What's Inside
Why Your Business Needs a Website
All are viable options to use when getting started. However, eventually, you are going to want your own platform that you control. Third parties notoriously change the rules all the time, and if you build a business fully dependent on someone else, you are taking a big chance. Plus, if you ever want to sell your business, then the assets you own (such as your website and your list) are extremely valuable. Your accounts on third party sites can enhance the value of your business if they bring in revenue, but they are not the business itself. So, as soon as you are ready, you should set up your own website!
Okay, now that I’m off my soap box, for the rest of this post, we’ll assume you are working on setting up a self-hosted website using WordPress (.org) as your content management system (CMS). We’ll also assume that you’ve figured how to use your webhost’s cPanel or other software to do a 1 click install and you’ve chosen a theme. I tend to use Genesis framework themes by StudioPress for a lot of my websites, because with my account I get a good selection of mobile-optimized themes that I can use for any number of my own sites. There are also great themes available on Themeforest. there are also tons of freemium and free themes to get you started. Although if you want more support later, you’ll want to get a paid theme, which typically come with customer support.
The question of this post is, how do you set up your WordPress site when it’s brand new?
WordPress Defaults
Here’s my checklist:
- Delete the default post, page and comment that come with WordPress. Nothing screams unprofessional like having text like “This is a sample page…” on a live website.
- Make a few tweaks to your settings:
- Under General Settings
- Give your site a title and tagline. (Don’t sweat this; you can change it anytime.)
- Make sure your URL is consistent with how you are promoting your site (e.g. with the www or without it; with https or not). Which one to use is a discussion for another day, but here’s a helpful article on using www and on using https.
- Enter the email address you want to use to receive site inquiries.
- Make sure Anyone can register is unchecked.
- Set your timezone and date and time formats.
The following items are grouped by category (either settings or types of plugins).
WordPress Settings
Under Reading Settings
- Set your front page to display either posts or a static page. This will depend on your theme. For some themes that come with a ‘Blog’ page template and widgets to use on the front page, you would leave this as Front page displays your latest posts. Other themes require you to display a specific page (that you leave blank) as your Posts page, and designate a static page as your front page, where you’d have a mix of sections. If you’re having trouble getting your posts to show, play around with these settings. The default also works depending on your tasts (just showing a rolling list of your latest posts).
- Search Engine Visibility is an important setting. I would check to ‘Discourage search engines from indexting this site’ at first until you get your site working and a look/design you are comfortable with.
- There’s a hidden field here that will appear once you uncheck the Discourage search engines box and save changes. The field will ask for a list of sites to ping (notify) of updates to your blog. There will be one there by default, but I always add a custom ping list to ensure my site updates get spread around the web and indexed quickly.
Under Discussion Settings
To deal with spam, make sure the following two settings are in place:
- Comment author must fill out name and email
- Close comments after a certain amount of days
- Before a comment appears, Comment author must have a previously approved comment
- Comment moderation. Hold a comment in the queue if it containsor more links.
- The above should capture most Spam, for the rest, see the plugins below.
Under Media Settings
- The only thing to change here is to uncheck the Organize my uploads into month and year based folders. If you don’t, all of your images and media uploads will be buried in separate month and year folders. If you ever need to change links or find all your files at once, it would be a nightmare to look through all those folders (trust me).
Under Permalink Settings
- Just check Post name and Save Changes. Done.
Setting Up Pages
- Add the following pages to your site: About, Blog, Contact, Privacy, Terms. Start off with blank pages, you can add content to them later. There are also plugins that can help you generate content for some of these, which I’ll discuss below.
- As my sites grow, I sometimes add a Start Here page to orient visitors to the best, most useful content.
- You’ll also want to add pages for your giveaway to encourage people to optin to your email list, and an eventual sales page for your first product. Other pages I add to new sites, depending on how I plan to monetize them, include Resources (with a list of recommended products, some of which will have affiliate links), Products (with a catalog of products I have up for sale), Books (with recommended books embedded with Amazon affiliate links), Reviews (with reviews of products embedded with affiliate links), Tutorials (with how-to videos or write-ups), or Application (if you have a process to screen potential clients, for example coaching or web design). Services and Service Areas pages are both essential for local businesses.
Setting Up Posts
- Under Posts, Categories create a handful of categories (departments) for the content you’ll post on your site.
- You’ll want to create at least 1 post on your site to get started, but 5-10 starter posts is a good idea. Some call this ‘pillar content‘. Like this post, pillar content is informative, in-depth content that provides an overview of a core topic within your niche or sector. It can lead to other content (for example, from this article, I could develop articles around themes to choose, premium vs free themes, plugins, creating optin pages, sales pages, resource pages, etc.)
- I highly suggest you write this content yourself, so that readers get a feel for your style and perspective. For those of you cranking out niche sites to test which topics are popular, you could also hire others to write pillar content. You could go high end and hire a freelancer on Upwork or similar site or a virtual assistant. Or, you could opt for lower cost article writing sites, like iWriter or Textbroker. Remember that you get what you pay for, and opt for the highest quality writers on such sites. One good site that does a good job with articles is (despite the name) 99 Cent Articles. This article has helpful tips on hiring freelance writers.
Installing Plugins
I’ve categorized plugins by category:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your website in the search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo). While each search engine has hundreds (thousands?) of proprietary ranking factors, the plugins below will help you to cover your bases on the most important ones (adding images, videos, subheadings, and links to other content on your site). The bottom line is that search rankings are tied to a site that is useful and engaging (meaning, people tend to stay on the site once they get there). You can ensure your site is both many ways and these plugins help.
