I love WordPress and so do the other 100 million websites on the internet that use WordPress. As a professional web developer, I mostly develop my clients’ websites using WordPress and our custom-built framework CalibreFx. With 3 years of experience using WordPress, optimizing it, getting hacked, and moving to different hosting providers, I decided to compile all those experiences and write this article on how to make the Perfect WordPress Installation.
Web Hosting
Choose your web hosting carefully. I wrote an article a long time ago on how to Find a Web Hosting Provider That Best Fits For You. When choosing a web host, I suggest you not judge by price. Don’t be fooled by cheap prices — you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you treat your website as one of your valuable assets, then you need to use a professional web hosting provider. I can recommend Inmotion Hosting or Hostgator. I love their service because of their fast customer service response. This blog has a track record of 98% uptime.
If this is your first time having a WordPress blog or website, I suggest you start with a shared hosting plan first. The cost is not expensive and it is suitable for a start-up. But if your blog/website already has more than 1K visitors per day, I highly recommend moving to Managed VPS Hosting. You may need to scale up the VPS as your website traffic grows. Ideally, 1 VPS server with 8GB of RAM can handle up to 20K visitors per day.
WordPress Themes
The second most important thing you need to choose carefully. You can find many beautiful WordPress themes on the net, starting from premium themes from Themeforest, Studiopress, Elegant Themes, WooThemes, etc., and free WordPress themes available in the WordPress themes repository. You need to find the theme that best fits your needs and requirements. But above all, read the reviews by the community, because there are many WordPress themes that have security holes. Once you get hacked, all your data will be compromised. Please read my earlier article to secure your WordPress blog.
Performance comes second after security. More features in a theme mean less performance. You may find beautiful themes from Themeforest with great animation sliders, gallery effects, etc., but keep in mind that they will decrease your website performance. And more features come with less user-friendliness and a higher learning curve.
Mobile responsive — this feature is now a must for your website. Make sure your WordPress theme already has this feature, because your readers might be reading your website from a mobile phone.
My team and I fortunately came up with a solution: we created the perfect WordPress themes framework with primary features of security, great performance, and mobile-responsive design. We call it CalibreFx. We will launch it sometime at the end of October 2013. So stay tuned 🙂
Useful Plugins
Do not install many plugins on your WordPress website. More plugins could decrease your whole website performance. I only use the most essential plugins listed below:
- Jetpack: this plugin is a must for a WordPress blog. You can find the reason here.
- Akismet: this plugin helps me fight spammers.
- Formidable: this plugin helps me create forms with just drag and drop.
- Google XML Sitemaps: this plugin helps me create an XML sitemap so it can easily be indexed by Google.
- Limit Login Attempts: this plugin helps me lock any user that tries to brute force my password.
- Post Thumbnail Editor: this plugin helps me edit my thumbnail images so they show the correct part.
- W3 Total Cache: this plugin helps me optimize website performance and connect it to Amazon CloudFront as a CDN.
There are still tons of useful plugins out there, but before you install one, make sure you know it well. And when updates come, be sure to read the changelog before upgrading — please read my earlier post about this.
On Page SEO
After you pick your web hosting, find a good-looking theme, and install the necessary plugins, it’s time to do on-page SEO so your website can easily be indexed by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.). The most well-known plugin for SEO is WP SEO by Yoast. You can use this plugin to boost your on-page SEO.
Here are the steps to do on-page SEO:
- Check your homepage title and description; make sure it is relevant to your content.
- Use a friendly permalink. You can find it in WordPress Admin > Settings > Permalink. Choose Post Name for best results.
- Verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Submit your sitemap to major search engines: Google and Bing.
- Set up Google Analytics to check your website traffic.
- Apply Google authorship using your Google+ profile.
- Optimize your website performance — you can check it using Google PageSpeed and Yahoo YSlow.
Once you do all of that, keep monitoring your website and let your readers know you exist. You can use social media such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
Backup Solution
This is the last one, which is easily forgotten by most people. After all the work is done, you need a disaster recovery plan by backing up your whole website and database. There are many services that allow you to back up your website to their server with ease. One of them is VaultPress — they have a real-time backup feature, and it is already integrated with the Jetpack plugin. So you can relax and focus more on growing your audience and providing useful content.
This blog uses Amazon EC2 for backup. I created my own script to do frequent backups to Amazon EC2 and store them securely there. You can find more information on why you need to backup your website. For a free solution, you can find it here.
So this is how I set up this blog, based on my experiences. If you find some useful plugins, themes, or backup solutions, please fill in the comment box below. And lastly, I hope this article can inspire you.