So you'd like to build your own website, but you don't know where to start, and you want to keep your technical cost overhead to a minimum. You need an efficient website so people can use it without waiting 5 minutes for it to load... on every page. In fact, ideally, you want to keep your page loads under a second, if possible. Well let's get started.
The Traditional Way of Building an Efficient Website
Right, so I'm going to try to keep this understandable for someone without technical knowledge, but detailed enough that you'll be able to see the mechanics of how it all works. So, before we can get to a simplified solution, we need to analyze what we're trying to avoid. Let's take a look at the traditional way of building a website.
- Plan your project. In order to build something, you need to plan what you're building. This often means things like Trello for project management, Figma for planning the layout of each page, block diagrams for the workflow, and so forth. Anything you deem necessary to feel that you've jotted down enough notes that your vision can come to life.
- Set up your project. On a local machine / development environment / locally hosted website, you need to install your WordPress website or other framework. For this article, we'll assume you'll be using WordPress. WordPress needs a database, so your local environment also has MySQL installed so you can create the database. Pretty routine, but something you'll want to avoid doing if you're not looking to learn web development, nor design.
- Install / Create Plugins / themes. To make your site look the way you want, you need a theme, and to make your website DO what you want, you need plugins. You could buy themes on Envato, install plugins from the free plugin directory, and effectively click-together a website. However, if you need something more detailed, you might need to create a WordPress plugin efficiently by working with the Dragon Framework for instance. However, you're really just looking for an informational website with a few extra features that existing plugins can provide you with. (Ex. WooCommerce for Ecommerce, BuddyPress for user profiles, etc.)
- Launch your efficient website. You have your website ready, have installed W3 Total Commerce for speed using the BunnyPress CDN. All In One WP Security is your best friend for added security on your site in this hacker-ridden world of ours. Your website is ready for consumption. You turn on production / live mode for all of your plugins, and people come in due to your marketing efforts.
I know. You're feeling extremely overwhelmed right now. You know what's great about all this? Most of this not something you'll need to learn in depth. In fact, the steps that you do need to do are outlined below in step-by-step detail so you can have an efficient site ready for your creative potention today.
Step-by-Step Efficient Website Build in One Hour
The steps I'm going to outline below are things that take me about 15 minutes or so to do for each new website I create for clients. For someone who hasn't done it before, it will probably take about an hour. So, one hour is reasonable for you, no matter how much you know about building a website. I assume that you have at least a general idea of what you want, but feel free to spend as much time as you'd like on the planning stage. So here goes.
Website Setup
You'll need a domain name, web host, and a WordPress installation.
- Domain name - What do you want to call your site? Try to keep it reasonably short, but unique enough for your SEO to be easier. UbeRubix.com is a better choice than thesuperduperuberrubicscubesolver.com. Super short names are often taken, but be creative and use words most people don't use, combine letters as in the above example, and you'll get a good name.
- Hosting Provider - A hosting provider provides you a server on which your site will run. DO NOT use WordPress hosting unless you're going for something extremely basic like a flyer website that you never intend to scale. WordPress Hosting is the absolute lowest quality hosting possible, as you can't configure your server very well when you need to. Don't limit yourself. Get Shared Hosting to start with. NameCheap shared hosting is only like $60 per YEAR depending on the plan you want. You can also register your domain name at the same time.
- (Optional) CloudFlare Free Plan - If you want to properly secure your site, you can get a CloudFlare free plan. Banks and the like have very low security (unencrypted passwords so they have password lengths), but if you want to do things right, get CloudFlare. It'll walk you through setting that up when you open an account with them.
- WordPress install - Install your WordPress installation either manually or using the cPanel (hosting control panel) Softaculous wizard to click to install it.
You should now have a working WordPress installation and you can now log into your /wp-admin.
Here, There Be Magic!
To make your website look amazing and get right to designing your pages, adding contact forms, and more, get Elementor. Elementor comes with its own theme, as well as a page builder. Using Elementor gives you FAR more control over your site than Wix, Shopify, or other sites that try to lock you into a subscription that takes away your ability to own the code. With Elementor, the control of your own site is in your own hands.
Install Elementor and start building pages using a click-together environment that has everything from titles and text to picture galleries, powerful forms, pricing presentation, and even whole pages you can drop into your site and edit as you'd like.
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