20 Actionable Steps for New WordPress Blogs and Websites

Congratulations on your new WordPress blog or website. WordPress is one of the best ways to design a blog or site yourself.

Moreover, WordPress blogs are good for business. They are a great income source bringing numerous opportunities and prospects for your business.

But you cannot stop at just installing WordPress. To ensure that your WordPress blogs or sites work at its full potential, there are many more actionable steps that you need to follow.

In this blog post, we will share the top twenty things that, as a new WordPress site owner you must do.

These things will make your WordPress blogs and websites work to its full potential and your business will flourish.

20 Easy Actionable Steps for WordPress Blogs and Websites

If you find these steps overwhelming, start from the beginning and before you know it, you will reach the end of the list.

In no particular order, here is the list of top 20 tools, features, and steps for new WordPress blogs and websites.

1. Decide between a homepage or a blog page

The structure of your website is the first and most crucial decision that you have to take.

It implies what the viewers will first see what when they type your WordPress site’s domain name- the home page or a blog page.

It is simple to make both. But deciding between them can be tricky. So, let’s explore the pro points of both the pages and then it will become easy for you to make the structure.

It has general information related to your website including an opt-in form. It is a great way to welcome new clients.

A blog doesn’t have to be a part of your home page. It is because you will share the link of your blogs on your social media, and people can directly land on it using that link.

Also, consumers can easily look for them on the menu.

Moreover, if the blog is the main focus of your business, you can make it shine too. Both ways work, and you can interchange them later.

So, take your time and go with your needs.

2. Make another WordPress email address

If you use your personal email address while installing WordPress, you should change it. It won’t cause any errors, but it will make your website’s email id and your users profile the same.

It is better to change it, and this is how you can do it:

Select settings and then general, now there you would see an option for the email address. You can change it from there.

3. Use email list for building connections with consumers

Email marketing is the best tool for building a continuous and genuine connection with your readers.

It is a great tool because you get into the emails of your consumers only with their permission.

So, when you send them some mail with important information, you will get their attention.

That is why you should use them to let new readers know about your new blog or website.

Here are some tips about what to include in your emails:

•       The content of the email should be crisp and to the point. Don’t include irrelevant information.
•       Decide how often you will send the promotional email- weekly, biweekly, or monthly. According to that, curate your content and tools.
•       Since most people use mobile phones to open emails optimize them for mobiles.
•       Use readable typeface and font.

4. Complete or update your user profile

Once you set up plugins and other features in your new WordPress site, you should also update your profile.

There are many things that will require updates like a name that appears below every blog.

By default, WordPress uses your username in your blog, but you change it to your name or anything that you want.

You can also add a short bio describing yourself so that the user knows exactly who you are.

To make changes to your profile, go to users>profile.

5. Give audience reasons for sharing their email address

Consumers all around the globe have enough emails delivered to them throughout the day. And until your blog or site is pretty famous, they won’t subscribe to you.

What can you do then?

Well, this situation calls for creativeness. You have to come up with compelling options that would convince readers to subscribe to you.

These reasons can be:

•       Creating an eBook or slide show that solves issues that your target audience are having if they subscribe to you.
•       Share a tutorial with them and so on.

6. Include a form for contacting you

These days every website has a contact form for allowing users to quickly fill a form in case they have any query. It is a simple and more sophisticated way through which a consumer can contact you.

WordPress doesn’t have a default contact form, but you can include it in via a plugin. WPForms is the best plugin, which you can use to add a form to your WordPress website.

It is simple and lets you create beautiful and easy to use forms. It has two versions- free one that you install from WordPress.org and a paid one.

7. Keep tracking your progress

Your blog needs the traffic to generate revenue and to see whether it is generating enough traffic, you need to continuously track its progress.

For that, there is a tool Google analytics that you can add to your WordPress site.

It will analyze all traffic coming to your site and will let you know how much progress you have made. It even shows traffic of your social media platforms and bounce rate and so on.

It is crucial to track your progress otherwise you won’t be able to improve your strategy for bringing more organic traffic, and getting the first ranking on Google search.

Simple install the Google analytics plugin and then at the hood of your blog, it will be clear which is getting the most traffic and from where.

This information will certainly help you to create more such content that is popular amongst the consumers.

8. Don’t forget SEO

SEO is important for your blog. It is the only thing that will help you bring more organic traffic to your website. When performing SEO for your website, don’t forget your social media platforms.

