Before you can name your business or your brand, you need to find an address for it in the online space, and that is the domain name. It is important to think about the domain name because you want something that customers will remember, something that’s easy to type and something that represents your brand.

A big factor to consider when looking for your web-hosting package is future growth of your business. You don’t want to pick something too small. You want to make sure you're getting a platform with enough disk space and resources to scale your business. You don't want to end up in a position where you build yourself into a wall, where there's no growth or you can't expand.

The theme is the look and feel and identity of your site or brand, down to the kind of font and colour you want. The library of components not only makes it quick and easy to do things like building a form for customers to contact you, but also provides consistency across the site. 

You don’t need the perfect launch or the perfect product, you just need to start. One of the features of WordPress that helps with this, is what is called a staging site, which takes a copy of your live site and moves it into a private environment where you can tinker with it and change it until you are comfortable with it.

Backups are very important. You can mitigate what goes wrong as much as you like, but when something actually does go wrong, backups come into play. With one click of a button you can restore the backup and get a known working copy of your website back into the live environment.

Having a fast-moving website that customers can access quickly, 24/7 is fundamental to growing a business in this day and age. Speed is also important for you as a business owner so that you can make changes, release new content and upload products.

It's sometimes very difficult to know what has happened and why and to get the information that you need to either resolve it yourself or contact support and explain it to them. These are big problems that you face when hosting and you must know where you can get the help and the knowledge to address them. 

A staging environment is a safe place to play with things and to make changes. Going through the process allows you as a business owner to understand what you're building and what you have. If you want to start looking under the hood, the staging site gives you the opportunity to do it safely.

Don't be scared to use your own images. Show who you are, show who your brand is. People do pick up on this. Sometimes we get scared that our images don't look as polished as these stock images online, but it is important to be authentic if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Simply put, people want to keep you on their platform and they will make it difficult to move on. That’s a factor to really consider when you're picking your provider. Other platforms will build you into their service and make it difficult to move from, whereas WordPress, being an open framework, doesn't have those challenges.