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Our tips to build a beautiful, functional and fast business website in WordPress

Bluehost

The first step to take when building a website is to decide which host to use. Hosting providers are responsible to make your website available in the World Wide Web, and this is why it is important to choose a good, reliable hosting provider. The key features to check when choosing a hosting provider are speed, security, scalability, support, space, server location and whether it will let you enable SSL. Of the several WordPress hosting providers, we recommend Bluehost.

Bluehost is not expensive (it even let’s you have a free domain name for the first year!), its user panel is easy to use, allowing you to quickly launch your site using WordPress, the 24/7 support is great and they have a bunch of available guides.

Elementor

After you have chosen a host, it’s time to start building and designing your website! You could simply use the WordPress editor to build your website, but using a website builder plugin will give you more freedom to design.

Elementor is the leading website builder for WordPress, and with it you can quickly create professional looking websites and have control over every component without ever having to write a single line of code. Elementor makes use of a drag-and-drop editor so you can create your website while immediately knowing how it will look like. The same goes when creating a header, footer, a blog paste and corresponding blog posts – everything is very intuitive and easily available! You can also design your entire theme and templates using Elementor.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is another user-friendly drag-and-drop WordPress website builder plugin, with which you can build your website without the need of coding, as well as design your header, footer, and build your themes and templates. While Elementor offers more features and advanced design options as it has professional WordPress designers in mind, Beaver Builder is more developer-friendly and its drag-and-drop page builder offers clean code, a stable platform, and well-documented PHP, CSS, and JS options that can be used/customized by developers. Beaver Builder also has a Free and a Pro version and you can install the plugin from your WordPress dashboard by following the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “Beaver Builder”.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce solution to integrate in your WordPress website. If you want to sell products/services using your website, then WooCommerce can help!. WooCommerce is an extremely complete solution for your business, as it allows you to easily create your store front and product pages (is has beautiful customizable templates available!) and it provides a seamless shopping cart experience, so you can sell your physical products or services, like subscriptions, bookings or memberships.

You can also choose the payment method, be credit card, mobile wallets, bank transfers etc.The shipping options are also customizable and it can help you with the sales tax.

Install the WooCommerce plugin from your WordPress dashboard by following the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “WooCommerce”.

Jet Pack

When building a website, it is important to pay attention to security and performance, and Jetpack allows you to make your WordPress site safer and faster. Jetpack provides real-time backups that can be easily restored, offering unlimited storage for your backups. It also includes malware scans and spam protection, facilitates migration to new hosts and allows auto update for individual plugins, to facilitate your website maintenance and management. Jetpack also includes tools to auto-optimize the images in your website, making it faster.

Jetpack can be installed from your WordPress dashboard by following the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “Jetpack”.

UpdraftPlus

Updraft Plus is another backup and restoration plugin, where you can backup your files and database into the cloud and easily restore them. The free version let’s you save your backup files in Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email, while the paid version also allows you to save the files in Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV. Updraft plus let’s you set up automatic backup schedules! Like the other plugins, you can install UpdraftPlus from your WordPress dashboard by following the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “UpdraftPlus“.

Short Pixel

An essential tool to add to your website is an image optimizer. By reducing and optimizing the size of the images in your website, this will be faster, providing a better experience to the users and ultimately will increase your website’s SEO ranking and rank higher in the search engines. One of the best image optimizer plugins is ShortPixel. It’s simple to use and it compresses past images and PDF documents with a single click and images that are added are automatically resized/rescaled and optimized. To install it, go to your WordPress dashboard, and follow the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “Shortpixel.”

MemberPress

Not all websites will be selling tangible goods or services, which often has a straightforward system where you can find a homepage and a store front. There are websites that are set up to run on memberships, subscriptions and courses. It can get overwhelming to manage these website and often, you would get a plugin for everything it does. Good news! There’s actually a plug-in that keeps everything seamlessly working!

With MemberPress you can monetize your WordPress site, build a perfect membership site, control who sees your content, sell online courses and digital downloads, and accept credit cards and digital wallets securely… all with easy setup.

To install, simply go to your WordPress dashboard, and follow the menu Plugins -> Add New and search for “MemberPress”.