WordPress is a fantastic platform for websites of all kinds, from blogs to small online stores. In fact, more than 500 websites are built using the WordPress web design system every day — compared to just 60-80 websites built using systems like Shopify and Squarespace.

The best way to get a great WordPress site is to hire WordPress website design services. They can build brand-new WordPress themes from the ground up, leading to an original style that no one else can copy. If you’re tackling this project on your own, here are five tips to remember when building your own WordPress website.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Service

Creating your own website using WordPress isn’t as simple as setting up a basic blog. First of all, you’ll need to choose a web hosting service to host your website. And as you’ll quickly learn if you do much research, not all web hosts are created equal. While it’s easy to get basic hosting services for relatively little money, for a reliable, high-speed service, you’ll want to plan on spending a little extra. Unless you want to deal with slow site speeds and constant technical difficulties, do lots of research before choosing a web host. You’ll want to set up your WordPress site with a hosting provider that others have had success with.

2. Use an SEO Plugin

Search engine optimization is critical for any website’s success. Fortunately, the WordPress platform is already well optimized for search engine discovery, with simple code and a good reputation for running high-quality websites. But to take your SEO game to the next level, you should install and use a plugin for further optimizing your site.

A good SEO plugin will analyze your website for problems that could hold your site back in search rankings. It will streamline and optimize different parts of your site, such as your theme code and image files. It might even analyze your content and recommend keywords.

3. Compress Your Images

No WordPress web design is complete without images. But using large, detailed image files can make your site take longer to load. However, smaller images often won’t do the trick, because they look pixelated when blown up across an entire webpage. Fortunately, there’s a third option: always compress your images before uploading them to your WordPress site.

Compressing images makes them smaller in terms of file size, without noticeably diminishing their quality. If you know how to use image editing software like Photoshop, you can compress images that way. But there are also many software tools made just for compressing images. Many of them exist as web apps which you can access and use from any browser.

4. Avoid Using Too Many Plugins

Although we’ve talked about using a plugin for SEO, and you can also get plugins that compress images directly within WordPress, you should also keep your plugins to a minimum.

Plugins are essentially small pieces of software that add functionality to your website. WordPress can already do many things, but it can do even more with the right plugins. But like the software on your computer, plugins take up storage space, and if you have too many of them running on your site at once, they can slow things down. That means slower loading times, which can cause your site to rank lower in search results, as well as to encourage people to leave right away.

To avoid this, only use plugins you absolutely need for the things you want to do.

5. Keep WordPress Updated

WordPress is just a software program, and as such, it needs to be updated frequently when security threats are discovered. This applies to your plugins as well. Updating WordPress and plugins is easy, but you need to be sure and do it as often as updates are available to keep your website safe.

WordPress web design and development is an exciting field rich with opportunities. But it can be hard to do it alone. Don’t hesitate to get a service to help you if you get such with your WordPress web design. Either way, keep these tips in mind to end up with a great website.