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are you a professional looking to enhance your brand and are you ready to create digital experiences right down to the click?
Having an online presence will help you achieve your goals of visibility, sales and reputation. Your site will be a loudspeaker. Don't worry if you don't have a website yet and you don't know where to start building it, in this post we explain you how to create a WordPress website from scratch. Step-by-step!
10 steps to create a WordPress website from scratch
ready to launch your business and start gaining visibility online? Here are the steps you need to follow:
- Designing the structure and content of the site.
- Structure
Don't start the house from the roof, and don't start designing like crazy without knowing what you want. It all depends on your business idea:
- Colours: It is advisable to use a maximum of two or three colour codes so that the appearance of your site is coherent.
- Typographies: The ideal recommendation is to use no more than two for headings and paragraphs, always bearing in mind legibility. Avoid handwriting styles.
- Logotype: Explore simplicity and be as conceptual as possible. For the logo, you can look for a symbol that represents you or simply play with the initials of your name or the name of your business.
The structure requires being clear about which sections you are going to include in the menu, each of them will be a new page created on your site: home, services, contact, about us, blog... Give them a coherent name and use submenus if necessary to create pages and content for each of your services.
For SEO, it is advisable to work the keyword that corresponds to each product or service on your page. It will be much easier to find.
- Content
Now that you have defined the sections of your website, it is time to think about how to write the content well:
- Don't just fill it in for the sake of filling it in and think carefully about what you are going to say. Be persuasive.
- Do a keyword research to know exactly what are the most searched words related to your services and sector.
- Use the keyword with a density of between 0.5% and 1%. Repeat it without being redundant or saturating the text and use other related words.
- Write between 600 and 900 words. If your services are not enough and reaching the goal becomes an uphill climb, it will be enough to exceed 300 words. If you do not exceed 300 words, it is very likely that you will be penalised by Google's algorithm as thin content.
- Design
Now it's time to show your most artistic side. Quality images and photographs that fit perfectly with the layout and length of the texts. If they don't convince you, don't even think about it, use professional graphic content from image banks or leave it in the hands of an expert.
- Choose a domain name and contract hosting
It is true that choosing a bad server or domain can affect your visibility. After all, it is the place where your website will be hosted, but there are many platforms and services where you can buy your own domain and contract hosting.
It is a matter of taking a look at the plans and choosing the one that suits you best. Or if you decide to leave the construction of your page in the hands of a specialised agency, they will take care of the whole process, making the transfer with delicacy so that after all the development and care you can have your page available for all users. You will only have to worry about enjoying it.
- DOMAIN is the name of your website and the name that users will use to search for you in the browser bar. Being perfectionists, your keyword should appear there, although it is not always possible due to the extension.
- HOSTING is the home of your website, so it has a great responsibility for its loading speed. Think carefully about the hosting provider you are going to choose.
That said, let's move on!
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Download and install WordPress.
Many hosting services already include the installation of a CMS like WordPress in their price, so they will automatically install it and give you the login details. When this doesn't happen, you just need to download the latest version of the platform. It will be an easy and guided path.
all set!
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Select a template or theme.
It's very important to think about what your business does so that the theme you choose is in tune with it. There are lots of options. Some free templates will already come installed in your control panel. They're great to start with, although they don't give you all the customisation options you might want to experiment with. You may run into a few snags if you don't know much CSS code.
Go to Appearance > Themes, hover over any of the themes, you can activate it or go to preview.
If you want to see new options, you can go to Envato and find a lot of different responsive premium template styles.
Actually, there are a lot of sites on the internet where you can find free and premium templates or themes. The best thing to do is to ask an expert opinion to make sure that the chosen theme is the best option for your website. After all, it's an investment.
Whatever your choice, you will be able to customise the look and feel of the themes.
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Install the necessary plugins
As you work on your site you will need, or not, new plugins. You can always try some new ones and discard those that become obsolete. Here are some of the most used ones:
- SEO By Yoast, a great tool to keep control of readability, keywords, path configuration, URLS, links, titles, etc. It allows you to optimise your site for search engines.
- WP Rocket: Its purpose is to keep the speed optimised.
- Jetpack, the mega plugin with dozens of features for your website: JSON API, Custom CSS, Carousel, Site Stats and much more.
- Akismet- Keeps your site away from the dreaded SPAM.
Remember that these plugins are just a small sample, there are many more.
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Optimize images
If you're going to upload your own images with pixels galore when they're going to look tiny on your site, PageSpeed will give you a bad score, so we recommend you use Photoshop or another tool before uploading them.
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Contact forms
We have compiled the best WordPress contact form plugins for you:
- Contact Form 7. Free and with a large number of downloads, it's very easy to use.
- Caldera Forms is easy to use and has a lot of features and a good visual editor.
- Formidable Forms: It provides other functions beyond other plugins and is 100% mobile-optimised.
- Ninja Forms: Its free function has limited options, while the premium function offers constant updates, support and a large number of extensions.
- Form Maker by WD allows you to create attractive forms to obtain valuable data from your customers.
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Upload the content
The most awaited moment has arrived. You have invested a lot of time and effort in the previous work. Everything will be much easier from now on, you just have to use a layout tool to load all the text and image elements as you like. It is a matter of selecting rows, inserting blocks of text or images and adjusting sizes so that everything fits in the structure of the template.
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Evaluate SEO
This is a good time to check that the URLS are clean, that the H1s are correct, remove all the demo content that is not published, check that the menu is well configured and the internal links do not give errors, establish SEO titles and meta descriptions to favour the CTR, check the H1 and H2 subtitles with keyword, the optimisation of the images and the spelling mistakes, among other things.
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Index your website
In other words, Google adds the site to its index to show it in the search results. To do this, you must uncheck the 'deter search engines' option and remove the 'maintenance mode'. At this point, you will also need to configure the sitemap.xml and upload it to your Google Search Console account.
are you ready to take off?
Finalising your WordPress website
Now you know how to build your corporate website from scratch in WordPress, and although it's not a difficult task, we know it will take time.
Don't worry about anything, you can put yourself in the hands of a web designer. Your website is about to become your best letter of introduction.
