When you think of making your own site, you must be looking for the perfect web development platform to turn your ideas into reality. Undoubtedly you will want to examine the customization options, credibility, performance, and flexibility.
You must have heard about WordPress because, at present, it powers a significant portion of the whole web. It offers you everything that you require for considering while crafting a custom WordPress site. However, before you opt for custom WordPress development, you need to consider a few things that are listed in this article.
Things to consider beforehand:
Before you download WordPress and hectically proceed with custom WordPress development, you need to consider some variables before you decide to play. You must have a plan and make sure that you have all the indispensable skills and the needful budget for developing the website that you desire.
Precisely, you need to think about the functionality that you want your website to possess and what the look is that you want to offer to your site. All these will help you to understand the expense that you will have to bear for making the website.
Before you start right away, familiarize yourself with all the basics, and craft an outline of your overall website.
Let us see what you need to consider:
Brand identity:
The way you are perceived by your audience will be determined by the identity of your brand. Thus, a crucial role is played by the brand identity in setting up your professionalism and credibility. The two vital aspects of brand identity you need to consider while opting for custom WordPress development are described below:
1. Logo of your brand:
A brand identity is composed one several visual components such as your business or organization’s logo, your site’s color palette, images, typography, and a lot more.
The logo is the component that portrays your brand visually to your audience online.
If you already have a brand long, that is great. However, if you do not have one, you must look to make one. Nowadays, several graphic design tools are there that you can consider for making a logo for what your business does. Or else, you can hire a designer to simplify the process.
2. The name of your domain:
The web domain name you have is the address that points out your site’s location on the web. Being an essential component of the identity of your brand, it is better if you can include the name of your business in it.
Choose a domain name that can be easily spelled and remembered. Also, make sure that it uniquely represents your website and you as well. It makes things easier for the visitors to look you up in the upcoming future.
You can opt for custom domains based on the type and nature of your business. For example, “.org” is food for the organizations such as non-profits, and on the other hand, “.com” is an allrounder option for personal and commercial sites.
In case you are introducing a localized business, opt for a country-specific extension.
The architecture of your website and content:
Before you design your site, you need to ask yourself what kind of content you want to publish and how you are planning to organize it.
All these answers are superb indicators of your custom WordPress website’s complexity. The more pages you need on your site, the more complicated its design becomes.
Moreover, if you want to publish tons of content, you may need to upgrade web hosting while considering custom WordPress development.
If you are looking for the best way to plan the architecture of your site, you can write it down like a flowchart and highlight which of the navigation item is opening which page.
If needed, you can add additional navigation steps. You must know how to move to and fro between directories and pages. You can go through useful tutorials for brushing up your skills. All these will help your organization and efforts down the road.
With a ready-made plan, your process of web development will get more straightforward.
Your custom WordPress Website’s core functionality:
You need to create the list of features that you will need for your custom WordPress development project. Then, make a different list of the functionalities of your website.
When you create your lists, always think about the core purpose of your website. This can be blogging, an e-commerce store, an e-learning website, a website brochure, a membership website, or others.
While brainstorming on all these for a custom WordPress development project, you may think that you need to boost user experience. And for that, you will require extra features. For example, website forms, popups, course creators, loyalty programs, tools for email marketing, etc., are a few such features.
Having all the functionalities that you have listed, you can easily determine how complex your website will become. If you cannot code all these features all by yourself, you can make use of third-party WordPress plugins. But, before opting for one, do some research and choose the ones that suit your business and budget.
Your custom WordPress site’s design:
You need to decide if you want a theme for your custom WordPress development. If yes, which theme do you need? Also, it is related to your cost, so make your decision wisely. A lot of free pro-looking and premium templates are there. Choose from them.
If your hunger is not satisfied with the themes, you can hire an expert to create the theme for your WordPress website. This is one of the surest ways to ensure that the desires for web design are met, and you will have a unique theme.
Also, if you have an outline design already, consider hiring a web developer to implement it.
You can always practice customizing your themes. For this, you can start with making basic modifications to a page while keeping the elements of the page original.
After you are accustomed to it, you can try out other themes. Choose a theme that helps you in programming a responsive design.
Make use of plugins for customizing functions, and include features that make your website unique and ensure maximized performance.
The UX, security, and performance of your website:
For running a website successfully, you need to ensure that your custom WordPress development process meets the core standards concerned with website responsiveness and speed.
Indeed, there are some amazing multi-purpose themes out there, but the truth is that not all of those readymade themes are mobile or performance-optimized. Also, they often offer you unnecessary features. For instance, some of the themes come with unnecessary codes, potentially slowing down the website and hurting the website’s performance.
