Perplexed about rebuilding your WordPress website? Fear not!

WordPress has been a popular content management system for ages now with hundreds of thousands of websites being created, maintained, and updated with it. Indeed, it’s a powerful and user-friendly platform that people love using, but it’s not infallible to malware attacks, poor design, or bad code, etc. What happens when you encounter such a problem?

One of the most critical decisions you need to make is whether to rebuild your website or not. Rebuilding a website can at first seem daunting, but it does not have to be! With proper planning, execution, and attention to seemingly tiny details, you can build a better website than the previous one, which has good speed, is mobile-friendly, better optimized, and more secure. Here are the steps you can take to rebuild your WordPress website:

Step One: Backup your website

Before starting to rebuild your website, it’s essential to maintain your website’s old data. This includes all your content, pages, images, posts, and files. Create a full backup of your website by using plugins such as UpdraftPlus or Duplicator. And save these backup files to a secure location like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Step Two: Make a plan

The next thing you need to do is assess what needs to be done and then make a plan for reconstructing your website. You must consider the following:

• Define your objectives and goals for the website
• Decide which pages and content require changing in the new website
• Choose a new design template or come up with a custom design
• Decide which plugins should be retained and which ones to delete
• Assess your current content and look for changes or upgradation based on your objectives

Step Three: Create a new environment

While rebuilding a website, it is best to work in a different environment such as a staging site or subdomain. This allows you to work on your current website while not impacting your existing website. Use plugins like WP Staging or WP Stagecoach to generate a staging site. These plugins copy your website to a staging environment where you can rebuild your website.

Step Four: Choose a new theme or design

When starting from scratch, choose a theme that is mobile-friendly, lightweight, and aligns with your goals. But if you want a custom design, hire a professional web designer to create a custom theme for you. While rebuilding your website, thoroughly research and choose a theme that is easy to use, lightweight, and customizable.

Step Five: Install necessary plugins

WordPress has over 50,000 plugins you can install on your website. When rebuilding your website, ensure to retain only the necessary plugins. Below is a list of some plugins that need to be installed:

• Contact form plugin
• SEO plugin like Yoast or All-In-One SEO Pack
• Security plugin like WordFence or iThemes Security
• Backup plugin like Updraft or Backup Buddy

Step Six: Optimize your content

After rebuilding your website, it is time to optimize your content to make it mobile-friendly and SEO-friendly. The optimization tips to employ are as follows:

• Add alt tags to your images
• Use shorter paragraphs and sentences
• Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content
• Add internal and external links to your content
• Use descriptive and engaging meta descriptions and titles

Step Seven: Test your website

Once you complete rebuilding your website, it is essential to test it for speed, performance, mobile-friendliness, and SEO-friendliness. You can use tools like Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTmetrix to test it. As part of testing, ensure that your page speed is fast, your website functions correctly on mobile devices, and the optimization aligns with the search engine’s needs.

The Wrap Up

Rebuilding your WordPress website can be an overwhelming task, but following our steps and tips can help you create a new and improved website. Remember to backup your old website, have a plan, create a new environment, and decide on a catchy theme. Install the necessary plugins, optimize your content, and, finally, test your website. In following these steps, you’ll end up with a website that is more secure, faster, mobile-friendly, and SEO-friendly. Happy rebuilding!