Are you preparing to build a website for your business but don’t know how to approach the task without making mistakes that could result in a slow, heavy, uneditable, or poorly constructed site?
This post aims to guide you through the major aspects of building a robust and efficient WordPress website—ensuring a good balance between performance, usability, and scalability.
Since we’re on the topic of CMS, in this article, we’ll focus exclusively on WordPress, as we believe it’s the best solution on the market for building virtually any website or online store. Of course, this system has certain limitations, and everyone needs to be aware of them. In brief (as there’s another post coming on this topic), we’ve managed to create WooCommerce stores with more than 20,000 products in their inventory that still perform incredibly fast. However, achieving such performance requires careful planning and implementation.
Website Planning and Purpose Definition
Even a seemingly simple website can be poorly executed, which could result in ongoing issues, a loss of trust among partners, or, worst of all, your customers no longer taking you seriously.
The first step to building a great website is planning. Defining the purpose of your website is a critical foundation, guiding everything from design to development. Understanding what you want your site to achieve helps identify necessary features, structure, and content. Is it an informational business site, an eCommerce store, or perhaps a lead generation platform? Each purpose will dictate different needs, including hosting requirements, plugins, and integrations.
When defining the purpose of your site, consider creating user personas to represent your ideal audience. User personas help you understand your visitors’ needs and behaviors, allowing you to make decisions that optimize user experience. Ask yourself: Who are the target users? What are their goals? What problems do they need to solve? This early exercise will help shape your site’s structure and content.
Defining the Budget
If you’re looking for the cheapest contractor and that’s your main criterion, you can stop reading this article now. However, if you’re serious about this, defining your budget will help you quickly make important decisions about your website and allow you to align your budget with your expectations. Often, seemingly “simple” functionalities can be very expensive. A company that cares about its potential clients will try to match your budget to your possibilities and expectations.
With lower budgets, ready-made solutions are often used, which today are of really great quality—you just need to know which ones to choose, and it’s even better if you have some experience in using or extending them.
Some might immediately say that such ready-made solutions are amateurish and not worth it, but we disagree. Yes, there are plenty of plugins or templates on the market that are so bad it’s hard to know what to say, but since we’ve been doing this for over 14 years, we know which ones are well-written, and those are the ones we recommend to our clients.
Below is a list of a few that we use so you can judge for yourself:
- Advanced Custom Fields Pro: One of the best tools for extending WordPress, ACF allows you to add custom fields to pages, posts, or custom post types, making it easier to create rich content structures.
- The Events Calendar: A high-quality plugin for managing events. It integrates well with other WordPress plugins and offers solid features to maintain an event schedule.
- Bricks Builder: In our opinion, the only true and incredibly fast builder for WordPress, Bricks Builder offers clean HTML output and reduced overhead, unlike most bulky page builders on the market.
Defining Functionality
This is one of the most important steps to avoid budget inflation and misunderstandings down the line. You need to establish a list of necessary features for your website. Remember, every feature has a cost—both in terms of development and site performance. Understanding what is needed at launch versus what can be postponed to a later phase helps maintain a lean and effective launch process.
When defining features, always categorize them into Must-Have, Nice-to-Have, and Future Features. This prioritization will help keep the project on track and within budget, and it will allow your website to grow over time.
- Informational Websites: If your primary goal is an informational website to present products or services, you only need basic functionality, such as a contact form, blog post capabilities, image galleries, and maybe a content slider. This setup is simple but should be focused on maintaining quality in user experience and design.
- Online Stores: If you plan to create a store, consider functionalities such as:
- Product Configurators: These are useful for customizable products (e.g., bicycles with various drivetrain options).
- Payment Gateways: Depending on your audience, you may need to include a number of payment options like Stripe, PayPal, or even cryptocurrency options.
- User Pricing Segments: Different pricing for user groups can add another layer of complexity, useful for offering bulk discounts or special rates.
- Recurring Payments: For subscription-based products, integrating recurring payments effectively is critical.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: This feature sends reminders to users who have abandoned their carts, helping you recover lost sales.
- Inventory Management Integration: Ensuring that your inventory management system syncs properly with WooCommerce is essential, especially if you have an extensive product list.
When planning functionality, it’s essential to document everything meticulously. This helps developers provide an accurate budget estimate and reduces scope creep. Consider using a tool like Trello, Asana, or Jira to manage features and track development progress.
Setting Up a Wireframe
Wireframes are low-fidelity blueprints for your site—they map out the structure without getting bogged down by design details. This step provides a bird’s-eye view of your website, making it easier to identify potential pitfalls early. Wireframes allow stakeholders to comment on and understand the proposed layout, which ultimately saves time during the later stages of development.
For technical implementation, we use tools like Figma and Adobe XD to prepare wireframes and even develop prototype interactive layouts. This helps clients visualize user flows, particularly for complex websites such as online stores, portals, or membership sites.
During the wireframe stage, focus on User Experience (UX) and Information Architecture. UX wireframes should guide the user’s journey across your site, making navigation logical and intuitive. Sitemap planning is also part of this process; it defines the site’s structure and ensures that users can find what they need without confusion.
Selecting a Development Approach
There are multiple ways to develop a WordPress site, each fitting different needs, budgets, and expectations.
- Custom WordPress and WooCommerce Theme Development – This option is ideal for clients who want complete control over the design and functionality. A custom theme is tailor-made for your brand and typically optimized for performance. During custom theme development, it’s important to emphasize:
- Clean Coding Standards: Adhering to WordPress coding standards not only ensures compatibility with other plugins but also makes the code maintainable for other developers.
- Scalability: Thinking ahead during development makes scaling the theme easier if your site gains more visitors or product listings.
- Minimizing Dependencies: Too many plugins or external dependencies can introduce risks such as slower loading times or vulnerabilities.
