It’s no secret that WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) right now. As of 2021, WordPress powers nearly 75 million websites on the Internet, which is around 34% of the entire web. There are plenty of reasons why developers choose WordPress to build websites.
The CMS offers thousands of built-in themes, plugins, and add-ons that make the entire development process a hassle-free task. Not to mention, WordPress has a user-friendly interface, which means even non-developers can use it to set up their website with minimum effort.
But, despite all these cool features, even WordPress is vulnerable to unexpected errors and failures. Since the platform is open-source, the websites are always exposed to potential hackers. Anyone can release a theme or plugin and run their custom scripts to steal data from your website.
That’s the reason why it’s always a good strategy to hire a professional WordPress website design company. Such agencies have experienced WordPress developers who have years of experience in the field. They’ll implement the best security encryption and designing practices to ensure that your website can engage the users while protecting their personal information at the same time.
And, in case if you’re planning to execute DIY development, it would be better to utilize the right practices to build an engaging website. In this guide, we are going to share some of the most effective design & development tactics that’ll help you build a feature-rich website for your customers.
Install Up-to-Date Themes, Plugins, and Add-Ons
Every WordPress website incorporates different plugins, add-ons, and a general theme to enhance usability. However, if you use outdated themes or plugins, they’ll most likely hinder your website’s performance.
Outdated themes usually contain malware that will not only put your website’s security at risk but also damage the overall functionality. This will damage customer engagement and you’ll struggle to retain the website visitors. So, if you already have a WordPress website, make sure to update its theme, plugins, and all the add-ons to the latest version.
And, in case you’re yet to design the website, try to choose a theme with positive reviews and ensure that it receives regular updates. These initial efforts will help you avoid any major consequences in the future.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
Mobile phones have become an essential tool of one’s everyday life. More and more users have started to rely on mobile to access different websites. This is a major reason why a large portion of Internet traffic comes from mobile itself. If you want to reach your potential buyers in 2021, it’ll be imperative to make your website mobile-friendly.
When it comes to WordPress, designing a mobile-friendly website is easier than you think. All you need to do is choose a responsive theme from the WordPress Theme Store. For people who don’t know, responsive themes allow a website to automatically adjust the layout as per the user’s screen size. This will ensure that your website delivers a consistent user experience across all devices.
Implement SSL Certification
This is probably the most crucial WordPress development tactic that’ll help you secure your website from hackers. Even if you’re going to design a single-page website, it would be a wise decision to add an SSL certificate. Moreover, users have become pretty smart these days and they are always going to choose secure websites over random domains on the Internet.
Adding an SSL certificate is a cakewalk, especially if you’re working with a team of professional web developers in Miami. You can also choose to add the SSL certification while choosing a hosting plan. The majority of hosting providers, including Bluehost and Hostgator, offer free SSL certificates with even the basic hosting plans.
Utilize Test Environment
Test environments are designed to test a website under different real-life scenarios to check how it’ll perform in the real world. However, these test environments can be a great tool to test new changes to your website without damaging the performance at all.
With a test environment, you can test different updates before making them live. This will help you evaluate all the potential bugs beforehand and avoid downtime in the future.
Try to Use Child Themes As Much As Possible
If you’re an experienced developer, you’ll most likely make changes to the core theme and plugins to offer a personalized experience to visitors. While this is a great practice to enhance a website’s usability, it’s also one of the biggest mistakes you can make while managing a WordPress website. Why? Because any changes that you make to a theme will be removed automatically as soon as you update it.
To avoid such scenarios, it’s always advised to create child themes for a core theme. This will help you preserve all the changes that you make, even if you decide to update themes to the latest version.
Use Caching to Optimize Website Speed
Website’s loading speed is one of the most critical factors Google uses to rank different websites in its search results. Basically, if your website takes too long to load, you won’t be able to get ahead of your competitors and gain the expected online exposure.
You can use WordPress caching to ensure that your website loads quickly and delivers a remarkable performance. If you’re not familiar with the concept, WordPress caching is the practice to reuse database requests to speed up the entire website. With some of the most popular hosting providers, you’ll get a default feature to automatically enable WordPress caching.
So, check your hosting plan and see if it supports WordPress caching or not. In case it doesn’t, you can outsource the task to a professional WordPress website design company.
Use Limited Plugins
As tempting as the idea of installing different plugins sounds, keep in mind that adding more plugins will only make your website bulkier. Even though the WordPress store is filled with different plugins, you don’t need them all.
Simply analyze your website requirements and then choose the most appropriate plugins accordingly. This will help you bridge the gap between better functionality and fast loading speed and you’ll be able to deliver a consistent browsing experience to the customers.
Conclusion
So, these are some of the most helpful WordPress design & development tactics that’ll help you design fully functional websites in 2021. Implement these tips and your website will perform remarkably in terms of user engagement. However, if you’re new to the entire WordPress community, consult professional WordPress developers before making any changes to the website.
About Author Bio
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If you have any question, please email me at durgtech@gmail.com