You have launched a new website and don’t where to start. Don’t worry at digital markeeter we got you covered.
This article will thoroughly cover this topic and we will guide you on how you can set up your new WordPress website from scratch.
Table of Contents
Why is it important?
Setting up a new WordPress website properly is really important and there are many benefits to doing this. For example, if your website is set up professionally then you could not only be generating traffic automatically via organic and social means but it will also make your website more secure and you can rest assured that your website will function properly even with hack attempts. Because you would have closed most of the open doors for hackers.
Setting up your WordPress completely will also help you collect data that you could use later to better optimize your website content.
Let’s start setting up your new wordpress website. it does not matter if it is woo-commerce or wordpress these plugins and settings will help you in both instances.
Which Plugins To Install?
Let’s start by adding the most useful and important plugins to your website. these plugins are not only the most basic plugins but they also serve various purposes. Some plugins will help you in doing better search engine optimization, some plugins will make your website more secure and some plugins will help you get some extra traffic automatically and some plugins will help you better analyze your content to gain more organic traffic.
Yoast SEO
The first plugin that digital markeeter will recommend you to add is the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular and basic wordpress plugins. If this plugin is set up properly then it will save you a lot of work.
Yoast SEO setup: to set up the Yoast SEO plugin, click the search appearance option and for the SEO title and meta description box select title and click save.
What this will do is that every time you create a new wordpress post the Yoast SEO plugin will automatically add your SEO meta title and meta description. This is most helpful when you forget to add your meta information then this plugin automatically adds this information. Which you can change manually anytime.
Ad inserter
ad inserter is a wordpress plugin that allows you to customize your ads. for example if you want to show a specific ad on the specific location of your website then you will use this plugin to do so.
This plugin is really handy when you want to show native ads on your website. Native ads require you to generate separate ad codes that you will use according to which location you want the ads to appear on your website.
Wp Code- Headers and footers
Once again this is one of the most important and basic plugins that you just need to add to your website. it’s a basic plugin in a way because it will help you do the most important and everyday tasks.
One of the most important features of this plugin is that you could add google analytics code here and start using your google analytics. it’s not only useful for google analytics but this plugin offers the functionality that whenever you are going to use any third-party feature that you want to show on your website then you will mostly be provided a code by those websites which you will need to in this plugin.
for example for showing google Adsense ads even then you will be required to add AdSense code in the header of your website which you could do easily via the headers and footers plugin.
Really Simple SSL
Google now requires all of the websites to be SSL secured and if your website is not SSL secured then google will display a message to all of your website visitors that this website is not secure and will prompt them to leave your website.
really simple SSL is one of the best SSL plugins which is also totally free to use.
Pin it button on hover
Basically, on a new wordpress website, you have to make sure that you provide the best user experience to your website visitors. this not only makes it easier for your users to navigate your website but it also sends a positive signal to google.
which will help you increase your google search rankings. So when you enable the pin it button for Pinterest then it helps users to save your content on their Pinterest accounts which in turn brings you more Pinterest traffic to your website.
Social share plugin
Social share plugin serves a similar purpose just like the pin it button on your wordpress website. use the social media share plugin which seems to offer basic functionality at no cost. it is free and can be downloaded from this link.
Google Analytics
Once your website is ready and you have posted content then as the content creator the most important thing for you is to be able to see how much traffic are you getting and at what time intervals. Using google analytics you can track your website traffic and also find out the sources of traffic. these are just a few features that you can get with google analytics. To set up google analytics for your website.
Simply use the above-mentioned plugin named headers and footers and insert the google analytics code in the header area of your website.
Important note: Please note that google is going to discontinue tracking data with google analytics in 2023 now you are required to set up gA4 analytics. This is similar to google analytics but a better and improved version of it.
It’s highly recommended to set up ga4 analytics for your websites.
Google webmaster setup
if you ask any SEO guru, they will tell you how important is to set up google webmaster tools, whether you have to submit links for indexing or tracking your ranked keywords that are bringing traffic to your website then you need google webmaster tools.
Google webmaster tool or google search console tells you which keywords from your website are ranked, how much impressions they are generating, and what are the keyword positions on google search.
WordPress automatic updates
Simply enable this option so your website remains up to date every time. If you are WordPress version is up to date then this restricts hackers to penetrate your website thus making it more secure.
