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Following is a non-comprehensive list of things to create a highly functional website for a side project.

Page structuring

• Structure the content with a <title> & 1 <h1>, <h2> - <h6>: for sub headings.
• Always have an About section.
• Configure to display 404 page for the missing/invalid pages.
• Check for a11y assistance using axe DevTools and Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

Content

• Images: Compress the images for size.
• Images: Set alt texts.
• Add external links with rel="nofollow".

Social

• Enable RSS feeds for your site. If you want to generate a dynamic feed, check How to generate a custom RSS feed from scratch programmatically.
• Add your other social(Twitter, Github, Instagram, LinkedIn) links using:<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="social URL>"/>.
• If you are collecting email, secure your form with csrf tokens.

Server configurations

• Enable https using lets encrypt.
• Enable caching at the server side for static assets like image, js and CSS by adding location ~* \.(css|gif|jpg|jpeg|js|png|ico)$ { expires 365d; } in site's nginx config.
• Redirect the non-https traffic to https version.

Performance

• Use CDN-minified versions for bootstrap and other widely used dependent libraries to leverage browser caching.
• Minifying and serving the site's own static assets like JS and CSS.
• Verify the page performance on Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix.

SEO

• Set author name as meta: <meta name="author" content="YOUR_NAME_HERE">.
• Add robots.txt and updated sitemap.xml to the site.
• Verify site ownership on both Google and Bing webmaster tools.
• In webmaster consoles: Add all variants of domain - http, www.