They bring a lot of organic traffic, and thus maintaining them is crucial.

Most brands create a social media account only to forget them later. It is one of the biggest mistakes, as it a golden platform to connect with a global audience.

If you find maintaining it a huge task, take help from Canva. It will effectively manage your website or blog.

It will look after your content and other things and will suggest minor changes that will help you bring more organic traffic to your website.

9. Don’t forget about caching

Caching is crucial for improving the speed of the website.

A study shows that if a website loads after a delay of even a second, the site loses conversion up to 7 percent, and a reduction in customer satisfaction up to 65 percent.

Thus you require a website that loads quickly, and caching can help you with that. It serves cached copies of the web pages to the consumers rather than generating them instantly.

It in turns reduces the server load and your website loads quickly.

There are tons of plugins available for WordPress that can help with this, choose the one that suits your needs completely.

10. A brand experience is a must

Branding is crucial for every business, and the same goes for your new WordPress site. Branding is the ultimate tool that will give recognition to your website amongst the audience.

To brand your blog, use a premium theme and customize it, and then use the same colors and font consistently in all the pages.

Use a logo that represents your business and brand your site all the way from top to bottom.

The consistency of branding is crucial so that consumers can pick out your brand from amongst the various brands available in the market.

11. Have backups

Data loss is a big concern for every company which causes damages worth billions. To ensure that in future due to some miss-happenings, your data doesn’t get lost, backup your WordPress blogs and websites.

Most companies that host WordPress blogs provide backup, but they are limited, and there is no guarantee that it will ever happen.

Thus, it is crucial that you install one of the many available plugins that can provide you with an unlimited backup option.

12. Install the Jetpack plugin

Installing so many plugins for different things is a hassle and that is why WordPress has come up with a super plugin that takes care of so many things known as the Jetpack Plugin. It does the following:

•       Site’s traffic review
•       Let’s user subscribe to comments
•       Post sharing on social media
•       Checks the posts for spelling and grammatical errors
•       Embed videos using a shortened code.

Also, this plugin is free to use.

13. Express gratitude to first-time feedback givers

You want to encourage people to keep commenting and providing feedback to your page.

It is because getting no comment on a blog is disheartening, and if you encourage people, they would know that you place certain value to their comments.

Thus, it is necessary that you reply and express your gratitude to people who comment. Especially to people who are commenting for the first time.

14. Activate Akismet to deal with Spammers

For blog writers, it is extremely important to activate Akismet in the dashboard of WordPress.

It is a great plugin that is crucial for filtering out spam comments from your comments section.

15. Posts should be planned carefully

Before you publish anything on your WordPress blogs or websites, take some time, and muse over your long-term goal.

Once you are aware of your broad vision, plan your content according to it, and then publish your blog articles. For that you can install the plugin- editorial calendar, it will help you schedule posts in a consistent manner.

16. Secure your website

WordPress is a secure platform for creating and hosting WordPress blogs and websites. Still, it doesn’t hurt to add extra protection to your website.

To enhance the security of your WordPress blog, keep changing the password and use strong ones too.

Secure the admin area and take the help of numerous security plugins offered by WordPress to add more layers of security.

 17. Get rid of themes that you are not using

When you are deciding upon the theme of your site, you will install tons of themes before your heart set on one.

Instead of keeping those unused themes installed, delete them so that you don’t have to worry about keeping them updated too.

But as a precaution, keep the default or any one theme installed. It will help in case you need to switch to it during error testing or so on.

18. Ensure you are visible to Google for indexing

If your website is not visible to Google, it won’t index your pages and you won’t get rankings. Usually, WordPress does this on its own, but double-check it to be on the safer side.

•       To do that go to wp-admin, and then to settings/readings.
•       Then uncheck the ‘discourage search engines from indexing this site” via the tab of ‘Search Engine Visibility.’

19. Get a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content delivery network, CDN is a service that stores the content from your WordPress blogs and websites on a global network.

Then when a user wants to read your content, it checks their location and severs the content from the location that is near to them. It makes them view your site quickly.

Thus, it is advisable to hook your WordPress site to a CDN.

20. Install Sitemap.xml

It organizes all the URLs in your WordPress blogs at one place helping Google understand the structure of your website well.

WordPress generates the sitemap on its own, but you can use plugins for the same too.

Make sure you make these changes to your WordPress site to get a powerful blog or website. Don’t worry, adding these features is pretty easy.