In almost all of the cases where I was hired to help with a website, I had to deal with a WordPress setup. I have done this often enough to discover some patterns and to create a “WordPress Recipe” that I can use and apply really fast and that was proven to work!
Why the recipe?
WordPress’s power is that it is simple to install and set up by a non-technical person. But that is also its weakness. It is easy to conclude that after a successful install “you’re done and ready to go”, but that is usually not the case.
The common elements
The online store. Most of the websites today sell a product or a service. The most flexible solution that I know of is to use WooCommerce, connected with PayPal. And of course, there are all sorts of add ons you can use to customize the store to your needs.
The newsletter service. As a business, you need a way to stay in touch with your customers and to get leads. The best way I know how to do this is by capturing emails and using them with a newsletter service. MailChimp is a common choice. Contact Form 7 is the plugin that connects MailChimp with your site.
The contact form. If you are selling a product, you need to allow your customers to ask for support. Also, prospective customers should be able to reach you with presales questions. You can solve this with a contact form done right. What do I mean by “done right”? Two things: first you need some sort of spam protection so that only genuine contact requests get to your inbox. And secondly, you need to save these requests in a database in case your email happens to not be working.
Website Analytics. It surprises me how many website owners do not have any analytics reporting setup. If you don’t use analytics you could be missing out on potentially vital information ranging from technical problems with your website to discovering how your customers find you and where, in turn, you can find them. The best tool for this is Google Analytics. It is easy to set up and does not require any maintenance. Once you have it on your website any time you need to make a big decision about your business you can consult the analytics data to determine what the impact may be on your traffic and customers. Usually, the WordPress theme has a way to add this code. If you need something more advanced then PixelYourSite is the tool I’d recommend.
Search Engine Optimization. This a very broad topic, but a good start can get you a long way. At the very least choose a theme that is SEO friendly and properly configure your website structure through permalinks. Also, install the free plugin from YOAST and follow the configuration steps to make your pages more “google friendly”. I should add here that starting with 2018 the mobile users have surpassed the desktop users (in the data I have access to), so the website needs to look great on mobile first and desktop second! This is a big departure from: let’s make a great desktop website and then we’ll fix it on mobile.
Social Share. This is one is optional in my mind because I am not very convinced that it helps. If you know better let me know in the comments below. Some themes do provide this feature as do some plugins, but I have not found anyone that I could recommend. What I usually end up doing is to create custom code to add social share on the pages that I need to.
Website Security. Unfortunately, none of the websites I was hired to work with had good security in place. In fact, many times I was hired to try and salvage a hacked website and that is not always possible. WordPress is notorious for being easy to hack. This is not actually their fault. The paradox is that the software is so easy to use and install that many people who use it are unaware of the online security pitfalls so they fail to take the required steps to secure their website. To get you started you should only use popular plugins that have a good reputation of high quality. And you need to install and configure a security plugin. The one that I use and I recommend is All In One Security. Your hosting can also help here if they provide a malware scanning service.
Backups. I have learned the lessons of good backups the hard way. These days I don’t even take on clients if they don’t agree with a backup policy. It is too risky and so easy to make a mistake that costs both me and the client. I don’t have a plugin to recommend here. I personally have a backup server, with custom code, where I keep version mirrors of my work and my client’s data. This allows me to do quick restores in case of trouble and to work fast, knowing that even if I make a mistake, I can always roll back.
The WordPress quick setup Recipe
- Install WordPress
- Install a theme. I recommend DIVI (with some caveats)
- Install WooCommerce and connect it with PayPal (or Stripe)
- Install Contact Form 7 and connect it with MailChimp
- Setup the contact form in Contact Form 7 and also install Flamingo. Configure spam protection with recaptcha. Do a test of the contact form to make sure it works.
- Add the Google Analytics code in your theme
- Install and configure YOAST
- (optional) Install a social share plugin (or use custom code)
- Install AllInOne Security plugin and configure it.
- Setup automatic, versioned backups.
A note about choosing a theme
As you know I recommend DIVI from Elegant Themes. What I like about it is that you can quickly have a beautiful website that is mobile friendly, it is super easy to update and it’s very customizable without having to write any code.
But all this comes with a price!
I am not very happy with the performance of the theme. Sometimes it feels bloated. But there are ways to mitigate this problem. Another much bigger issue is that you are locked in with this theme. If you decide to use DIVI you might as well purchase the lifetime package because it will be incredibly hard to change to another theme down the line. If you think this may be an issue for you then you may want to look into Beaver Builder.