There is a reason about 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. First, it is free but more importantly, it offers customizable templates, plugins and tools that can be customized to build websites suitable for any business.
If you’re looking to get the best out of a WordPress website, there are several considerations you must pay attention to in order to ensure that your website comes out clean, responsive and optimized to help it rank higher on Google searches and make sure that users can easily read through your content without having to scroll down page after page.
5 main considerations to make the best out of your WordPress website design are:
- Get a responsive theme or plugin
- Keep it clean and clutter free
- Making sure it is SEO optimized
- Use High quality and Secure hosting
- Get rid of unnecessary plugins
In this article, we will explore each of these points to guide you on how you can use them to create a website that is not only visually appealing but loads fast and drives engagement to help you grow your business.
1. Get a Responsive Theme or Plugin:
The theme you choose for your WordPress website is one of the most important decisions you’ll make for your website. You have to balance functionality, design, and performance all in one.
If there’s anything that every website owner wants it’s for their site to be fast, responsive, and optimized for search engines. We’ve got some great tips on how to do this with a responsive theme or plugin!
When it comes to choosing a theme, you want to find one that is simple, lightweight, and easy to use. There are many great themes available on WordPress.org (the official repository of free themes) as well as from third-party sites like ThemeForest and Creative Market. If you aren’t sure which one will fit your needs best, ask your web developer for recommendations based on the purpose of your site and whether it will be responsive (optimized for mobile devices).
What is a responsive theme?
A responsive theme (sometimes called mobile first) works by resizing itself based on the device size so it looks good no matter what type of device someone uses to view your website. It’s built using CSS media queries so that when someone browses in portrait mode vs landscape mode (on tablets), everything changes accordingly without having to reload any pages—or even page elements like navigation menus!
The best way to ensure that you have a fast website is by using a lightweight theme that loads quickly in any browser or device type. Some factors that contribute to slow load times are heavy images, large file sizes and bulky scripts and stylesheets so check out how much weight each option has before making a decision!
2. Keep it Clean and Clutter-Free:
Keeping the website clean and clutter free is a must, especially when it comes to mobile devices. Mobile users are more likely to bounce off websites that are cluttered with too much content and other distracting elements. Make sure your site is simple and clean so that it’s easy for customers to navigate through the content they’re looking for.
For example, if you’re selling shoes online and want people to see all of your products (in this case, shoes), don’t force them into scrolling down past unrelated categories or other unrelated products just so they can reach another page with more shoes! Instead, just make sure everything related to your product is organized in one place so that visitors can easily find what they need without having their experience ruined by extra fluff or unnecessary popups/ads.
Also pay attention to using clean and readable fonts. In the first instance, you want to be sure that the fonts you use are readable on all devices.
Avoid fonts with lettering that is hard to make out, like script or cursive types. This can make your site look unprofessional and difficult to read. For body text, choose a sans-serif font such as Helvetica or Arial; these typefaces have large x-heights and tend to be easy on the eye when reading for long periods of time (such as on a website). For headings, pick a serif font with smaller characters; this will help them stand out against the larger blocks of text in your content without being too distracting.
3. Making Sure it is SEO optimized:
Running basic web page tests for speed, performance and SEO optimization is a must.
Speed and performance, along with SEO optimization, are all key elements of a great website. In order to make sure that your site is performing well, you should use tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom to run basic web page tests. Another useful tool for testing speed and performance is Google PageSpeed Insights, which will tell you how fast your site loads on desktop and mobile devices. This can help provide insight into where there may be issues within your theme’s code base.
Another important aspect of a WordPress website design is that it needs to have good SEO optimization so that it can rank higher in search engines like Google or Bing—which means more traffic for your business! To check whether this has been done correctly on your site, we recommend using SEOQuake from Yoast SEO plugin by WordPress itself (it’s free!). This allows for easy testing against the guidelines set forth by Google so that you can see what changes need making before launching into full-scale production mode.
4. High Quality and Secure Hosting:
One of the most important factors for your website is ensuring to select a high quality and secure hosting solution.
You want to make sure that you’re using a host that offers reliable uptime and is capable of handling the traffic you get from your site. The last thing you want is for your site to go down when it receives too many visitors or if it gets hacked by a malicious user who finds a vulnerability in your code or theme.
The best hosting services have several features that make them ideal for WordPress websites. First, they should be secure. This means that they have a firewall that keeps hackers out of your site and that they keep their servers up-to-date with the latest security patches. They should also have security software installed on their servers, such as antivirus software and intrusion detection systems.
The hosting service should provide a lot of bandwidth so that your visitors can load pages quickly when visiting your site. If you have lots of images on your site or if you have lots of videos embedded in your posts, then you will need to get a hosting plan with more bandwidth than usual because these types of files tend to take longer to load than basic text files do.
Another important thing to consider when choosing a host is whether or not it offers 24/7 support via phone or email because sometimes something happens with our sites at odd hours of the day (or night) and we need help right away!
5. Get rid of Unnecessary Plugins:
The best way to keep your WordPress website running smoothly and securely is by getting rid of unnecessary plugins. You might think that having more plugins on your site will make it more functional, but this isn’t always the case.
Plugins can cause major performance issues for your site because they often load up in the background and consume server resources without you knowing. They can also slow down other plugins or conflict with them altogether, which could lead to massive headaches if you have multiple sites running on one account (like an e-commerce site). The same goes with widgets—if there are too many widgets on a page, it could slow down your loading time.
Take care of some key aspects to ensure your website is highly responsive, loads fast and is optimized for speed and SEO.
Conclusion
We hope we’ve provided you with some helpful tips to get the most out of your website design. If you need help with implementing any of these tips for a new website project or for an existing one, feel free to reach out to us, we’d be glad to help!
