Blogging on WordPress: Things to Remember

If you want to create a blog you have two options: A free blog and a self-hosted blog (Paid blog). A free blog means your blog is built on free blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogspot, etc. paid, or a self-hosted blog is created by buying a domain and web hosting. When you are trying to blog with a self-hosted blog, you have two options, built a website from scratch, or use a content management system like WordPress. Building from scratch involves coding, whereas content management systems have prebuilt templates that will make your website ready in a few minutes.

WordPress Vs Website Builders

Generally speaking, you can get a blog or a simple website for about $5 per month with Wix, Weebly, and other similar website builders. If you want to build a website with WordPress and buy a domain and hosting, you can get $1 per month for hosting and $7-$8 for the domain for one year. Calculate the website running cost. WordPress websites are as beautiful as website builders if you know how to customize websites. If money is not a concern, you can use a website builder and get an amazing website for no extra hard work or elaborate skills. I am not a fan of website builders, though.

You can create a blog on WordPress without zero knowledge of programming. Even if you have never used WordPress, you can easily build a WordPress blog by watching 5 minutes tutorial on how to build a WordPress website on youtube. In order to launch a WordPress site, you need a domain and hosting. If you think managing a hosting account is too technical for you, you can use website builders like Wix, Weebly, etc. to create blogs. These website builders are so easy that you can build your blog through drag and drop tools.

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Your work as a webmaster does not end when your website is live, there are a lot of things to do, like backing up and securing your website, doing search engine optimization, etc.

However, there is also one important thing to consider that is optimizing your WordPress website for fast loading, optimizing a website for user interface and user experience, etc.

One of the best WordPress optimization plugins I have come across is called perfmatters. This plugin will optimize your wordpress site for speed. It removes unwanted features from WordPress to make your website lightweight for faster loading. This is a paid plugin.

There is also a plugin called Auto Optimize. This plugin enables and disables minification to make your website load faster. Minification is a process that minimizes codes and mark up on your website to make it load faster.

You can also improve your website speed with WP Rocket.

In order to improve speed, you will have to use an image compressor. For this purpose, I recommend WP Compress.

3 Things to Remember When You Are Running a Wordpress Website

If you have a blog or website, it is very likely that it is built with WordPress. If you are running a wordpress website, you get a lot of options for plugins. Plugins help you not only to customize your website (for instance a wpforo plugin will convert your WordPress website into a forum) but also let you do a lot of things from backing up your website to securing the website, search engine optimization.

After launching your website, the first and foremost thing you need to do is to create a backup for your site. You can do this by using a backup or migration plugin, or directly on your hosting account.

Once you have backed up your website, you think about security. Wordpress is the most popular CMS, which makes it vulnerable to hacking, therefore, you need a security plugin. 

You have created a backup for your site, you have secured your site, now what next? Well, now the third step is Search Engine Optimization.

3 Plugins You Need For Your Wordpress Websites

Here I am going to share 3 plugins that you need to install and activate on your website.

WPvivid Backup Plugin: Even though your web host will provide backups for your WordPress websites, you still need a backup plugin in the order you have control over backup such as when you should back and where your backup files will be available. WPVIVID is one of the best backup plugins. It has a free version as well as paid version.

iThemes Security: iThemes Security comes with free as well as paid versions. The free version is also perfectly fine. By the way, Wordfence is also a good plugin.

SEOPress: SEO is a very important step for a website owner because your website will receive organic traffic only when it is properly optimized for search engines. You need to use SEO plugins. There are a lot of SEO plugins available for your WordPress websites, but I recommend SEOPress. It has a free version as well as a paid version.