How To Efficiently Plan A WordPress Site

The most exciting part of starting a new WordPress project is the beginning. We have a great idea that we want to share with the world. But sometimes, it can feel like a lot to handle.

WordPress offers many plugins that can do almost anything. In fact, the number of plugins added to WordPress has doubled in 2025. So, which plugins should we choose? In this post, we will talk about how we plan to build a WordPress website.

Why We Should Plan a WordPress Site

Planning a WordPress site is very important. It helps stop the project from taking too much time or money. Spending just an hour or two on a simple checklist, like the one we share below, helps us and the client stay on the same page.

We’ve seen many projects get delayed because some parts were not clearly planned. When we plan everything, we know what to expect and avoid sudden changes. We also get a clear task list. We can add these tasks to our project tool to track them easily. This makes building the site faster.

Set Clear Goals for Your WordPress Website

The first thing we need to do is set clear goals for the website. The easiest way to do this is to ask two questions: Where will our visitors come from? What do we want them to do on the website?

If the website is a brochure-style site, we may want people to come from search engines. We might want them to contact us. In that case, we’ll need plugins like Yoast SEO or Gravity Forms.

We might also want to grow an email list or run an online store. Or maybe we’ll get traffic from social media, so we’ll need tools that work with those platforms. We need to write down all these goals clearly. That will help us choose the right tools and plugins for the site.

Goals Defined? Great. Now, Plan the Layout

Once we know our goals, the next step is to plan the layout and think about any special work we might need to do. When building a site, we like to think in terms of templates instead of single pages.

For example, we don’t need a new template for each blog post. If we’re building a website for a law firm, all the services they offer (like Conveyancing or Wills & Probate) can use the same template. This saves time. This might not work the same way if we’re using a page builder, since page builders often treat each page on its own.

We can also think about using custom post types and taxonomies for some parts of the site. For example, on a “Meet the Team” page, each person can be a separate post. That makes it easy to update when someone new joins. Testimonials also work well as custom posts. We can store many of them and show them around the site. Once we’ve figured out the structure of the site and how we’ll build it, we can start working on templates.

Usually, for a simple business site with a blog and team section, we’ll need templates like:

• Home Page Template
• About Page Template
• Contact Page Template
• Blog Post Template (Single)
• Blog Post Template (List)
• Team Member Template (Single)
• Team Member Template (List)
• Catch-All Template

The “Catch-All” template is useful for pages that don’t need much design, like Terms & Conditions or the Privacy Policy. We like to build this first since it’s a good place to start creating the header and footer. We should also think about things like different languages or locations. If we’re working on a large website, using WordPress Multisite might be better than one regular site.

When we’re done, we should have both a WordPress theme and at least one plugin ready to use. We believe that any important feature we want to keep during future redesigns should be in a plugin, not the theme. Things like custom post types or SEO settings should go into a plugin. If the project is large, we might need more than one plugin.

For example, on an ecommerce site, one plugin can handle custom invoices, another can manage vouchers, and another small plugin can help with performance or add simple custom features.

Don’t Forget the Extra Parts!

A good theme and the right plugins are only the start. The website also needs content. If we’re a marketing agency, we may also need to write the content. But what about images? It’s smart to plan who will provide the content and images in advance. If we’re using content from an old site, we should know who will move that content, or at least check if it can be moved easily. Some content systems don’t copy well into WordPress.

Other things to plan include training, who will access the site, and what permissions they’ll have. It’s best to have only a few users with full admin access. When we’re updating an existing site with a new design, one smart way is to set everyone except us as editors or authors. If someone needs more access, they’ll tell us. This approach works really well!

The First Step Comes With Experience

The more we plan and build WordPress sites, the better we get at it. We already know the tools we’ll use for our next 10 or 20 sites, and we don’t change them much. What works well for a law firm will likely work for a cleaning service too.

We have a set of 5 to 10 plugins and 2 to 3 themes we use most of the time. We only add new plugins when needed. These tools are what work best for us, and over time, others will find what works for them too. Having this list ready makes planning and building WordPress websites much easier.