Although building an efficient website is not the easiest thing to do, that's pretty different with WordPress.
As the most widely used CMS, it's beginner-friendly, easy to customize, and offers tons of features and functionality.
With as much flexibility that it comes with you'll be able to create and customize your website all by yourself, without any design skills and need to touch a single line of code. That's why it's the first choice of website owners and bloggers, both newbies and old hats alike.
WordPress is a great choice for business websites as well, as it allows you to have your site up and running after you undergo several key steps. Plus, you can equip it with the right functionality that best fits your business type, size and customers.
See Also: Move Your Free WordPress Site To a Self-Hosted Website in 5 Easy Steps!
With this short "how to" I would like to walk you through some essential steps that you'll have to take to have your business site up and running, and suggest 10 WordPress plugins that will add the right functionality to it.
Please note that some of the links provided in this article may be affiliate links and we will earn commission if you buy their products through our links.
Let's get started.
Step #1. Install WordPress
Installing WordPress will not take your more than 5 minutes. For this, you'll have to head over to wordpress.org , and download the latest version of WordPress. There is a detailed installation guide available that will help you complete the installation and setup your new website.
If you need a more detailed step by step guide to start from scratch, visit How to Start a Blog.
Step #2. Find a Domain Name and a Hosting Server
Before we even start to search for a domain name, let's first figure out what domain name and hosting are.
The domain is, basically, the name of your website or its URL, which you can get from a domain name registrar companies.
Try to choose a name which best relates to your business and its purpose, and is easy to remember as well. There are a few popular domain registrar companies that offer fast, simple and affordable domain registration.
The hosting is the server or the space where your website files reside. Without it your visitors won't be able to see or view your website content.
There are also a plenty of hosting companies out there, which actually provide domain registration as well. It's recommended to get the domain name and hosting server from the same company.
One such company is BlueHost that offers both domain name registration as well as hosting. Also you can directly search for the domain name below:
Step #3. Choose a Website Template
When it comes to choosing a website template it's quite easy to get overwhelmed with the seemingly endless number of the options that are available.
The theme selection process is, however, simplified as soon as you identify your website purpose and its niche audience.
Also, don't forget to look at some of the trends regarding web design and UX.
A good and modern business theme is supposed to be:
- Responsive
- SEO-friendly
- Easy to navigate
- Highly customizable
- Social media integrated
A good example of such a theme is WordPress Business Elite, one page WordPress theme , targeting business or corporate websites.
It features a full width slider and a contact form on the homepage, and comes with multiple page templates and layout options, which you can use to create blog, contact, portfolio, testimonial and about us pages. The theme has a fixed menu which makes it easy to navigate around your website.
It's fast, responsive, highly customizable and is sure to best showcase your business identity and credentials.
Step #4. Get the Right Set of Plugins
Plugins are what define the functionality and usability of your website. With the right set of plugins you'll bring the required features and functionality to your website, which will make it easy to manage and also help you better serve your customers.
See Also: 15 Essential WordPress Plugins
Below you can find a short list of WordPress plugins that are a good fit for business websites.
Statistics are valuable for all types of websites, be it a small personal blog or a large news site.
For business websites statistics are the key for understanding your customers and improving its performance. The good news is that you can now access all of your website statistics reports right from the WordPress dashboard with Google Analytics WD plugin.
It's a quick and easy way to view the reports on real time visitors, your audience, site performance and speed, AdSense and AdWords accounts, and also allows you to track the sales statistics of your eCommerce website.
Apart from the mentioned report types, it lets you set custom reports for any metric and dimension and access them anytime. The plugin comes with custom dimension tracking option and an advanced goal management functionality to let you track targeted activities.
It also supports data filtering, alerts and Pushover notifications, and allows you to compare reports of two periods with each other.
Form Maker is an advanced form building WordPress plugin that lets you create almost any type of form for your website.
It comes with tons of field options and enables you to create survey, questionnaire, contact, registration and application forms. You can give custom design and styling to the forms with CSS or with the pre built 41 editable themes.
You can create simple or multi-part forms with multiple choice questions, text and number input fields, custom select options, passwords, Captcha/ReCaptcha protection, etc. The created forms are responsive and highly customizable as well.
Google Maps WD is the most feature-rich yet user friendly Google Maps plugin that you can find.
It allows you to create and add unlimited maps to your website and live preview them before they go online. You can also add unlimited number of markers, shapes, and overlays to the maps and give them custom styling with the available map themes and skins.
Among its outstanding functionalities you can find store locator and get directions features, that are meant to help your visitors easily find your business location. The maps are responsive and fully customizable to fit your every need.
Related: Top Rated jQuery Google Maps Plugins
UpdraftPlus plugin makes the backup of your website easy and allows you to keep your files safe.
With its help you can set manual or scheduled database and file backups and store them into the cloud, email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, and other services.
You can have different schedules for database and file backups, split larger backups into multiple archives, select which files to backup and which ones to restore.
The failed backups will automatically resume until they are finally done.
Related: 5 WordPress Plugins That Make Database Management Effortless
You can enrich the scope of your reach with AddToAny plugin, which enables you to share your website content across more than 100 social media platforms.
It's a set of highly customizable social sharing and following buttons, that are also analytics integrated.
You can add the buttons as a shortcode or as a widget in various locations: before content, after content, or before & after content.
You can suggest related products or content to your customers with Similar Posts plugin.
It identifies the similarity of the posts based on content, title and/or tags, and allows you to adjust the balance of factors to best fit your needs. You can exclude posts by author, ID, tags, category and custom fields.
You also get full control over how the related content is displayed.
Step #5. Add Your Business Information
The last, but probably the most important step is to provide essential information about your business.
Depending on your business type you should have a few pieces of information about who you are, what you do, what are your strengths and achievements.
Also, don't forget to provide easy-to-find contact information and user testimonials if such are available.
If your business still operates without a website, it's the time to step up into the present day.
See Also: STARTUPS: Is It the Right Time to Build a Website?
These tips and tools will help you to make the right foot forward and build a functional and customer-friendly business website. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to let me know in the comments section below.