Starting Over with WordPress: Tips for a Thrilling Journey

Are you feeling perplexed about starting over with your website? Don’t worry! With WordPress, it doesn’t have to be daunting. As one of the world’s most popular website builders, WordPress has user-friendly, affordable, and customizable options that make starting over exciting. Below are tips to help you get started with your WordPress site.

1. Analyze the Reason for Starting Over

Before you start redesigning your website, evaluate why you want to start over. Understanding the reasons for the change will help you avoid the same mistakes in the future. Perhaps you want to change the site’s design, content, or focus. Maybe the website’s performance isn’t meeting your expectations, or you need to revamp your brand. Once you understand your goals and objectives, you will be more productive in building your new WordPress site.

2. Back up the Current Site

Before making any changes, you must back up your current site to avoid losing any valuable data when starting anew. Back up is like taking a snapshot of your website that can be used to restore your website to its previous settings if anything goes wrong.

To back up your WordPress site, you can use a plugin or back up manually. Several plugins, such as UpdraftPlus, offer scheduled backups and can save your site’s data to a variety of options such as cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive.

3. Identify What Works and What Doesn’t

After backing up your website, take some time to evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Analyzing your site’s analytics will provide valuable insights into the overall performance, such as visitor numbers, bounce rate, average session duration, and popular pages.

Based on the analytics, you can identify what pages, features, and functionalities resonate with your audience and which ones don’t. You can then make informed decisions on the necessary changes to achieve your goals.

4. Choose a New Theme or Design

The success of your WordPress site hinges heavily on your theme or design, which plays a vital role in representing your brand and goals. It’s essential to choose a theme that aligns with your new objectives and brand image. You can select a theme from the WordPress repository or purchase one from a marketplace like ThemeForest.

When selecting a theme, look for responsiveness, well-coded features that avoid performance or security issues, and customization options for color schemes, layout, and design.

5. Update Your Content

After selecting your theme, it’s time to update your content to reflect your new goals and brand image. Remove or update all outdated content, optimize your pages and posts for SEO best practices, and add new content as necessary.

Ensure you maintain a consistent publishing schedule to keep your audience engaged and up-to-date. If you need help with content, consider hiring a copywriter or investing in a content marketing strategy.

6. Plugins and Functionality

Your website’s functionality is crucial to its success. Plugins add more functionality to your WordPress site, whether it’s SEO optimization or social media integration to e-commerce solutions. More importantly, make sure the plugins are updated regularly and have excellent reviews from the WordPress community.

7.Test and Launch

Before launching your new WordPress site, check thoroughly for errors, broken links or functionality issues. Use family and friends, or testing tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your site’s performance.

Once you are satisfied with your new WordPress site, launch it and market it to your audience. Share it on your social media accounts, email newsletters, and other marketing channels.

Conclusion

Starting over with WordPress can be an exciting journey with proper planning. Analyzing your current site, understanding your new goals, choosing new themes and plugins, and launching a new and improved WordPress site can help you achieve long-term success.

By following the tips above, you’ll be on your way to creating a website that resonates with your audience and meets your new goals. Good luck!