Launch your Site

These tutorials will guide you through selecting a host and show you how to launch your website, increase performance and setup your site for optimal SEO.

Launching your Website

This series will walk you through choosing a website host and launching your website.

1) Choosing a Host

Review of the best current hosting options for WordPress.

2) Launching with Kinsta

A step by step guide on launching your website with Kinsta.

3) Launching with Flywheel

A step by step guide on launching your website with Flywheel.

4) Launching with Pantheon

A step by step guide on launching your website with Pantheon.

5) Marketing & Performance

Additional information on utilizing Divi with plugins such as forms, toolset and more.

Marketing and Performance

Now it’s time to take a look at the performance of our site and begin setting up and optimizing our site for our marketing needs. I want to point out that we do not cover popular caching or minification plugins which those of you who are more experienced with WordPress may wonder about. With the hosts that we cover, these plugins (even minification) very little, if any performance increase. Additionally, they can cause several problems with site’s breaking, redirect issues and issues by clashing with the host-specific caching functionality which is happening at the server level. Overall, we felt that since we’ve invested in using proper hosting, that the performance difference in using these plugins isn’t worth the trouble and issues they can present. In the majority, if not all cases, proper hosting combined with server-level caching and integrating with Cloudflare is all we’ll need on this front.

We will likely cover optional tutorials covering these plugins, however we only recommend getting into these for advanced users. We will however, cover improving performance in other ways, which can be found in the next section.

Improving WordPress Performance

Performance issues with WordPress normally have to do with poor hosting or un-optimized code from themes and plugins. We’ve already taken care of the hosting part, and generally, with the plugins that we work with, the latter shouldn’t be an issue either, but as an overall rule of thumb there are some things we can do to increase the performance and load time of our WordPress websites by disabling things that run in core that we won’t need and cleaning up the mess of any unruly theme or plugin we may be using.

Kinsta, one of our recommended hosts has written and maintains a fantastic guide covering increasing performance on your WordPress website. We recommend reading through this guide and choosing the options that you’d like for your site. At this stage, we do not recommend option #2 in this guide, “Complete Analytics Optimization Suite (CAOS)”, simply because this method isn’t approved from Google, however you can utilize this if you’d like. Additionally, we do not recommend #3, because we do not recommend using Disqus as a comments solution.

Everything else in the guide is great, and for ease of use we definitely recommend “Perfmatters”, a premium plugin built specifically to do many things on this list easily and is made by some of the people that were involved in building the Kinsta framework. You can check out the Perfmatters website by clicking the button below.

After that, check out the rest of the guide at the link below:

Marketing

There’s a lot of thing that are included within the “Marketing” category. Not just marketing your site and setting up meta information but also integrating your site with Google Analytics and Webmaster tools for testing and traffic reports (and a lot more). We’re again, going to refer to an amazing guide and checklist from Kinsta at the link below. We recommend you read the entire guide first before implementing any of the specific options, so you can get a clear understanding of the needs for marketing your site and everything involved, and determine which you would like to implement on your site.

Some of these items are optional, and some of these you’ve already been doing if you followed along in our tutorials. Specifically, even if you’re not ready to fully optimize and market your content, at a minimum review and implement the following steps from the guide:

  • 2. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin – specifically, Yoast SEO.
  • 3. Setup Friendly Permalinks – you should have already done this, but if you haven’t yet, now is the time.
  • 19. Sitemaps
  • 20. Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
  • 21. Submit Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
  • 22. Submit Sitemap to Yandex Webmaster Tools
  • 23. Force Crawl for Faster Indexing
  • 28. Schema Markup – This won’t apply to everyone, but if it applies to you, we recommend it.
  • 44. Google Analytics – this is a must for everyone.

Perform these actions at a minimum, however please read through the entire guide to get a fantastic understanding of how to improve your content and market your site using organize routes.

For more information on other third party tools you can use from a marketing perspective, check out this guide, and scroll down to “Best SEO Tools for WordPress Users”.

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