WordPress for Government Sites: Structure, Accessibility, Operations

This article is a localized edition of the Japanese original. Read the Japanese original

When you build a local government or public-agency website with WordPress, success depends on settling three things before you think about design: an information architecture that lets residents reach procedure information, accessibility, and roles and operating rules that let multiple departments update the site safely. This article covers page structure and custom post type design, choosing a theme, how to implement the features you need, roles, updates and backups, and a pre-launch checklist, focusing on what you do in the admin screens. Procurement requirements and security policies differ from one organization to another, so follow the rules of the department in charge for final decisions.

What visitors to a public website want

Most people who come to a public website have a clear goal. They want concrete answers, such as "What do I need to register a move into the city?", "When is garbage collected?" or "Until what time is the service counter open?", in as few steps as possible.

So rather than giving the home page over to a long introduction of the organization, it is more useful to make these paths stand out:

• Site search and links to the most-viewed procedures
• Entry points by life event, such as "Moving", "Having a baby", "Raising children" and "Elderly care"
• Location, opening hours and phone numbers of service counters
• Emergency and temporary notices, such as disasters or holiday counters

Public websites also serve a wide range of users: older people, people with visual impairments, people who browse only on a smartphone, and people whose first language is not Japanese. Treat the accessibility work described below not as an "extra feature" but as a premise of the design.

Information architecture: separate pages, post types and taxonomies

You can build the site with WordPress core features alone, but giving each kind of information its own container makes search, listings and per-department management easier.

• Pages: content that rarely changes, such as the organization overview, facility guides, how to use the site, the accessibility policy and the privacy policy
• Posts: news and announcements, split by category into "Living", "Health and welfare", "Disaster preparedness" and so on
• Custom post type "Procedures": content published in the same format every time, such as required documents, the service counter and whether there is a fee
• Custom taxonomy "Life events": lets people find procedures across the site by "Moving", "Marriage", "Having a baby" and so on

With the Custom Post Type UI plugin you can create custom post types from the admin screens. If you prefer to manage them in code, put the code in your own plugin (a small PHP file placed in wp-content/plugins/) rather than in the theme, so the post type does not disappear when you change themes.

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Procedures post type
 */
add_action( 'init', function () {
    register_post_type( 'procedure', array(
        'labels'       => array(
            'name'          => 'Procedures',
            'singular_name' => 'Procedure',
        ),
        'public'       => true,
        'has_archive'  => true,
        'show_in_rest' => true,
        'menu_icon'    => 'dashicons-clipboard',
        'supports'     => array( 'title', 'editor', 'excerpt', 'revisions' ),
        'rewrite'      => array( 'slug' => 'procedure' ),
    ) );

    register_taxonomy( 'life_event', 'procedure', array(
        'labels'            => array( 'name' => 'Life events' ),
        'hierarchical'      => true,
        'show_in_rest'      => true,
        'show_admin_column' => true,
        'rewrite'           => array( 'slug' => 'life-event' ),
    ) );
} );

A common stumbling point is that without show_in_rest enabled you cannot edit the post type in the block editor. After activating the plugin, open Settings → Permalinks and click "Save Changes" to refresh the URL rules. If the new URLs return 404, check this first.

Changing URLs after launch breaks links from other sites, so decide on an alphanumeric slug convention up front (for example /procedure/tennyu/).

Choosing a theme

For a public website, choose a theme on these points rather than on visual flair:

• Headings and landmarks (header, nav, main, footer) are marked up correctly
• Every menu can be operated with the keyboard alone, and the focus position is visible
• The color scheme can be changed easily to secure enough contrast between text and background
• The layout does not break when the text size is increased
• It is still being updated, and you can turn off unneeded features (sliders, animations)

In the WordPress.org theme directory you can filter by the "Accessibility Ready" feature tag. The tag is only a starting point, though: try keyboard operation and screen reading on your candidate themes before deciding. Another easy option with few unnecessary features is to start from a default WordPress block theme (such as Twenty Twenty-Five) and adjust colors and font sizes under Appearance → Editor.

