Eight important things to do when building your WordPress website

1. Secure Your Login

Use a strong password and change in periodically. Use a password application like Dashlane to store your passwords. All you then have to remember is one master password.
Also install the Limit Login Attempts Reloaded WordPress plugin (or if you’re using Jetpack, enable the Protect module) to limit and block automated repeated password entry attempts on your login form.

2. Setup Backups

Regular backups is imperative to save your work and website. This serves as protection during hacking attempts and website crashes. Always do a backup every time before installing a plugin. Check your backup software that restoring can be doen when needed without a hitch. Here are some suitable backup plugins.
▪ BackUpWordPress – free plugin.
▪ UpdraftPlus – free and paid plugin.
▪ VaultPress – Paid service with daily automatic backups.
▪ BackupBuddy – Popular paid backup.
To be safe consider running two backups. Website hosts may also have a backup feature that may be utilised to do automated backups, or alternatively setup reminders in your calendar to remind you to generate and download a backup of your website periodically.
Recommended: Best Backup WordPress Plugins According to 21 Pros

3. Do Regular Updates

Your WordPress theme and plugin updates include new features and bug fixes. Bug fixes are important for security reasons. Always do regular updates. To ensure you stay updated you can install the WP Updates Notifier plugin, and the ManageWP Worker plugin to update multiple websites all at the same time and from a single location source.

4. Check Your Settings

General Settings
Go to Settings > General and set the settings suite your website. Important here is setting the Tagline and Timezone settings.
Enable Pretty Permalinks
Your WordPress websites’ URL’s will look like either of the below. The first is more accepted because it search engine friendly, and are easily remembered.
http://yourname.com/about-us/
http://yourname.com/?p=237
Go to Settings > Permalinks and choose anything but “Plain” (formerly called “Default”). A common choice is “Post name”. Nearly all web hosts support mod_rewrite which is required for “Pretty Permalinks”. Read Using Permalinks for more information.

5. Prevent Comment Spam

Having comments enabled for your posts or pages will open opportunity for you to receive spam submissions. The following two steps will remove / reduce risk of excessive spam.
1 Go to Settings > Discussion and configure these options:
2 Install the Antispam Bee plugin (and use the default configuration).
New comments will be checked if it is spam and it will get marked as spam or be put into a moderation queue. An email will be sent to you when a new comment requires moderation so that you can check if it is spam or not. After a users’ comment has been approved once, they become trusted and thereafter will not require anymore moderation.
Alternatively use Akismet.

6. Welcoming Search Engines

Go to Settings > Reading and look for Search Engine Visibility. Set “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” to: “not checked”.
It is highly beneficial to install the search engine optimisation plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast, even if only using the default settings. WP Kube recently asked 40 experts what their favorite plugins are and SEO by Yoast came up as number one.

7. Moving Website and Needing to Update Your URLs?

If moving your website from one location to another please consider the below. WordPress stores full URL’s for links and images in content, menus, custom fields etc. After moving ensure they’re not still pointing to your previous location. To correct website names use the Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin (NB is to make a backup first). However please note that this plugin does not update widgets so please do those manually.

8. Switching Themes and Needing to Resize Your Images?

Different themes uses images sized specifically for their design. When uploading an image, WordPress generates a copy of the image that is specially cropped and resized for the active theme. Images that got uploaded before you switched to a new theme may therefor not have the optimal sizes generated. No worries, you may re-upload specific images, or install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. After installing this plugin go to Tools > Regen. Thumbnails to resize all your images in one shot.