- You’ll want one of the two major SEO plugins:
- WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in One SEO. Don’t spend hours trying to decide. Pick one and follow the instructions and keep it moving. Each plugin adds meta descriptions and keywords to each of your site’s pages, as well as an XML listing of your content so that search engines can read your site, among other extremely useful features.
- Add a Pixabay plugin to make it easy to add a featured image to each of your posts. Pixabay is a site where you can obtain free public domain images contributed by users (like you!).
- Default featured image – this is a plugin that automatically turns the first image in your post (or a default image from your media uploads) in to a featured image. This is helpful for themes that use magazine layout or display default thumbnails for each post.
- YouTube Videos – You don’t need special plugins anymore to embed youtube videos. If you put a youtube URL in a post, it should display the video by default. If you want more control over the video, use YouTube’s embed codes.
- Table of Contents plugin – While this is not an essential plugin, I’ve found it does boost SEO by making your articles more structured. To make this useful, you’ll have to add heading within your blog post. This just means giving subheadings (h2 or h3) to sections of your articles. The plugin will automatically generate a table of contents and display it where you tell it to.
- Ad Inserter – This plugin is also a part of monetization, but a clever trick is to use this plugin to add links to other pages on your site in the middle of your articles. Again, this is about reducing bounce rates and keeping visitors on your site.
- Related Posts – If you install JetPack by WordPress.com, it comes with a related posts plugin. Or you can add a separate plugin for this. This helps keeps visitors on your site and reduce bound rates by pointing them to related content they might be interested in.
- Popular Posts – Jetpack has this feature built in. But you can also find separate plugins that tally the number of visitors to each post in your site and can display these in a sidebar widget by time frames your specify (last week, year or all time, for example).
Site Enhancement
- Social sharing plugin – These plugins automatically add like/share buttons from popular social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more.
- Optin or Landing Page Generator. I use Mailmunch most often. However, other popular alternatives include LeadPages, Clickfunnels and the more expensive InfusionSoft. You can also buy into a system like ThriveThemes, which includes wysiwig editors, landing page creators and probably replaces most of the separate plugins I’m listing on this page.
- Contact Form – JetPack has a built in one. You can also use form plugins like Ninja forms (which I use) or Gravity forms, or the ever popular Contact Forms 7 (which I also use on a number of sites). Each plugin generates a shortcode, that you paste into the blank Contact page you created above.
- Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This plugin makes it easy to add legal pages to your website with respect to how you handle the information of your visitors, your use of ‘Cookies’, which track visitor behavior on your site, etc.
How to do Tracking
You don’t have to add these right away, but it’s good to begin to track as soon as possible where your visitors come from and what they do on your site.
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress
- Pretty Links – This plugin lets you turn affiliate links and other links into easy to use short links (kind of like bit.ly or goo.gl). The plugin comes with a built in tracker to tell you how many people click on each link.
Note that JetPack also has tracking built in and will tell you which pages and posts your visitors click on.
Handling Security and Spam
Once you create a website you are at the mercy of all the stuff in the wild out there to take sites down, steal your information, take over your domain. Yeah, really scary stuff. The great thing is there are tools out there to help you fight the good fight.
- WordFence is a great plugin to protect your WordPress website. I love it. It’s like a robot that is constantly on guard, watching your site. You get alerted about attacks in real time and can block these attempts right away. There’s so much more…I recommend installing the plugin and using the default settings. As you get more familiar with it, you can tweak it later.
Spam is a constant problem when you have forms on your website, e.g. Contact forms, surveys, optins, etc. You need a plugin that can trick the robots (or thwart them).
- Akismet is the WordPress standard, it automatically puts spam comments in moderation so you don’t have to deal with them.
- WP-SpamShield is a plugin that works differently than Akismet in that it silently thwarts spam from getting through without CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions, or other inconvenience to website visitors. With this plugin you don’t need the Google ReCaptcha account.
Optional Plugins
- Some optional plugins that may be essential depending on how you monetize include the following:
- Shopping Cart and/or Download manager – Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce
- Tables plugin to add comparison tables to your posts.
Offsite Tasks
Although this post is about setting up your site, there are a few things you’ll want to do off site as well, that are part of setting up your website. Below I categorize some of the things you’ll want to do.
- Email – Create google mail account for your business. The Google account opens up other accounts you’ll want like YouTube, Google+, Blogger, Maps and more. Also, create email accounts with your host provider (like admin@website.com, info@website.com, support@website.com, yourname@website.com). I also like to create a Yahoo email account, which works by default with other sites like Tumblr.
- Set up an autoresponder account. I use MailChimp, which has a free option up to a certain number of subscribers Other popular alternatives include Aweber and GetResponse
- Set up an account with a payment processor: PayPal, Stripe, GumRoad (Just do all three to give yourself flexibility.)
- Create your social media accounts, especially Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Pinterest. increasingly people are using Instagram. There are many sites you can use to create a branded media platform for your business, and you can find them all (and register your business or brand name on them) using a site like Knowem.
- Create an account at a URL shortening service like bit.ly or goo.gl (Google’s service).
- Sign up for Heatmap software like CrazyEgg, which tells you where people are clicking on individual pages (e.g. are they clicking on your adds, dead links, in the middle or top of your page, at the end). This software is a real eye opener, although it won’t reveal anything until you have a healthy number of regular visitors to your site.
- Create a Google Recaptcha key, which can work with WordPress plugins that handle comment spam.
Remember, you don’t have to do this all in one day! Print out this article and use it as a checklist when setting up a new site. Also, there are many more plugins and tweaks you can do to a website; this is just a list of things to get you up and running. If you want a complete guide to starting your online business, sign up to get the free road map to creating cash flow below!
Are there other plugins that you consider essential to a new website? Let us know in the comments below!