Accessibility

Public websites in Japan generally refer to JIS X 8341-3 as their web accessibility standard, and the widely used edition (as of October 2026) is JIS X 8341-3:2016. Its content is equivalent to the international guideline WCAG 2.0, and many organizations aim for conformance level AA. W3C has since published WCAG 2.1 (2018) and WCAG 2.2 (2023) as Recommendations, so for a new site it is reassuring to consult their success criteria as well. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' "Accessible Public Websites Operation Guidelines" is also a useful reference for drafting a policy and running tests. Editions of the standard and the level required of your organization can change, so check the latest information before you start.

When working in WordPress, keep these points in mind:

• Fill in the "Alternative text" of image blocks; leave it empty for purely decorative images
• Use headings in order, h2 then h3, and never use a heading just to make text bigger
• Write link text that tells people where it goes, such as "Move-in notification form (PDF)", instead of "click here"
• Do not publish information only as PDF; put the main content on an HTML page too
• Set header cells in tables, and do not use tables for layout
• Add captions to videos

For checking, you can use automated tools such as the axe DevTools and WAVE browser extensions or Chrome's Lighthouse. Automated checks find only part of the problems, however, so combine them with keyboard testing and screen readers (NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on iPhone and so on). It is common to publish the test results and your policy as an "Accessibility policy" page.

If you need multiple languages, you can either keep translated pages with a multilingual plugin such as Polylang or WPML, or point visitors to a machine translation service. Machine translation can contain errors, so for important information such as disaster preparedness and procedures, consider providing translations checked by a person.

Required features and how to implement them

• Site search: the default search works across post types, but if you are unhappy with its accuracy, consider a search plugin
• Contact form: build it with Contact Form 7 or WPForms, and require SSL (HTTPS) because submissions contain personal information. Add spam protection to the form and decide how long submissions are kept
• Facility maps: open the location in Google Maps, choose "Share" → "Embed a map", and paste the HTML into a "Custom HTML" block. A map alone does not come through to screen readers, so also write the address and nearest station as text
• Emergency notices: traffic spikes during disasters, so prepare a way to show an announcement at the top of the home page and a lightweight emergency page with few images

Operations: roles, updates, backups and security

A public website is updated by several departments, so role design matters. WordPress has five default roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. If staff in each section write drafts as Contributors and an Editor in the public relations office reviews and publishes them, this approval flow reduces publishing mistakes. Administrators can change themes and plugins, so keep them to a very small number.

Also decide on the following operating rules:

• Updates: apply updates to WordPress core, themes and plugins to production only after verifying them in a staging environment
• Backups: with a plugin such as UpdraftPlus or your server's own features, regularly save the database and files to a separate location, and actually test the restore procedure
• Login protection: use hard-to-guess passwords and two-factor authentication (for example the Two Factor plugin), and if possible restrict the IP addresses allowed to reach the admin screens
• Number of plugins: use only the plugins you need, and replace any that are no longer updated

Procurement and security may be governed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' "Guidelines for Information Security Policies in Local Governments", your organization's own rules, and, when you use cloud services, assessment schemes such as ISMAP. Whether you can adopt WordPress and which servers or clouds you may use are decided by each organization's rules and procurement requirements, so talk to your information systems department early. If you want to shrink the public attack surface, another option is to export static HTML with a tool such as Simply Static, publish that, and keep WordPress itself somewhere reachable only from the internal network.

Pre-launch checklist

• The main procedure pages can be reached from the home page in about three clicks
• Every image has appropriate alternative text (empty for decorative images)
• Menus, forms and search can be operated with the keyboard alone
• Text contrast and zoomed display have been checked
• The accessibility policy, privacy policy and how-to-use page are published
• Accounts have been created for staff by role, and unneeded accounts deleted
• A backup has been taken and restored once as a test
• If URLs changed from the old site, 301 redirects are in place
• Staff have walked through the procedure for posting emergency information

Summary

• Give top priority to "residents reaching procedure information quickly" on a public website, and make life-event entry points and search stand out
• Using a custom post type for procedures and a custom taxonomy for cross-cutting classification keeps management and display organized
• Build accessibility in from the design stage with JIS X 8341-3 and WCAG as references, and combine automated checks with human testing
• Firm up operations with a Contributor → Editor approval flow, updates applied after testing, and backups whose restore you have tried
• Procurement and security requirements are set by your organization's rules, so coordinate with the information systems department early

• How to improve WordPress accessibility in line with WCAG
• WordPress security basics

Questions about WordPress? The publisher of this site is based in Japan and replies in Japanese. Contact (Japanese)