New wordpress website

[Plumber08]

First time messing with wordpress well it took me forever. I'm just lost I dont know what to do next. Been reading tons about it. I'm a plumber not a web guy I guess. Any help please? Thanks for your time

 

[JoyHawkins]

Do you want to list your website so that people here can give you some specific advice?

 

[Plumber08]

Unclog Drains | Plumber | Mason City,IA | A-1 Drain Cleaning

If you're looking for the best drain cleaning service in Mason City and surrounding area call 641-583-1431 with over 20 years experience in plumbing, sewer & drain cleaning. Quality work for a fair price.

A-1draincleaning.com

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Hi @Plumber08

Firstly, congratulations on taking on this kind of project. I remember my first experience with Wordpress and yes, it was daunting. Good news is it gets easier the more you work with it.

My first recommendation would be to go with a paid theme, the free ones can be hit or miss technically. Without lots of knowledge you won't know which ones are the hits.

I personally use Genesis as the base theme for most websites, and then pick a child theme to go with it. I don't get a commission for recommending them. https://www.studiopress.com/

If you're going to blog, I recommend you set yourself a limit of 5-ish categories (general topic classification). Tags (more specific label)I don't limit apart from not creating a tag that would have only one entry over time.

Secondly, I'll give you a list of plugins I usually start with (these are all freebies):
- Yoast SEO - used to be simpler, but it gives you lots of good configuration options. Be sure to turn off indexing of tags, and yes, go ahead and index categories.
Generally speaking, the defaults for the plugin will be good to go.
- Broken Link Checker - sits in the background and gives you a notice if you accidentally include or break a link in your site which gives visitors an error
- Genesis Simple Edits (if you're using Genesis) - makes it easy to update some commonly edited areas that are not easy to edit.
- Ninja Forms (or any other contact form tool) - make it easy for people to email you from your website. I don't get heaps of spam through Ninja Forms, that's why I recommend it. Am I tempting fate saying that? ;-)
- Updraft Backups - gotta have. Automatically backs up your website to email, dropbox, google drive, etc. Easy to restore from a backup. I guarantee it will save your bacon at some point.
- WPFeatherlight - if you want images on your site to be clickable and make a bigger version for people to see the details.

You could also head over to udemy and see what courses are there for WP. Can't recommend a specific on there, check the course reviews. There are some free ones there that might be good to start with, and as your knowledge grows, so can your investment.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I noticed your homepage title tag is targeting "north iowa". I'd check to see if anyone searches that. It's more likely that people would search the city or county name. I'd also add "near you" to the title tag.

The site speed is also really poor. You might want to have a developer look into making that better.