- Use of Modern Build Tools: Tools like Webpack, Gulp, and Sass make theme development more efficient. We prefer Tailwind CSS in many cases due to its utility-first approach, leading to clean and performant code.
- Responsive Design and Cross-Browser Compatibility: Ensure that the website looks good and functions well on all devices and browsers by using frameworks like Codyframe and applying thorough testing.
- WordPress and WooCommerce Development Using Bricks.io Builder – If your budget is smaller or if the website doesn’t require a highly customized solution, Bricks.io provides an excellent alternative. Unlike other page builders, Bricks Builder is very lightweight and outputs clean, optimized HTML. Additionally, the system:
- Uses Vanilla JavaScript instead of relying on jQuery, making it significantly faster.
- Automatically generates page-specific CSS to minimize unnecessary overhead.
- Pre-built Elements: Leverage pre-built elements and templates to reduce design and build time, while maintaining quality. This ensures that users can easily make modifications without delving into the code.
Choosing the Right Hosting Solution
The server plays a key role in how well your website performs. Kinsta has consistently proven to be one of the best hosting solutions for WordPress websites due to its balance of speed, reliability, and developer tools.
To provide a more comprehensive view of technical hosting requirements, let’s break down what a good server needs:
- PHP Version Management: Always use the latest supported version of PHP for speed and security. Kinsta supports PHP version switching in just a few clicks.
- NGINX vs. Apache: NGINX is generally faster and more optimized for serving static content, making it preferable for performance-driven websites.
- Caching Strategies: Proper caching reduces server load. Kinsta provides advanced caching mechanisms, but other plugins like WP Rocket can be used to supplement caching.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): For global audiences, serving static content via a CDN like Cloudflare reduces latency and improves the user experience.
- Server-Side Compression: Tools like Brotli or Gzip can compress server responses, making load times shorter by reducing the overall size of the served files.
Staging Environment
One highly overlooked aspect is the use of a staging environment. This allows you to make changes to your website without affecting the live site. It’s incredibly useful for testing updates, plugins, or new features. Kinsta, for instance, provides one-click staging, making it easy to test changes before going live.
A staging environment should be used for:
- Testing Updates: Whether it’s WordPress core, theme, or plugin updates, testing in a staging environment prevents breaking your live website.
- Testing New Features: Before implementing new features, test them for any potential bugs.
- Client Review: Staging sites are excellent for allowing clients to review and approve changes before they go live.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Considerations
Whether you’re building a new website or updating an old one, SEO is crucial for ensuring your website is visible to your audience. Here are some advanced aspects of SEO to consider during development:
- Schema Markup: Adding schema helps search engines understand your content more effectively. You can use plugins like RankMath or Yoast SEO to add schema data directly to your pages.
- Server Response Codes and Redirects: When updating old sites, it’s crucial to ensure that URL structure remains intact. If it doesn’t, implement 301 redirects to avoid losing SEO rankings.
- Optimizing Core Web Vitals: Google now uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Optimize your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) to provide a good user experience. Plugins like Perfmatters can be used to disable unused scripts and improve performance.
- Internal Linking Structure: Use descriptive anchor texts to create internal links to important pages. This helps improve SEO by enabling Google to better understand the relationships between pages.
- Image Optimization: Optimize images by using formats like WebP for faster loading, and always add descriptive alt text for accessibility and SEO benefits.
Going Live: Deployment Strategy
When launching a website, a proper deployment strategy should be in place. This ensures that any unexpected issues can be resolved quickly without negatively impacting user experience.
- DNS Propagation: Once the website is ready to go live, update the DNS records. It’s wise to set the TTL (Time to Live) values to a lower rate (e.g., 5 minutes) to facilitate faster propagation.
- SSL Implementation: Install an SSL certificate (most hosting providers now include this for free). SSL not only helps secure data but also contributes to SEO.
- Monitoring and Post-Launch Testing: After the website goes live, it’s essential to have monitoring in place. Use services like UptimeRobot or Pingdom to get alerts if your site goes down. Google Analytics and Search Console help monitor traffic, while Hotjar can help you understand user behavior.
Consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to manage the distribution of your content globally. This helps reduce latency and improves load times by serving data from servers close to your users.
Handling Legacy Websites: Migration and SEO Preservation
If you’re relaunching a legacy website, you need a solid migration plan to preserve SEO rankings:
- URL Structure: Retain the original URL structure as much as possible. For URLs that need to be changed, implement 301 redirects so that the link juice is preserved.
- Backlinks Preservation: Use tools like Ahrefs to understand which pages have high-value backlinks. Make sure those URLs do not break during the migration process.
- Audit After Deployment: Conduct an SEO audit post-launch to ensure there are no broken links, missing meta tags, or indexing issues.
- Testing Site Performance: Use tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights to test the site’s performance and make sure everything is working as expected after migration.
- Maintaining XML Sitemaps: Update your XML sitemap and submit it to search engines to ensure that they can crawl and index all pages correctly. This is particularly important when the site architecture changes.
Conclusion
Creating a website has never been easier, but doing it right requires planning, experience, and technical understanding. A well-built website provides not only a good user experience but also serves as a scalable platform for growth. With the right hosting, development practices, and budget allocation, you can build a website that will serve your business for years to come.
The process may seem daunting, but with a clear strategy and experienced team, it becomes manageable and ultimately rewarding. Remember, the key is not to cut corners but to focus on the essentials that align with your business goals, ensuring every technical decision made contributes to a performant, user-friendly, and scalable website.
Investing in proper planning, development, and hosting is investing in the foundation of your online presence. This effort not only helps establish credibility but also sets your business on a growth trajectory that leverages the full potential of the digital landscape.