To enable this option simply hover your mouse to the dashboard and select updates and then on the next page click and enable automatic updates. that’s it you are secure now. congratulations.
plugin automatic updates
To hack or penetrate any website hackers try to find any loopholes in your website, one of the most common ways anytime a website is hacked is through plugins. When to use many plugins on your website and those plugins are not updated regularly then they are easy to hack.
Therefore it is recommended, first to only use the must-have plugins. The less they are the better it is.
Secondly, make sure that you have selected all plugins to be updated automatically whenever their update is available.
To automatically update all of your plugins, simply go into plugins/installed plugins. Select all the plugins and from the drop-down select enable automatic updates. Now your plugins will be automatically updated every time there is an update available. Your website is more secure now.
Disable comments
Whether your website is new or old. Rest assured you are going to be bombarded with fake and spam comments. This is a black hat method to get backlinks from your website.
Moreover deleting and approving the comments is a huge task. although some people prefer to keep the comment feature on for their blogs. But digital markeeter would recommend if you are just starting out then disable this comment feature. using the turn-off comments WordPress plugin.
After installing the plugin. simply go to settings and select disable comments for the whole website.
Classic editor
Gutenberg is a relatively new content editor launched by WordPress. If you like to keep it simple then a classic editor is probably the best choice. It’s just better.
When Gutenberg was launched, it received a lot of hate. which can be verified by seeing installs of the WordPress classic editor plugin. WordPress classic editor has surpassed millions of installs.
Wp super cache
It’s pointless to say it’s a very useful plugin as that’s the main reason for writing this blog post. And it becomes repetitive to say something again and again.
Nevertheless, it’s a must-have plugin also. What the wp super cache plugin does is that it improves your website speed for your users. Basically how it does is that if a user visits a page on your website, the wp super cache saves that page in its cache, and when the same page is requested by other users it loads the same page from its cache rather than loading it all again. Hence improves your page speed.
Using the same process caches your most visited website pages and improves the speed.
Although, the plugin is full of many useful features and all of them cannot be mentioned here as this blog post is not only about wp super cache plugin but there is another feature worth mentioning.
Which is its delete cache feature. If you make any changes on your website and want to see the live changes, then many times websites do not reflect the changes right away.
But with the wp super cache plugin, you can review the website changes right away.
Another plugin worth mentioning as an alternative to wp super cache is the w3 total cache. This is really amazing plunging and offers more features than wp super cache.
But with it, you may experience different kinds of bugs which will not only affect the working of your website but you will also lose traffic and hence lose revenue.
Those bugs are
- one, the changes don’t reflect even after clearing the cache.
- Secondly, featured images for your blog posts might not debug or cause issues when shared on social media networks like Facebook.
And once you experience such issues, the worst thing is that you don’t know what is causing this on your website. so you might have to spend money and hire someone to see what is causing issue or at least waste a lot of your useful time in finding and resolving the issue.
So better stay clear of the w3 total cache and use the wp super cache plugin instead.
Hide my WordPress ghost
Although few people might disagree on this inclusion but believe me once you start seeing some progress and start generating some traffic and revenue. Then people are going to try their best to steal your efforts.
Some people with stealing your content and some people would just want to hurt you for example hackers.
Hackers will find any way available to break your website. We have been hacked many times and most of the time almost felt helpless. Finally, we found the solution and found this plugin. After testing the plugin for months at digital markeeter we are very satisfied with the results and can happily recommend this plugin.
Use this plugin to change your admin URL and set up different security rules. Using these security features you can avoid hack attacks like brute force.
hide my wordpress ghost does not only hide your admin URL but it also adds a captcha on your admin login screen thus making it a nightmare website for hackers to hack.
These were just a few features, install this plugin and play around with different features you would love this plugin.
I would highly recommend you buy a paid version if you can. As it is full of features that you would require once you scale.
But the free version does the job if you are just starting out.
It may also help to purchase highly reviewed plugins on appsumo and get yourself a lifetime deal so you don’t have to pay monthly for using the plugins and services. Hide my wordpress ghost was also launched on appsumo. We are happy we got a lifetime deal for the hide my wordpress ghost pro plugin for unlimited websites.
Want a free paid Hide my wordpress ghost plugin? Drop a comment below. we will send you paid plugin.
Mail chimp for wordpress
Better start sooner than later. You would have read this quote many times. Now is the time to really understand this.
