Designing and building a WordPress website is much more than just creating content. You'll want to keep your site running efficiently and smoothly, user-friendly, and well-protected. The following aspects are the most critical: performance, page builders, admin enhancements, and security. Mastery of these will help you create a WordPress site that excels in speed, design, usability, and safety.

Performance: Speed Is Key to Everything Site performance is directly proportional to user experience and search engine rank. Slow websites can lead to high bounce rates and lost conversions, making performance optimization a top priority for any WordPress site.

Ways of Speeding Up WordPress Performance

1. Use a Caching Plugin: Install plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, which store static versions of your content, thus saving the server from performing more work that needs to be done while at the same time speeding load times.
2. Optimize Images: Heavy images can slow your site greatly. Use image optimization plugins like Smush or Imagify to compress images without losing their quality.
3. Avoid Too Many Plugins: Limit the number of plugins on your site; too many can bog your site down. Disable and delete unnecessary plugins.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDNs host your website's assets on servers around the world, reducing load times for visitors from other parts of the globe.

Page Builders: Web Design Made Easy With page builders nowadays, it is easy to think that users could just design their WordPress website through drag-and-drop, sans any coding. Not that using a page builder was not awesome enough but now, with these tools, anyone is empowered to create professionally looking websites.

1. Popular Page Builders
2. Elementor Pro: It is considered one of the most popular WordPress page builders. It features a live editor, a large template library, and customization capabilities.
3. Divi Page Builder: Divi's visual drag-and-drop builder is best for creating unique layouts with ease, so great for users who take full control over the appearance of a site.
4. Beaver Builder is famed for writing clean code and being flexible, and solidly built to work well with both devs and beginners seeking a reliable and customizable builder.

When selecting a page builder, consider design needs, ease of use, and how much customization you wish to achieve. The right builder goes a long way in streamlining web development.

Admin: Power-Up the Dashboard Experience Your WordPress dashboard is essentially mission control for your website. If the dashboard can be turned into a more powerful tool, it means you can manage your site better, easily over time as your site scales.

1. Top Admin Customizations:
2. Custom Admin Menus: Plugins like Admin Menu Editor will allow reordering, hiding, or renaming items within your WordPress admin, rendering the section more accessible and cleaner leading to more ease in your workspace.
3. User Activity Monitoring: WP Activity Log keeps an audit log of what's going on in your WordPress site, giving you some easy methods to get visibility about changes that are taking place so you can improve the security of a website.
4. Advanced Custom Fields (Custom Fields): The Advanced Custom Fields Pro adds flexible content management options from the admin panel, enabling even the most complex content structures to be managed without cluttering the dashboard.
5. Looking after your specific needs can also allow for better content focus rather than technical administration.

Secure Your WordPress Site When it comes to administering a WordPress site, security is one of the primary concerns. Given that WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, it's also among the most commonly targeted by hackers. Make sure to implement proper security measures to shield your site and data from users.

1. Security Practices That Need to Be Followed:
2. Install a Security Plugin: Some of the best-recommended plugins are Wordfence Security and Sucuri Security, which protect with firewalls, malware scanning, and security monitoring.
3. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): This will make sure that even if your password is compromised, an unauthorized user won't be able to access your account.
4. Updates: Always keep your WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date. In these updates, very important security patches usually come.
5. Limit Login Attempts: Use plugins such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, which will help in limiting brute force attacks. It limits the number of logins to your website per one IP address.
6. Enable SSL: SSL certificates encrypt data transferred between your site and your visitors, so it is secure and boosts your SEO rankings.
7. Prioritizing security on the WordPress site will guarantee it remains free from attacks, data breaches, or unauthorized access.

Conclusion Building and managing a site on WordPress has a lot more to offer than only writing. Optimized performance will enhance the experience for users and work greatly to your advantage for SEO. On the other hand, page builders tend to simplify the design process and still give tremendous outcomes in the end. The user dashboard brings with it management enhancements to the website, and robust security so that your website and user data is not vulnerable.