So, if you desire a top-performing site, you need to only include the functionalities and features that you genuinely need. You may consider a custom theme. These themes are created right from scratch and work best. But if you want to bring all these to life, you may need to hire a web designer or web developer’s services.
The web hosting that you have selected is a vital factor that influences the security and performance of your website. Therefore, it is best if you can make use of a web hosting provider with having specialization in WordPress. They will monitor the security and performance of your website proactively on behalf of you.
The web hosting provider and package you select have a lot of things to do with the speed and security of your website. But while considering a service, make sure that it offers automatic backups, firewalls, and caching at a minimum.
SEO focus:
Google is regularly updating what it loves and hates on all the pages that Google indexes. The WordPress pages must-have plugins and code that are modernized according to the latest standards of SEO. Include correctly written metatags and heading.
Avoid using permalinks while doing custom WordPress development. Make use of unique photos and text with correct heading tags. Comply with the with-hat SEO, or Google may ban you, or you may lose your ranking.
The current support and maintenance of your website:
Constant attention is demanded by websites. Your website will need upgrades, tweaks, updates, and others. If anything goes wrong, you may need to face occasional support and maintenance costs. So, you will need to choose a developer for fixing all the present problems that are faced by you with the website you possess.
Analytics:
If you want to measure activity and interactions, consider making use of Google Analytics. However, you need to make sure that it works perfectly with your website, and it is not going to be as easy as inputting the tracking code.
Several analytic plugins are available to make sure that Google is correctly configured. Consider a one in your custom WordPress development that can track your blog for measuring the different aspects of the behavior of a visitor.
Social media:
Yes, you might not be in love with Facebook or Twitter. But, the visitors of your website will be. And they might want to inform people about the greatness of your website or might just want to share one of your pages.
So, you need to help them to do so. Moreover, it is free advertising for you. Things are made easier by the social media plugins for people to share your blog and site with their friends.
What are some of the different website types?
There are a few common website WordPress websites that people consider while doing custom WordPress development. They are as follows:
A simple and personal blog:
Generally, one of the most common websites to produce is a simple blog. All you need is a sweet and simple site for publishing text-based content that you can organize into categories.
There are three-page templates needed for it, blog category, blog article, and blog home.
You can consider custom form plugins to make opt-in and contact forms. Besides, newsletter plugins and email marketing need to be considered.
For the themes, the ones from WordPress can be used because it needs little customizations. Make use of a web hosting provider who specializes in WordPress hosting and select a plan for custom WordPress development purposes based on your traffic requirements.
A standard brochure/ business website:
Most small business owners need a few pages, and they need some extra features based on the services they offer.
These websites need seven-page templates, the home page, about page, contact page, services page, blog home, articles, categories.
Some of the plugins that you need to consider in custom WordPress development are SEO plugins, drag and drop web page builder plugins, lead generation plugins, and analytics plugins.
You can make use of a premium or free WordPress theme. There are templates available designed particularly for businesses.
It is best to buy web hosting from a provider that specializes in WordPress. Also, the package you choose must align with your traffic expectations. If you are looking to attract a massive number of visitors, you can opt for a comprehensive package that unlocks advantages like several IP addresses, increased storage, more bandwidth, and others.
A complicated eCommerce custom WordPress site:
When it comes to performance, architecture, and web design, one of the websites that need the maximum requirements is a complicated eCommerce website. You will need to consider an expert developer and an array of widgets in custom WordPress development for aiding the growth of the website.
There are more than ten-page templates needed, homepage, about, contact, product categories, product pages, FAQ, support, blog, articles, categories.
You can look invest in premium plugins like eCommerce platforms, keyword research plugins, helpdesk plugins, and email marketing automation tools.
For themes, it is best to consider a WordPress theme that is completely eCommerce optimize. It will keep the performance of your website intact and will facilitate mobile adaptability.
Choose a hosting plan having tons of storage and bandwidth for your custom WordPress development. Make sure that the plan you choose has all the security features and fits your expected traffic and your store’s size.
Conclusion:
Whether you think it is difficult or easy to build a WordPress website depends on the experience you possess with web design. The best thing about WordPress is that it is regularly improved and updated.
By considering everything mentioned in this article, you can opt for custom WordPress development, whether advanced or amateur. Stay focused and stick to the plan, and do not hurry on things, or you may ruin everything in a blink.
Sonal S Sinha is managing director of Shri Krishna Technologies. He has been writing about website designing, digital marketing and WordPress ecosystem for the past 15+ years. He handles the overall operations and in his free time writes suitable blog posts which are knowledgeable and informative.
