It’s possible to configure your home machine to act, feel, and behave like a web server. You could therefore install WordPress locally and for the inexperienced user, there’s no better way to learn and experiment with WordPress before going live.

• If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress, you can practice installing, configuring, and upgrading WordPress office, without touching your web server.
• You can test changes to your assorted code, theme, or plugins before implementing them online.
• You can produce content whilst offline, allowing you to see how it will appear within your theme once live – great when travelling!

The easiest way to do this is by using XAMPP. The XAMPP Lite version is enough to allow you to install and build an offline WordPress blog.

Further Reading: Installing Xampp and WordPress

When you install any content management system or blog, it’s clear that your website may become susceptible to attack through exploits and vulnerabilities. Fortunately, it’s reassuring that WordPress take this subject fairly seriously, even if it is as themselves aptly describe, a topic with shades of grey.

You can cover the main bases firstly by reading through the official WordPress Codex. However, most of this effort could be in vain unless you ensure that you always try to run the latest version of WordPress. Updates are announced via your WordPress dashboard and can be installed automatically with just a few clicks.

Other than these two points, it’s difficult for to recommend other further reading here, as this topic has been covered so many times over by other blogs across the internet. My only advice would be to be careful what you try to implement. Some security tips can break your site if you not implemented properly – stick to tips that you understand and feel comfortable implementing.

Things can break. Easily. That’s something you don’t want to happen after putting many hours of hard work into your site, so save yourself any headaches and setup a backup procedure. Fortunately this isn’t as daunting as it sounds – there are plugins available that does just this.

I recommend the plainly titled WordPress Database Backup. This plugin can produce a backup immediately, or automatically send you a backup via e-mail on a periodic basis (e.g. weekly). Make sure you know how to restore a backup in case things do go wrong.

One area that sets WordPress apart from other content management systems is it’s expandability through plugins. You’ll find a plugin for almost anything you would commonly want to do with your site, from setting up redirections to adding fancy image effects – all with a few clicks of the mouse. It’s likely that you’ll end up with at a small handful before you even go live.

But, I believe that it’s important to understand that plugins aren’t perfect. Some can introduce ‘bugs’ or security issues into your site, or at worst break it. It’s good practice therefore to check reviews and make backups before installing plugins. Always test your site after activating them.

Plugins are not always compatible with WordPress updates, so never rely on a plugin for your site to function properly. If you did, you could be left with a choice between having a few published security holes languishing on your site, or having your visitors put up with reduced functionality whilst you wait for the plugin author to release an update.

Optimising your site to make your pages load faster is a good idea – if you’ve ever clicked the ‘back’ button when a site doesn’t appear after 5 seconds, you’ll know exactly what this means.

If you only do one thing, I’d recommend installing WP Super Cache. It caches your web pages and serves these for visitors, hence removing the need to build the page from scratch each time and speeding up load time in the process.

Further Reading: 38 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up your WordPress Blog