WordPress Setup Checklist

WordPress Website / Blog Setup Checklist

Launching a WordPress website is pretty simple, but if this is your first time using the platform, it helps to have a WordPress setup checklist you can refer to before launch. Before we start, make sure that you have chosen the right hosting plan for your business type. Most sites are fine with basic WordPress hosting, but those that have a large volume of data or require a bigger bandwidth might need a managed WordPress hosting plan. The articles below can help you compare top hosting providers or determine whether you need to upgrade to a managed hosting account:

• Compare top hosting providers
• Managed WordPress hosting

After you’ve chosen the most appropriate hosting plan, it’s time to make sure you’ve got everything covered before you launch your site and make it public. This WordPress checklist can act as a guide to make sure that you’ve covered all the setup steps. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can install WordPress through this link.

Checklist

1. Secure your WordPress login and admin area
2. Check your site for dead links (404 errors)
3. Setup permalinks
4. Check all forms on your website
5. Test social integrations
6. Performance and page speed tests
7. Install Google Analytics
8. Check SEO settings
9. Test your website coding’s W3C compliance
10. Confirm your SSL
11. Removed unused plugins
12. Delete unused themes
13. Install a WordPress backup solution
14. Backup your website

1. Secure WordPress login and admin area

Similarly to how you would protect your brick-and-mortar business from thieves and vandals, your login and admin areas are just as important to secure from virtual ones. Think of your login as the gatekeeper to the admin area, which is your virtual headquarters. Your username and password not only need to be unique, they need to be too difficult to encourage guesswork. Don’t use generic usernames like “admin” or a weak password like 123456. Alternate between capital letters, numbers, characters and make it difficult for hackers. We also recommend limiting login attempts and enabling two-step authentication for login. As for your admin area, try to limit the access to your dashboard to the people who absolutely must to use it. The more you secure your headquarters, the less vulnerable to hacking attempts your site will be.

1. Check Your Site for dead links (404 Errors)

Dead links, broken links, and 404 error pages can impact your traffic and lead to issues in terms of your search engine rankings. Major search engines penalize sites that have too many broken links by showing your site less to users. It’s all about the quality of search results yielded and to stay competitive, search engines have to ensure their results are the best possible solutions to the user’s query. It’s always important to perform a run-down of your site to make sure that you don’t have this problem. Although it can be done manually, there are a lot of software programs that can perform this service for you and help you identify and remove dead/broken links.

3. Setup permalinks

A permalink is a permanent URL that is used to index different posts and pages on your site. Users need permalinks to be directed to a specific post on your site, and search engines use them to index your website. Based on the type of website you have, you can start by creating a permalink structure that you can follow. For example, you might want to include dates in the permalinks of news or blog articles and continue that pattern for future posts. Just make sure that they are SEO friendly and that your strategy is one that is simple enough for you to follow for every post.

4. Check all forms on your website

Web forms are a simple and effective way to not only receive valuable input from your clients but can also be a great way to establish relationships with them. You can either have forms custom built by developers for you, or you can download form plugins and use pre-made templates. When you include forms on your website, make sure that they actually work, or it can cost you potential business. For example, if you have an opt-in newsletter, send a test e-mail and make sure that you are receiving the e-mail. If users send you a message, send one to yourself through the form to make sure you receive correspondence from others.

5. Test Social integrations

Social integration on your website means using social media and your website to strengthen your brand. It includes options such as like and share buttons, social login options, and video. If you’ve integrated social media with your site, test your features before going public because social media has become one of the strongest ways to connect with your audience, reach a potential audience, and spread your message out there. Also constantly check to make sure that any social media plugins you’ve installed are updated and functioning well.

6. Performance and page speed tests

The way your website looks and functions and how fast it loads is a big factor in retaining clients and ranking on search engines. Virtually every business nowadays has become highly competitive, and the longer your site takes to load or the more frustrating it is to use it, the more likely your target audience will take their business elsewhere. There are many ways that you can check your page speed and your site performance, and you can do it manually as well. Just make sure you check performance and page speed often because performance can fluctuate based on different factors.

7.  Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is considered to be the most widely-used analytics tool on the internet and is an incredibly useful tool that helps you understand the behavior of people on your site. Google Analytics tracks the quality of your landing pages, your conversions, which devices your users are accessing your pages from and where they are, and has insights and features that can help you generate campaigns and make the modifications and adjustments necessary to increase your traffic. We highly recommend that you create a Google Analytics account and use it to monitor your site’s performance.

8. Check SEO settings

In order for you to be visible in search engine results, your website needs to be search engine optimized. There are a lot of ways that you can optimize your site, and it’s an effort that is maintained throughout your site and in different parts of it, from the front-end to the back-end. There are a lot of plugins that can help you with SEO optimization, such as Yoast. When you’re doing things manually, check your general settings, make sure your titles and posts are optimized correctly, and check your sitemap and social settings.

9.  Test your website coding’s W3C compliance

When you have W3C compliant code, this means that your HTML and CSS are compliant with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium. These standards have been set place in order to ensure that developers write clean, good code that allows your site to function properly. Bad codes are penalized by search engines because their spiders will crawl your site and if they encounter bad code, it will result in your site ranking lower in search results. There are websites and programs that you can use to check your code, so you can easily make necessary adjustments after you’ve identified where the issue is coming from.

10. Confirm your SSL

An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates your website’s identity. It sends encrypted information to other servers that can only be deciphered with the appropriate decryption key. SSL is important for site security and needs to be renewed as they expire. Every SSL certificate comes with the signature of the certificate authority, so make sure that you confirm your certificate’s validity. You can do so by using an analyzer or security checker that’s available online.

11. Removed unused plugins

Remove any unused plugins that you have on your site before you launch. This includes those who have stopped issuing updates or don’t work properly. Plugins are tricky; although they can be extremely useful and help you save time working on your website, there are some of them that can be considered security vulnerabilities and may be loopholes for hackers to access your information or site. Unused plugins cause unnecessary clutter and can impact your site’s load speed through repeated HTTP requests, so there’s really no reason to have them and slow down your page speed and site loading time.

12. Delete unused themes

Just like plugins, unused themes on your WordPress site can create security vulnerabilities, and especially if the theme developers no longer issue updates. Furthermore, themes can take up space that you can use for other types of data on your site and they can slow it down. Before you go live, it’s a good idea to delete any unused themes and stick to the ones that are consistently being updated and improved for the sake of security, speed, and efficiency.

13. Install a WordPress backup solution

There are a wealth of backup solutions available for free or paid use. Regardless of what route you opt to take, it’s never a good idea to keep backup until the end. Backing up your site ensures that you never lose any valuable data and allows you to re-upload the site back onto the server if something goes wrong.

14. Backup your website at this point

Backing-up your website at this point will save you a lot of time in the future, especially if this is your first time working with WordPress. Make sure to setup an automated website backup plan. There are several free and paid backup plugins for WordPress. Most of them are fairly easy to use, and no coding knowledge is needed, but we always suggest backing up the website manually at least once on a quarterly basis.

We hope that with this checklist, you’ll be able to tweak and fix all the important pre-launch functions and make the most out of your new site. You may not need to perform everything on this list depending on your business type, but even using a few of these tips can make a major impact on your traffic and conversion rate down the line.