Wordpress is a web development framework used by a lot of web site developers, organisations, schools and businesses. It’s packed with features to make a web site, whether your new to coding and just want to drag and drop, or experienced and want to write and develop your own code and customisation.
Because Wordpress is the biggest platform of its kind there are many people using it which makes for lots of great free support, documents and forums to read and learn about Wordpress.
Wordpress also has a great thing called Plugins. Plugins are add-ons developed by other people which add features to your Wordpress website to give you a lot more features without having to develop or write them yourself.
Many Plugins are free and some are paid. If you get your Plugins from the actual Wordpress repository, they are usually thoroughly tested for viruses and compatibility issues, which helps for the health and stability of your website.
Contact Form 7
If you want your readers, customers or subscribers to be able to contact you, your going to need a contact form on your website.
You don’t want to put an email link on your site. Doing that makes it way to easy to become a victim of spam. There is software which goes to millions of websites just in search for peoples emails to add them to a list and start spamming them.
The best way to protect from that and make it easy for your customers to contact you is to have a contact form on your website.
Contact Form 7 is the best and is easily customised for you to quickly add to your website, in a post, page or sidebar.
Contact Form 7 is free and can be downloaded from Wordpress.
WP Super Cache
The speed of your website is everything. Not only will your readers quickly quick away if they have to wait too long for your website to load, it is also a pretty well known fact that search engines give preferences to sites which load faster, than ones which take all day!
Wordpress is built on a file language called PHP which does many wonderful and technical things.
Every time your website loads, the web server hosting your Wordpress websites needs to generate using PHP a page for the customer to see. This is slow and for big websites with lots of codes and lots of users can result in your website running slow and laggy.
WP Super Cache will make create faster html pages of these pages and serve them to your viewers in a fraction of the time making your website run much faster and use less overhead.
You can really see the difference when using WP Super Cache which can be downloaded for free from the Wordpress Website.
Wordfence Security
Your computer, mobile phone, server and any other internet enabled smart devices needs an antivirus program and firewall to protect it from threats and your web site is no different.
Your website needs a good antivirus and firewall and Wordfence is just that.
There are many people out there looking to hurt your website, bring it down and halt you in your tracks.
Your website, quietly sitting there online 24 hours a day, accessible to anyone, anywhere, is the perfect target for criminals.
Wordfence is a very good security plugin for your Wordpress website. It is free and you can pay for upgrades and services if you need them, it protects your website 24 hours a day and sends you notifications when something is wrong, when there are people trying to access your admin panel and bad logins.
Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps allow search Engines like Google to know exactly whats on your website, where they are and the web address of the pages within your site so they can better search them and display them for their viewers who might be searching for what they are looking for on your website.
Sitemaps are very important and your website must have a well and updated sitemap address if you want to be noticed by Google.
Google XML Sitemaps is probably the easiest plugin to use. All you have to do is download, install and activate and it will automatically find all the pages on your website and display them on a XML sitemap.
Most search engines will see your sitemap automatically also, but having this XML file means you can manually upload it your search console in Google for your website so it finds it easier and as a way of letting Goolge know you have one so it can start searching your website.
Yoast SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most important aspects of your website.
If you want your website to be not only listed on the major website, but also clicked on by showing up in the results high enough someone will see them, you need your website to be optimised in a way which makes it easy and for search engines to notice you.
Many things go into search engine optimisation such as keywords, keyword density, tags, metadata etc.
Not only is it hard to know and remember all these different things, its even harder to impment them throughout your whole website and do it every time you make a new post of change.
Yoast SEO does a very good job of asking you and putting systems into place to make it much easier for you to optimise your website for search engines to see, organise and display your website for the customers and readers to find you when they are searching.
Yoast SEO will not give you immediate results, it still takes a lot of heard work to optimise your website, but if you keep doing it and keep updating your Wordpress website with search engine optimisation in mind, Yoast SEO will do its part to ensure the search engines are able to see your website and list the results for your readers.
