How to design a website in WordPress in 7 steps

WordPress is a very popular platform for website design. Presently, over 1.3 billion websites are designed in WordPress.

There are various factors which make WordPress better and simpler than the other website building platforms.

These website building platforms are called Content Management System (CMS). Few examples are Joomla, Drupal, ImpressPages, etc.

Initially, it might look difficult to design a website in WordPress.

But as you get used to its interface, designing a website will be no less than a cake walk.

Before you start designing your website in WordPress, you need to take care of a few things.

You need to buy the domain name, hosting and SSL certificate for your website. After that, you need to install WordPress on your hosting account.

The procedure will depend upon the hosting company you have chosen.

This article only covers the designing approach and not the prerequisites and settings. These are already covered in a lot of top blogs.

After all the prerequisites and settings are taken care of, we are ready to designing our WordPress website.

There is no right or wrong method to design a website in WordPress. Usually designers develop their own style and method after a certain time.

But if you are a WordPress beginner with no direction, you can follow our approach for designing website. So let’s get started…

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Step 1: Select and install a theme for your WordPress website

After you have done exploring the interface, we are ready to start with the steps which will help us design our WordPress website.

Theme determines how your website is going to look and what all widgets and features is it going to have.

Your website will already have a default theme. You need to go through the various free or paid themes and select one which meets most of your requirements.

After you have selected a theme, install and activate it. Don’t worry if your theme does not have some of the features which you want.

You can still get those features by installing related plugins which will extend the functionality of your theme.

It is still better to take time in going through the themes and selecting an appropriate one rather than installing hundreds of plugins.

Step 2: Add widgets, menus, headers & footers

Once you have installed your theme, its time to add the widgets, menus, headers and footers. Your theme might already have all these by default.

You can go to the Appearance section to make changes to the existing ones or add new according to the requirement of your website.

Step 3: Add essential plugins to your WordPress website

After you have customized the default features of your theme, you might still feel a need to add more features.

This can be done by adding related plugins. They also help you to make your website faster, optimized, secure and easy to use.

Without plugins, your WordPress website design might feel incomplete.

Some of the must-have free plugins are-

1. Yoast SEO – for search engine optimization
2. Jetpack – for various features like safety, statistics and social media
3. UpdraftPlus – for website backups
4. Wordfence Security – for improving website’s security
5. WP Rocket – for website caching
6. WP Forms – for form building

We recommend these plugins due to our past experiences and research. But you can choose any to your liking which fits the purpose.

You can add a plugin any time later whenever a need is felt.

Just make sure to add only those plugins which you truly need. Overloading your website with plugins can make the performance of your website slow.

Also, update your plugins and themes regularly whenever an update is available.

Outdated plugins and themes can hamper the quality of your website and can also make it vulnerable to security threats.

Step 4: Add the pages & posts required by the website

In this step we will add all the pages and posts which will be required in our website.

Some of the must have pages are Home page, About page, Contact page and Privacy Policy page.

If you are selling any product or providing any service, you can also have a product or services page.

The number and type of pages will depend upon the need of your website.

In case you want to design a WordPress blog website, you can set your home page as your blog page.

Then, your blog posts will be shown on the home page with the latest being on top. You need to write your articles as posts and not pages.

Step 5: Arrange data in pages

After we have added all the pages we need, we will start filling data in the pages one-by-one. We don’t have to worry about the decoration yet.

First, we will be focused on gathering the data which we need on every page and arranging it properly.

Then, we will design the look and feel of our WordPress website.

Doing this will help us to easily design our website in WordPress or any other platform according to the content in our pages.

Step 6: Customize the design of your WordPress website

To customize the design of your website in WordPress, go to the ‘Customize’ section in appearance.

Here you will find a lot of options to change the looks of your website. You can customize the colors, typography, widgets, menus, pages, etc.

Your home page is usually the major attraction of your website. So, start by customizing it first.

Once you are completely satisfied with the looks of your home page, follow the same specifications and design throughout your WordPress website.

This will help you in making your website consistent throughout.

It will also save you a lot of efforts which you might have spent in designing the whole website at once and then re-designing if you don’t like something.

Step 7: Publish your website

When you are done with your WordPress website design and everything looks perfect, you can finally make it go live by publishing all your pages and posts.

You can now go to your website’s URL and check if it looks perfect. If you need to change something after publishing, do not worry at all.

You can edit your pages or posts and update them anytime without any trouble.

Conclusion

Following this approach, you will be able to design a website in WordPress with ease. Remember that there are no strict rules in designing.

So, you can change the steps and experiment as and when required. Slowly you will develop your own sense of designing.

But till then, you can utilize our tried and tested approach to design your WordPress Website.