Why should you start your blog on WordPress? Where do you begin when building the site? What do things like domain, hosting, SSL and CSS mean? What to do to make your site secure? We’ve put together a list of five tips just for bloggers.
1. Choose WordPress
With a third of all websites built on it, WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. For the longest time, WordPress was seen as just a blog platform, but its possibilities have since expanded significantly.
WordPress is now also used by corporations, public services, and several online stores. At the same time, WordPress has also kept its status as the platform of choice for bloggers.
Are you thinking about becoming an independent blogger? Is your blog possibly going to grow into something bigger or include an online store in the future?
By choosing WordPress you can start small and grow your site over time as your needs change. WordPress skills also come in handy if you move on to a communications job in a larger organization.
Protip: When you build your site on WordPress, you keep all rights to your content. On an external service such as Blogger, the service provider has unlimited rights to the content you produce.
Read also: Five Reasons to Choose WordPress
Find a Safe Website Home with a Good Domain
Each website needs server space (hosting) and a domain. These are the home of your blog and the address (domain) that your visitors use to locate it. It’s easiest to buy the domain and hosting from the same place. In addition to these, Seravo’s plans include upkeep, which means that we make sure that your site remains functional, fast, and secure.
When you choose Seravo, you won’t have to install anything on your computer. Instead, after placing your order you will receive a fresh installation of WordPress and can start editing content and layout right away.
Protip: When choosing a domain, think about how easy the domain is to communicate over the phone or in an international context. Domains with special characters are available (everything from åäæöø to emoji) but a parallel domain without them is recommended for email services.
Read also: The Seravo Difference
3. Set Aside Time (and Money)
Although WordPress is easy to use, customizing the look of your site takes both skills and time. Prefab layout themes allow you to create a rudimentary site quickly but you won’t necessarily be able to create a layout that exactly matches your vision overnight.
Even though WordPress itself is free, it might be worth your while to pay for customizing it to meet your needs. There are a lot of skilled web designers and developers out there that are happy to help you.
Protip: Never make style changes – such as editing fonts or colours – directly into the content. Instead, add the changes to a CSS stylesheet.
4. Pay Attention to Information Security
Even if your blog doesn’t attract tens of thousands of visitors per month, it might still be a desirable target for a hacker. An outsider who can access usernames or contaminate files with malicious code can cause significant damage even on a smaller site.
With WordPress, the biggest security vulnerabilities are typically related to out-of-date plugins, which are not updated automatically. We take care of these updates for you and scan our customers’ sites daily for potential security problems. In case of a break-in, we clean the site and restore the site from backups. All we ask from you is to use passwords that are secure enough.
Protip: Don’t use the name of your mothers or even your mother-in-law as your password. Manage your passwords with a password manager like 1Password or LastPass so that you won’t have to memorize them.
Read also: 6 Ways to Improve Security on a WordPress site
5. Aim to Be Fast
How long are you willing to wait for a website to load? Visitors are less and less tolerant of slow sites. So is Google. The search engine giant punishes sites that are slow by lowering their ranking in the search results.
Great content alone isn’t enough to optimize your site for search engines. The technical side needs to be up to snuff as well. This is where we come in. Our server environment is optimized for WordPress, which guarantees that your site is as fast as it can be and operates smoothly even during massive traffic peaks.
Protip: One thing that affects the speed of the site is the HTTP/2 protocol which requires secure HTTPS connection. In other words your site needs to have a SSL certificate, something that is included in all our plans.
Read also: Speed
Bonus: Get WordPress Help from an Expert
You might feel mighty alone as an independent blogger when thinking about potential technical problems. As our customer, you get to utilize our WordPress expertise when it comes to security, search engine optimization, site speed, and the use of WordPress.