With an estimated 7.4 Million sites hosted in just the United States alone, WordPress has become an ever increasingly popular solution to help people get online, and do it quickly. WordPress was originally built to be a platform for building Blog websites, but has since grown in popularity to become one of the most popular and the highest supported framework on the market that is available for free. In order to help people build better with WordPress, we’ve put together this guide to help you along your way.
These instructions assume you are either hosting on a self-hosted system, or on cPanel with a hosting provider.
Site Performance Problems?
It’s common to deal with performance issues with WordPress, especially if you’re not familiar with what you’re doing. Here are some tips to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your WordPress installation.
- Check Your Disk Usage or Bandwidth Usage for High Utilization
- Check Your Processor and Memory Utilization
- Be Sure your Bills With Your Hosting Provider are Paid Up
- Be Sure to Compress & Optimize the Delivery of Your Site Wherever Possible (WP-Optimize is a great solution for this.)
- Always make sure you have an off-site backup for your website like CodeGuard
Site Security Problems?
Sometimes our problems don’t lie within performance, but with the security surrounding the site. E-Commerce sites specifically need to be mindful of keeping security strong on their websites to ensure that their customer information is being properly protected. Here are some ways that you can ensure you’re securing your installation.
- Be sure your site is operating with HTTPS properly so that links don’t break to content and pages
- Install Wordfence Security to Mitigate Attacks and Install an Application Firewall
- Rate Limit Your Login Attempts with Wordfence or Jetpack Plugins
- Ensure Your Site is Redirecting to HTTPS at all times
- Make Sure You Have a Valid SSL Certificate Installed
- Validate that All Deactivated Plugins are Uninstalled
- Ensure All Unused Plugins Are Deactivated & Uninstalled
- Remove All Unused Themes
Trouble Building Something Beautiful?
Although WordPress is a great platform, it can sometimes be initially clunky to work with. By installing some plugins and a flexible theme, you can take advantage of all that WordPress has to offer without buying an expensive theme or plugin.
We Recommend building your site with the OceanWP Theme that is available for free if you don’t already have a Theme picked out. So far, we have not found a more flexible theme that is available for free on the market.
There are a few notable benefits to building with OceanWP:
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- Full Control over Header & Footer Styling
- Full Control over Typography, Color, and Formatting
- Simple and Easy Navigation in Customization Menu
- No Major Features are hidden by Paywall
For your pages and content, we recommend the following plugins to give you a free builder that’s a bit more flexible than the default installed Gutenburg:
- Beaver Builder
- This tool will give you the ability to create beautiful and responsive multi-column layouts with full support for animations, drag and drop building, multi-column design and more.
- Live Addons for Beaver Builder
- If you’re short on cash and need a few more tools, this toolkit gives you access to a few more beautiful blocks that you can incorporate across your site to give it even more features.
- Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder
- Much like Live Addons, if you’re short on cash, this will give you a few more tools (and a couple of duplicates if you’re looking for the same block in a different style).
If you can, we recommend buying the full version of Beaver Builder. If you are unable to, the second and third options can help you expand your ability to build.
Fun Fact: Our website is built with the Free Version of Beaver Builder specifically to showcase the power of these add-ons.
