Building a Niche WordPress Site From Scratch: My 4-Month Process (Research to Launch)

Jotish Kumar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:10:32 +0000

I want to share the actual workflow I followed to build a niche content site on WordPress — not the polished two-minute version, but the real process, including the parts that went wrong before they went right.

Step 1: Niche and keyword research first

Before opening WordPress, I researched "menu"-related niches broadly. I pulled the top 10 ranking sites in different food/restaurant sub-niches, looked at their stats, and mapped out their keyword footprint and search volumes. This gave me a baseline of what "good" looked like in this space before I committed to anything.
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Step 2: Narrowing to a specific niche

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From that research, I picked Al Baik — a well-known Saudi fast-food chain — as my niche. I then researched its different branches across cities to understand the scope of what a complete site would need to cover.
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Step 3: UI/UX before code

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I designed the interface for both desktop and mobile, built prototypes, and tested them before writing a single line of implementation. This step had the most iteration — layout decisions that seemed fine initially broke down under testing, and I redesigned several core pages more than once based on what testing revealed.
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Step 4: Environment setup

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Once the design was locked in, I installed WordPress, set up the theme, and configured the plugin stack needed for the site's functionality and performance.
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Step 5: On-page content structuring

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This was the most detail-intensive phase. I manually cross-referenced Al Baik's official site — every item, every price, every calorie count — and built a section-wise, consistently structured list for the whole menu. Maintaining a uniform structure across every category mattered more than I initially expected; it's what made the later schema and SEO work manageable.
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Step 6: Technical SEO before and after launch

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Before going live, I worked through Core Web Vitals issues and built schema markup for every page. Post-launch, I've kept up a daily review and tracking process rather than treating the site as "done" after publishing.
What the timeline actually looked like
The condensed version above reads clean, but it represents roughly four months of work at 5–6 hours a day. It was not linear. Design issues in particular caused repeated rework, and debugging those often meant learning a new concept from scratch before I could move forward.
The result
That process became AlbaikMenu an independent WordPress site focused entirely on giving accurate, structured Al Baik menu, pricing, and branch information.
If you're building a niche site of your own, my main takeaway: front-load your research and design testing. The bugs and redesigns you hit there are expensive in time, but they save you from bigger structural problems once content and SEO work begins.