Whether you're planning to
run a small blog or a full-blown ecommerce site, setting up WordPress is an
essential first step.
WordPress powers more than
60 million websites, including the White House site and more than 30% of the
top 10 million sites (based on traffic). It's free, open source software (which
means you can easily find support online), and it's relatively simple to set
up.
When you get started with
WordPress, there are tons of things you can do. And it’s easy to get
overwhelmed with all the options and permutations. What should you start with?
How do you reach 50% of your store conversion goals? How do I tweak my store?
Should I start a blog? Is WordPress the right platform for me? Let us walk you
through it.
On this blog post, we will
share our experiences on getting started with WordPress as an e-commerce
platform and also offer some guidelines for converting your wordpress website
into a money making machine.
Finding
a hosting provider Section:
WordPress is one of the most
popular blogging and content management systems (CMS) in the world. It's also a
favorite for eCommerce and online stores. If you're considering building an
online store with WordPress, you have a few options for getting started.
The first thing you need to
do is choose a hosting provider. This will handle all of the technical details
of running your site, such as security, storage space, upgrades and backups. A
good host will also provide any necessary software and bug fixes to keep your
store running smoothly.
For your first eCommerce
site, I'd recommend going with a managed service like Shopify or BigCartel.
They offer everything you need in one convenient package, and they handle all
the complex behind-the-scenes stuff so you don't have to worry about it, but
you won't have full control over your site.
If you want more control
over how your site works — or if you want to customize the platform itself —
then you'll want to go with a self-hosted option like WordPress.org
. Depending on what level of control you want over your site's design and
functionality, you can get hosted services from companies like Siteground,
Bluehost and WP Engine, the list is just endless.
Getting
a domain name:
Registering a domain name
with a registrar is often an easy process that requires basic contact
information and payment information. It usually costs between $10 and $20 to
register a new domain name, but prices vary by provider.
For example, GoDaddy charges
$12.95 per year to register a .com web address, while Namecheap charges as
little as $9.98 for the first year of registration for a .com domain name. You
can register a domain name at your hosting company or purchase one from a
third-party site like GoDaddy or Namecheap.
If you're new to website development,
using your hosting company as your registrar will make it easier to manage all
aspects of your website in one place. Once you purchase your domain name,
you'll be given instructions on how to transfer it to your hosting provider.
Installing
WordPress :
To get started with your
WordPress , you need to activate your account and install the software. You can
use any host provider of your choice, but here's a quick guide on how to get
WordPress running on BlueHost:
choosing
a theme:
WordPress is a powerful and
versatile platform. There are thousands of themes to choose from, and the best
way to choose a theme is to consider your audience, how you want your site to
look, how it should work, and how much involvement you want with the code. My recommended
themes are astra and oceanwp.
Especially if you want to
build any type of a business website, both Astra and Ocean WP are two of the best
WordPress e-commerce themes available.
Important
WP plugins to consider for building your site:
The following are the most
important plugins that I use to create e-commerce sites. These plugins have
helped me save time and also gave me additional functionality:
Page builder (Highly recommended)
- Elementor Pro. This is a page builder plugin that gives
you more flexibility in creating responsive product landing pages,
checkout pages and much more. You can build pages with custom features
that don't exist in the WordPress theme.
- Elementor Pro also has a pro version which allows for the addition of new elements and options for existing ones. I can't tell you how many times Elementor Pro has made my website look professional, simple and easy to navigate. In addition, it has saved me countless hours of development time! I'm not going to go into detail about
- Elementor here as there are plenty of resources on the internet which will explain it in depth, you can checkout my other articles about elementor:
contact form for letting your customer contact you:
If you have elementor pro,
you won't need a contact form as it is pre-built in the plugin, you can get elementor here. With elementor pro you can build a fully-fleshed website, free you are using the free version, you will need a contact form.
It's important to add social
media buttons on your blog. Using a plugin makes it easy to share your content
on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest from your site. The MailChimp
plugin is free and easy to install. It's also great for adding e-mail sign-up
forms for your mailing list.
The first thing
you need to do is install the MailChimp plugin by going to Plugins > Add New
and searching for "MailChimp". Click Install Now and activate it once
the installation has finished. Then go to Settings > Mailchimp and enter
your API key, which can be found in your MailChimp account under Account >
Extras and API Keys (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The
Settings page of the MailChimp Wordpress plugin You can customize the signup
form in various ways through the Settings page (Figure 2). At a minimum, all
you have to do is enter a title and message, and select a signup button color.
Figure 2:
Settings page of the MailChimp Wordpress plugin It's important to note that you
have to have an active list in order to use this plugin, even if you don't plan
on sending any emails from it. You can easily create a list from
SEO plugin(highly recommended):
Section: Optimizing your WordPress site. In this
blog, I will be reviewing one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, Rankmath.
It has a wide range of features such as an analytics option, a keyword research
tool and much more.
Section: Plugin installation. I am going to
outline some of the steps to follow when installing an SEO plugin
Section: Keyword research tool. One key metric
that is used for the on-page optimization of WordPress sites is the density of
keywords or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score. This score indicates how
well your keywords are placed in your content and how effectively you are using
them in your post titles and body content. To get this information we use
Rankmath.
Section: Description tags. Description tags are
an important on-page SEO metric for WordPress' ranking algorithms that should
not be overlooked. Before I review some tips on how to find good Descriptions
Tags, let's first understand what they are and how they work with Content
Optimization strategy that influence the ranking of your site in Google search
engines
Section:
Backlinks strategy, backlinks play a very important role in increasing traffic
coming to your site and website rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo!
or Bing.
How to apply CSS in your blog
:
In WordPress, you can use
two types of content: posts and pages. Posts are what your visitors read on the
blog and should be used whenever possible. Pages are intended for static
content, such as your About or Contact page.
If you want to change the structure
or appearance of your blog (for example make each post title bold) then you
will have to use CSS . The CSS language can be used for many things in
WordPress such as change the color of any element or control the alignment of
text.
How Javascript works in
Wordpress :
Javascript in Wordpress is
used to make your site dynamic, meaning that it can do more than just display
text and images: it can also allow the user to interact with the website via
buttons and forms.
Wordpress uses Javascript to
make this interaction smooth and seamless, from the detail page in an
E-commerce site to displaying any type of content on your homepage.
Also, Javascript can be used
to build your own application within Wordpress without modifying or adding on
to the core files, which ensures that your modifications do not conflict with
future updates.
Conclusion:
Just remember, there are
tons of different plugins out there for Wordpress and you don’t want to
overload your blog with a lot of unnecessary code. Get the basics down first;
learn them well before moving on to more advanced features. Once you have that
down and are comfortable with the platform, explore more plugins and you’ll
find it’ll only make your blogging experience better.