How to Create a Beautiful WordPress Website (Guide)

Whether you’re a professional or a hobbyist, when it comes to website creation you’ll most likely end up using one of the most popular content management systems, WordPress. Chances are you’re already aware of WordPress’ popularity, as it powers 27% of all websites.

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) that’s popular with bloggers and small businesses alike, due to its ease of use and ability to function as a standalone website or blog. Because it’s so widely-used, WordPress is constantly evolving to fit new user needs and technological advancements.

If you’re looking to create a beautiful WordPress website then this article will tell you everything you need to know about designing a classy online space.

Pick A Theme

The first step to creating a beautiful website is selecting a suitable theme for the space. It’s a good idea to consult with a web design expert, who can guide you through the process of finding the right theme, as well as assist you in the setup and optimization of your new website.

Before making any sort of purchase decision, be sure to examine the terms of service (TOS) and privacy policy (PP) of the theme you’re considering purchasing. Reviewing these documents will assist you in understanding what to expect with regard to updates, support, and additional features.

Understand The User Experience

The design of your website is only as good as the user experience (UX) created by the structure and content of the pages. Put simply, a poorly designed website can be extremely unappealing and even frustrating for the site’s visitors. To create a beautiful experience for your users, you’ll want to consider:

• the type of content you’re planning on presenting
• the way your users will interact with the site, such as via phone or tablet vs laptop or desktop computer
• how quickly your users can navigate and discover what they need
• whether you’ll need help from a web designer to get the site up and running (and if so, how much this will cost you)
• whether the design of your site is mobile-friendly
• and much more

Choose The Right Hosting

Once you’ve picked out a theme for your website, it’s time to purchase hosting services to launch your site. Though there are a variety of hosting solutions available (e.g., DreamHost, Bluehost, and WordPress.com), most web designers will recommend selecting a premium hosting service that offers additional perks, like free domain registration and a money-back guarantee.

Once you’ve set up your hosting, it’s time to install WordPress. On most hosting plans, the process of installing WordPress is actually quite simple. Once you’ve logged into your hosting account, navigated to the WordPress directory, and clicked on the Install WordPress button, you’ll be presented with a form requesting basic website information, like your name and email address.

Curate & Organize Content

Now that you have a functioning WordPress site, it’s time to start adding content to it. Before doing so, you’ll want to take the time to curate and organize your content. That is, you’ll want to take the time to think of what you have and how you can best utilize it to present useful information to your visitors.

For instance, if you’re writing a blog post about dog grooming, you might want to curate and organize the content in a way that is most accessible to your target audience. You could, for instance, break down the various aspects of grooming a dog into a series of discrete posts, each focused on a particular technique or tool that is used, and intersperse the posts with content that is most useful to your target audience, like tips on how to care for your dog’s nails and cuticles, or how to brush your dog’s teeth.

Style With Personality

Speaking of useful information, you may want to consider investing in a few styling tools that can assist you in presenting the most useful information in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible. For example, you could purchase a tool, like Google Fonts, that will allow you to easily integrate Google’s entire font library into your next project. Simply type a word or phrase into the search bar, and you’ll be presented with a list of matching fonts. From there you can easily select the one that you prefer, and it will be added to your Google Fonts library.

Once you’ve added Google Fonts to your library, you can easily integrate the fonts into your next project by going to File & Settings –&– Appearance –&– Fonts.

Make Regular Updates

Keeping your website visually appealing and easy to navigate requires periodic updates. Though it’s a good idea to hire a web designer to take care of this for you, you can also take care of regular updates yourself. To do so, visit your WordPress dashboard, scroll down to Settings –&– General, and change the setting from Automatically update posts to Manual update posts.

From there you can choose how frequently you want WordPress to automatically check for updates, as well as install updates when they’re available. Though this may seem like a lot of work, keeping up with the constantly evolving world of web design means you’ll most likely be able to find the time to do so.

Make It Mobile-Friendly

If you’ve worked within the confines of a boxed-in desktop browser, it may be difficult to believe that mobile access is now a significant part of internet usage, as 66.2% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. To make sure that your content is easily accessible to your audience, whether they’re on the go or at home typing on a keyboard, you’ll want to ensure that the visual styling of your site is mobile-friendly. Simply go to Dashboard –&– Design and click on Mobile-friendly to activate the visual presentation of your site as a mobile-friendly design.

Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

If you’ve picked out a theme for your site, and you’re using a free hosting service like WordPress.com, it’s time to start thinking about search engine optimization (SEO). To do so, you’ll want to make sure that all the pages on your site are easily accessible to your target audience, whether this is via mobile devices or desktops.

To make your website easily discoverable by search engines, you’ll want to do the following: