Please excuse my ignorance. I'm a humble layman.
I'm setting up shared hosting tomorrow for my blog. It's basic. It has 1-click installation for WordPress.
Now act like you've got that setup. Keep in mind, I'm savvy but not technical. What plugins would you install? You guys all seem to have your favorites. Do I need caching? Security? Backups (digital and physical)? What am I missing? I want to do everything without spending any money.
I need to make a newsletter. It should give me control of the subject line, and I need a subscribe button that's non-intrusive. Do I need an email provider?
I know I need a privacy policy, a cookie policy, and a cookie banner with a button that lets you deny cookies. It should be compliant for all jurisdictions, and it has to be generated based on specific information about my business. I don't know what plugin to use, but I know some let you fill out a form about your business and generate a policy. This is essential. It has to cover everything.
My blog will have featured images for every post. What do I need to do as far as images? Which is better? Compression on something like tinypng or a plugin?
Are there any settings that I have to go through? Are there any major pitfalls? Have I mentioned all of the essentials?
Sorry, I know this is a giant dump.
Cant wait for someone to answer this
If you’re set on doing this all yourself and for as low a cost as possible, it’s probably worth contacting a local web agency and asking them if you can pay them for a couple hours of consultation, then asking your questions, and taking copious notes. Note that this is going to be a big time sink; there’s a lot to learn. Good luck!
The thing about WordPress is there’s a lot of plug-ins, free ones too that can do a lot for you and there’s many themes and templates for site/content looks.
Like you can download a newsletter plug in if you want that can do a lot of the work as long as you read what you’re doing.
You can get those things that you mentioned for free, caching, security backups if you type those keywords in the plugin search and the most popular, highly rated ones usually are there.
It’s recommended that you keep a copy of your website and database on your PC and a USB if you want.
Server hosting packages prices vary from provider to provider and location of the server doesn’t matter much. Most offer a domain name included in server packages.
Lots of people out there maintain their own websites without any related education or much experience as long as you choose a user friendly CMS like WordPress.
Install what you need as you go
Keep it lowest
Caching comes later when you have build a website.
If you want to set it up now
You can use wp optimize or litespeed cache
Both are free( wp rocket is paid)
Policy pages and other pages – you can create in WordPress – go to pages and create new
If you want to have a newsletter you need a service like mailerlite or mailchimp to collect subscriber emails and track their marketing consent. They have free plans to start but you will end up paying eventually once you have lots of subscribers. Depending on what service you choose you can install the corresponding plugin on your site to create the subscribe form.
If you are serving ads or advertising to the EEA you must use a Google certified cookie management platform. If you are in the UK you need a GDPR compliant cookie platform. I like cookieyes.com. Sign up there and it’s simple to add to your site. It will auto block scripts and create a consent banner for you. You will just have to organize and classify the cookies it doesn’t recognize. You can usually google the cookies and see what they do from someone else’s cookie platform.
For plugins, you can install Wordfence or sucuri. I would also recommend wps hide login to change your login url. If your host has server side caching though you will need to ask them to exclude the new login url from caching or else the forget password link and 2fa plugins won’t work. You can add any 2fa plugin for extra protection. If you don’t have your file permissions set right on the server though it won’t even matter. You can connect by ftp and check you file permissions against the WordPress recommendations (google WordPress file permissions).
For image compression I like robin image optimizer but honestly tinypng still does the best job out of everything I’ve tried. Nothing beats a properly sized and compressed image pre upload compared to post upload processing.
Good luck!!
Do you really expect that someone will give you “development ~~required~~ requirements” proposal for free?
You have enumerated required parts, now it’s time to investigate. Google and this /r/WordPress to start.
Success.
I always use yoast seo, Google site kit, wordfence security, wp optimize [database, image cache minify], all in 1 migration or updraft plus for backups.
I’m pretty into the AES plugin as well. Though this might be too advanced for now.
I’m gonna give you a few tips, but you should definitely do your own research because a lot of these questions are stuff that is answered in the first few minutes of watching video tutorials of how to install wordpress.
1. You can use updraft for backups
2. For security I would recommend wordfence, but biggest security you could ever do for your site is to use a strong password and not use the username “admin”. The other one is never installing a unknown plugin with little downloads,
3. You definitely need cache, which plugin is best heavily depends on your server configurations. I personally would ask your host which one they recommend. I personally use W3 Total cache.
4. I use complianz for cookie and privacy policy stuff, it automatically detects which stuff generates cookies and adds it to the consent banner. Even the free version is very good.
5. I would never use a plugin to compress images, just compress them before you upload and do the webp format.
6. I guess you can use a newsletter plugin but I can guarantee you will have to pay. I think you are much better off using a email marketing and then integrating it into wordpress, most have plugins to make it easier. I also heavily recommend you looking into SMTP to make sure your emails never fail because of server error. I personally use FluentSMTP and heavily reccomend this one.
Thing you missed ? Probably avoid installing a lot of plugins is good rule of thumb if you don’t know what you are doing. Always think first if you can do X thing without plugin and if it is really worth it to install a plugin because of that.
I got you.
* Complianz for cookies
* Contact Form 7 for contact forms or other forms
* EWWW Image Optimizer for server-side free optimization (not as powerful as others but no usage credits either)
* Relevanssi for much more powerful search bar
* Stackable Gutenberg Blocks if you have the dreadful Gutenberg editor, this unlocks it completely and is not very expensive either.
* UpdraftPlus for backups
* Wordfence security for security
* Yoast SEO for SEO
* WP fastest cache for easy free cache (WP Rocket I think is more powerful but only premium)
* WP Mail SMTP if you’re going to be sending email from the website, to make sure they get delivered. Set it up with your hosting provider’s email server if they give you an email address with your domain.
For newsletters I would just register with a third-party service and then install their webhook so they can communicate with your website, then you manage it entirely from their interface. You can build automated processes with their services so that every time you make a post an email goes out. Maybe there’s good built-in newsletter plugins but you need a mail server that can handle the volume of emails you’re going to be sending out and ensure delivery of all your emails.