WordPress is highly flexible CMS and can serve as a basis for blogs or fully-fledged business sites. It provides the easiest way of build a professional looking website with no knowledge of web development. It gives easy tools to quickly launch a website and extend it together with business growth.

With a WordPress-built site you can add new pages, create menus, customize the look of the layout, add new capabilities via hundreds of plugins and optimize your website more easily.

So what are the key steps of building a WordPress business site? The following is a how-to guide for building a small business website.

1. Choose A Domain Name and Secure Hosting

Domain name serves as a home address for your business website and the hosting is the land on which you can build your website. The domain name should be:

• Aligned with your brand
• Relevant to the core purpose
• Easy to remember

Although it’s possible to host a website on your own server, most individuals and companies prefer to buy hosting from external providers. There are plenty of hosting options, but only few of them are rather popular and secure. You can check the following most popular and secure hosting options:

• HostGator
• GoDaddy
• WP Engine
• Bluehost

When choosing a hosting plan you should keep in mind that your choice may affect the speed at which your web pages are loaded. Although, it depends on your list of plugins and its size, as well as media content.

2. Choose a WordPress Theme

A theme gives the site a look and feel. Some of the themes are free, others cost money. Some are fully customizable, others not. And it may require weeks to find a good one that will meet your requirements and be relevant to your website content and business type.

You can choose from thousands of free themes in WordPress free directory and simply install on your WordPress dashboard.  Try to select a theme, which is responsive, fully customizable, SEO and user-friendly and provides high functionality.

Business World is an ideal WordPress business theme with a number of customizable features like full width slider, fullscreen lightbox slideshow, page builder functionality, layout editor and social sharing options. The theme provides page templates through which you can easily  create contact page, search and sitemap, add galleries and perform other functions.

A good thing is that the theme can be fully customized to be used for multiple types of sites, including photography, restaurant and photography sites… Hence, it gives a freedom to customize your website according to your business needs.

Business Elite is a one page responsive WordPress theme with parallax and page scroll effects. It was tested with the most popular ones and is compatible with all WordPress plugins, provides smooth Retina navigation, functional sections, a number of fonts, layouts and a wide variety of built-in page templates. The theme helps to best showcase the company’s offers and services using full-screen lightbox slideshow. It comes with AdSense and Advertisement integration, social sharing options, sample data, and many other options.

3. Add Awesome Plugins

Another benefit of WordPress is that there are number of free and premium plugins that you can use to enhance your site’s functionality.

Here are few to get started.

• Jetpack – includes powerful features to manage a WordPress site much easily.
• WP Security Scan – scans your site to ensure that it is secure from malicious hackers
• Google XML Sitemaps – an XML generating plugin that automatically creates XML sitemaps for Google
• Slider WD – a responsive and SEO friendly WordPress slider plugin that gives an opportunity to add unlimited number of slides to the slider. It allows adding both images and videos to a slider, offers 26 transition and 38 layer effects, time bar and a possibility of slide duplication. You can add hotspots, social buttons, image and media embedded layers to the slides, change the navigation buttons and bullet styles, arrange each layer via user friendly drag and drop interface.
• Form Maker  – a WordPress form builder that  helps to  create both simple forms and survey forms, questionnaires, registration and application forms. It allows to set parameters like fonts, colors and dimensions and provides various customizable themes. The commercial version of Form Maker includes Google Map integration for the geolocation and PayPal integration which allows adding PayPal details to the form.
• Event Calendar WD –  displays unlimited events and calendars in an organized and clear way. This WordPress event calendar provides complete information about events, including options for venues, organizers and  location with Google Maps, etc. You can add tags and categories to your events so that users can easily find needed event.  The plugin comes with a big number of calendar add-ons, including Ticketing add-on, Import-Export, Filtering, iCal and other functional add-ons.
• Shareaholic plugin – allows you to add various social buttons. The default options include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and Tumblr follow and sharing buttons.

4. Install Google Analytics

Installing Google Analytics on your site is the first step to collect data about your website performance and your marketing efforts.

5. Create Important Pages

No matter what your business website type is, your goal will be  to get your visitors like and trust you and in order to establish your credibility you should first of all create some essential pages.

These are:

Homepage – which should be clear, user friendly and with nice design

• “About us” page –  which should explain who you are and what your business stands for
• “Contact us” page – which should provide detailed information how to contact you (via e-mail, phone, address, etc.)
• Products/Services page – where you should provide information about your products and services. In case of many options you had better create categories for each type of product.
• FAQ page – where you can list the frequently asked questions of your customers with the corresponding answers
• A testimonials page – which serves as a great source of social proof for potential new clients.

I have tested all the above mentioned products and passed all these steps and believe that they can take a website to a new level. If you have other good ideas in mind, please, mention them in comments.