouldn’t want to use an opportunity like that?
Consequently, 661 new WordPress sites go online every day. Unfortunately, most of these don’t do much. Usually, they never get sufficient audience, or the owners get discouraged by a bad start and abandon their websites after a few months.
That’s the reason we’ve prepared this list of requirements that will give you the edge. Your blog should fulfill these from the start. Be mindful of these basics, and you’ll have an advantage before you even get into promoting your site.
Strong Hosting Provider
Having a good hosting provider is like having a strong foundation for your website. It is a necessity if you want to get anywhere. A hosting provider should give you enough server resources, storage space, security, and professional customer support.
If your hosting provider fails to do this, it spells out trouble for you along the way. Your site might have performance issues, you can experience outages, security breaches, crashes, and a plethora of other problems.
Even though some providers might make grand claims before you purchase their package, they don’t always deliver. A lot of the providers out there aren’t trustworthy and are just looking to make as much money with as little effort as possible.
That’s why it pays off to review hosting options beforehand and choose the one that is a good fit. Luckily, hosting is rarely expensive. You can find reliable managed WordPress hosting for less than $100/year.
Quality Theme
This is a choice that can affect the entire future of your website. A bad theme can cause almost as much trouble as a bad hosting provider. Having a good theme is essential.
Many factors go into picking a good theme. To give you a few quick pointers, you should choose a theme that’s responsive, SEO-friendly, compatible with all major browsers, and has good support. Moreover, the appearance of your theme should fit the purpose of your website. It’s also a good idea to create a list of features you want on your site and find a theme that fulfills your requirements.
You should also choose between a free and a premium theme. We recommend starting with a free theme to test the waters and consider if you absolutely need a premium one once you gain experience.
Amazing Content
Admittedly, this one is somewhat obvious. That being said, there’s more to creating quality content than just sitting down and typing out a few pages in Word.
For starters, you should analyze your target audience. Think about the content you want to create and the type of content your audience might enjoy. It’s important to be passionate about your topic, but it’s important that other people are passionate about it too. Otherwise, you won’t get much of an audience.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t invite people to see your website once you get out a single piece of content. It’s great that you’re proud of your article, but visitors will quickly lose interest if your entire website consists of a single blog post. You should try to create at least 10 pieces of good, eye-catching content before even thinking about going public.
Make sure all your posts are well-researched and well-written. Contrary to popular myths, longer content is valued much more by readers and search engines alike.
Speaking of search engines, don’t forget about on-page SEO. WordPress might take care of most of your technical SEO, but you still have to make sure your texts appeal to search engines. Google will probably be your highest driver of traffic, so it pays off to familiarize yourself with its requirements from the start.
A tool like Yoast SEO can be invaluable. It helps you with some technical SEO while also providing an in-depth SEO analysis of each text you write. Follow its guidelines as closely as you can, and you’ll attract people to your website faster than might seem possible.
Conclusion
That covers the bare basics of starting a successful WordPress site. Follow these guidelines for a great start with your first WordPress website.
Some other aspects to look into as a new website owner include WordPress security, good plugins, speed optimization, and promotion. These are all important in ensuring smooth sailing in the future. With time you’ll experiment with your WordPress site, and you’ll find out everything that fits your needs as a website owner.
We wish you a successful start with WordPress.