Email marketing is one of the most underrated skills and is highly ignored too. How you should proceed with any business is that the moment you start your business you must try to build a community. if you build a community of people who trust you and know you then they are most likely to buy from you and trust your opinion on that topic.
It does not hurt to simply insert a Mailchimp form on your website and connect your Mailchimp account with your website. By doing this you will automatically start collecting the emails and start building the community and relationship.
301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager
At Digital Markeeter, in this blog post, our goal is to provide you with a list of plugins that cover all the issues that you are going to face in the coming days. So this thorough guide will help you to launch a complete wordpress website.
The next plugin that digital markeeter recommend is 301 redirects pro. Well, the pro plugin is paid version. But you can choose the free 301 redirects plugin. Which also does the job.
There is an issue in wordpress that you would face randomly in that when you change the permalink of a post then you will notice that your old URL will not automatically redirect to your new URL.
This will affect your search engine rankings. to resolve this issue we can use the 301 redirects plugin which will automatically redirect your old URL to your new URL.
You may also create Manual redirects. Among many other features, one other very useful feature that this plugin has is that it scans your website and will provide you with a report of all the broken links in your WordPress blog posts. Which you could update easily.
One signal push notifications
On a new website, you should be trying to capture every opportunity to gain more traffic and build your community. Now we could do that by providing all the social media links and adding your users as subscribers to your email list etc.
One other similar and slightly newer way to connect with your users is to send them push notifications. Users basically subscribe to your feeds via your website on their mobile phone browsers.
And when you send the notifications they will receive them on their mobile phones.
This feature could be easily enabled using one signal push notifications. One signal push notifications service is one of the most advanced push notifications services.
Pinterest setup
This topic requires a whole new blog post only on itself. If you are a new content creator and don’t know how to gain more traffic other than google, then interest is going to be your best bet. Pinterest and Facebook are the most viral platforms whose algorithms support all content creators.
Especially Pinterest. All you need to do is get your website verified on Pinterest and start pinning your new posts on Pinterest.
The more content you publish, the more visibility you will get on Pinterest and hence generate more traffic.
WPX wordpress hosting
Ok now, this is not related to a must-have plugin for a new WordPress website. But I think WordPress hosting is extremely relevant to the topic of our blog post.
Basically in this blog post, we want to help new WordPress website users to make the best decisions for their website. Whether it’s making your website even faster, and more secure, or choosing the best website hosting service. we want to thoroughly guide the users.
Why is good WordPress hosting required? Once you choose a WordPress hosting it generally stays with you for a long time. because in a few months you cannot really compare the performance of your WordPress hosting. You only find out when you put some load on your hosting.
After some load, you will be clearly able to see the limitations of your WordPress hosting. For example, your website might crash when you start receiving some traffic or it might not work properly when you use more storage space.
These are just a few important features to consider. What we recommend to our users is to use WordPress hosting which is widely considered one of the best hosting services for WordPress websites.
And according to our experience in past, we can easily recommend you two WordPress hosting providers.
- WPX Hosting
- Siteground
Both of these are really good hosting providers and you won’t really find many issues with these companies. But the first one “wpx hosting” is the best WordPress hosting provider in the market and digital markeeter says that by experience.
We haven’t just made this list just by reading a few articles on the internet, we have actually tried many WordPress hosting providers and found these the best.
Why is wpx hosting better than siteground?
The easier answer is wpx customer support is just out of this world. They are available 24/7. their chat widget loads right away when you log in to wpx.net and you can reach them in one click. While other hosting providers for example in this case siteground have made it really hard to contact their support.
You have to probably load 10 pages on Sitegorund and only then you will get their chat feature.
Secondly, where wpx takes lead from site ground is that wpx support actually helps you. if you have any issues then they will go out of their way to help you. And most of the time they resolve the issues.
But siteground support seems lazy and they would rather send you to support articles and would push you to try resolving your issues using those support links or simply hire a website developer.
So we highly recommend you use wpx.net hosting service.
Cloud flare
Cloudflare makes your website fast and secure. It provides you with a free CDN that makes your website faster and more secure.
To enable Cloudflare simply create your account on cloud flare, get your DNS from there and change the DNS on your website with those DNS.
Contact Form
This is one of the most basic plugins for WordPress. Using this plugin users can contact you through email for sponsorship, work or feedback purposes.
