In my previous posts, I have shown you how to create a website. Now you have your login id and password to the WordPress website. This post is next step showing how to design and customize the WordPress website.

Login To Your Website:

After installing WordPress, getting username and password; type domain name/wp-admin in URL.

You will get a login window and after typing username and password you will open up with Word Press dashboard.

Correct The Permalink Structure:

The permalink provided by WordPress is customizable. You can optimize the default permalink provided by WordPress. To change the default setting:

Go to settings> permalinks

You will be getting the options to select which type of permalinks you want for your posts. The best choice is to choose “post name” permalink type. All the other options are not good for the purpose of SEO. Post name permalink will add post name in the link and make it easy for the world to access.

Make Search Engine For Indexing Your Website:

It is important for your website to make it visible to the world. To encourage search engine for indexing your site, you need to uncheck the box “discourage search engines from indexing this site”. You will find this option by selecting settings and then reading.

Choose A Theme To Customize The WordPress Website:

Themes make your site look beautiful. Customization option of WordPress let you change not only the view but also layout, feel, new features to your website. It is very easy to change the theme and make it of your choice.

Appearance>themes>add new>install>activate

By clicking the mouse step by step as above mentioned steps, you will get your own theme activated. You can choose any theme of your choice. After refreshing the page you will get a different view of your website.

You can change the font, colour and size of your background, texts and links.

Set Site Name, Tagline, Logo, Site Icon:

Appearance>Customize>site identity

In site identity you can add your site name, a tagline for your site, add a logo from your hard disk and add a site icon. You can choose logo and site icon only and hide site name and site tagline. By doing these change you will come up with a very different look of your website.

Tips:

• Your logo size must be of 350*70.
• Preview before you apply any changes.
• Save the changes you do to make it visible.
• Site icon size must be 512 pixels.

Add Pages:

Pages>all pages

The sample page is created by WordPress automatically. We can delete this page because we are going to create our own pages.

To create new page click on add new and type the name of the title for your page. To save it click on publish. You can repeat the process for the pages you want to create. The page’s title can be home, contact us, about us, blog, etc.

After Refreshing It Will Look Like This:

Menus and Widgets:

Menus and widgets are great ways which you can change the sidebars of the website. To make changes in the sequence of pages or drop cap options and direct your visitors to a right part of the website; you need to create a menu for navigation purpose.

Go to appearance> menu> create a new menu>menu name>create menu

After creating the menu select the pages to add into the menu. Now you can navigate the pages and change the sequence of pages by drag and drop. You can even create drop-down pages by this navigation menu.

Make The Front Page:

The front page will be appearing first when somebody visits your website by your domain name. You can choose the front page from the pages you created. To make the static front page:

Appearance> Customize> static front page

Here you can either put your latest posts as your front page or home as your front page.

Change The Layout:

To change the layout: go to appearance>customize>layout

You can change container width, content layout, header, primary navigation, sidebar, navigation search and footer. By changing the layout your website will look well-formatted as you want to appear.

Take Site Backups:

Website backups are very important because it can be a resort if anything wrong happens with the site. We can create a copy of the files at some place to make them safe. By creating a backup storage, you feel relief in near future.

You can just install backup plugins and set it auto pilot mode. So that it takes backups automatically without your time. There are so many free backup plugins are available like backupbuddy, duplicator, updraftplus, vaultpress, and backwpup.

Yoast SEO Plugin To Set On-Page SEO To Customize The WordPress Website Well:

Optimization of the website is a necessary step. If you write a good post and it is not optimized, you will get fewer visitors. So to increase the visibility of your post it is important to install Yoast SEO to your WordPress website. Yoast is built-in SEO tool.

Yoast checks readability, active-passive, long paragraphs, keyword density, Meta description, title, images, tags, links and also provides tips to correct your SEO.

Add Social Media Buttons:

Social media buttons enable visitors to share the content. By social media integration, you can make a better relationship with your visitors and make them your passionate reader. You can notify your readers easily about your new post and a new feature if they are connected with you by social media.

The plugins like revive Old post, WPSSO, and Getsocial will help you make social media and follow buttons.

To customize your website with new features you will need to add plugins. I have covered the plugins in a separate article. Read it out in next article to add more appealing features to your site.