If you’re joining the growing WordPress family, check out our list of tips and tricks for WordPress beginners. It’ll make your life easier, and your website better.
1 - Choose Your Hosting
This covers a wide range of tips in itself, but finding the right hosting provider for your WordPress site is absolutely essential for success. Without hosting, your site can’t go live on the internet.
That’s not the only reason it’s important. Your hosting provider needs to give you enough resources to handle your site traffic, avoid crashes and downtime as much as possible, and give you fast site speeds.
2 - Watch Theme Demos
When you’re choosing your theme, it’s a good idea to make use of theme demos. This way, you can view a theme – and sometimes even try it out – before committing to it.
Your theme forms the basis of your website’s design, so it’s important to choose one that you like, that suits your project, and that you will actually enjoy using. Yes, you can customize WordPress, but unless you’re skilled in coding or are working with a developer, it’s sensible to start out with a suitable theme.
3 - Install an SEO Plugin
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is critical for the success of any website. Without SEO, your site won’t rank highly in the search results – not ideal for growing your audience! Unless you’re a real tech pro, and perhaps even then, you’ll probably need a helping hand with your SEO.
Installing an SEO plugin can make your life much easier, and your site much more successful. These plugins can analyze your content and keywords, and manage all the technical stuff like sitemaps and robots.txt for you.
4 - Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a well-known tool for tracking performance, recording data and giving insight into how people are interacting with your site. This makes it an invaluable tool for measuring your site’s success.
The best (and easiest) way to install Google Analytics is with the plugin MonsterInsights. Both Google Analytics and MonsterInsights come with free versions. You’ll need the tracking code given to you when you create your Google Analytics account, and MonsterInsights will guide you through the installation process.
5 - Pick Your Theme Carefully
Always read the reviews, pick one that suits your project, and don’t be afraid to pay for a premium theme. It’s essential you pick a mobile-responsive theme – if you don’t, you’ll run into problems with Google down the line, and give your mobile users a poor online experience
Some themes come pre-packed with features. While this might be appealing, be careful – these themes can really slow your site speeds down, which is a big issue you really want to avoid.
6 - Compress Your Images
Compressing an image reduces the file size, helping your site run faster and saving you precious storage space.
Fast site speed is like the holy grail of running a website. Speeding up your loading times can breathe new life into otherwise dead pages, and both visitors and search engines love a fast-loading site. That’s why you must always compress your images and videos.
7 - Limit Your Plugins
Plugins add functionality to your website. Unless your theme comes with built-in features, you’ll need plugins to add features like contact forms, newsletters, or live chats to your site. However, having too many plugins can slow your site down, and even put your site’s security at risk.
8 - Set Up Your Gravatar
Gravatar? What’s that?
Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. It’s a service that integrates with WordPress to basically provide the user picture attached to your account.
9 - Stay Updated
You’ve probably heard of the famed WordPress updates, but what are they really all about? WordPress updates its software regularly to keep its platform secure. Minor updates occur around every two weeks, while major updates happen roughly once a month.
10 - Manage Your Comments
Comments are a great way for your readers to interact with you and your content and can create a real community on your site. You can manage your comments through your WordPress admin.
11 - Keep Your Content Clutter-Free
It can be easy to get carried away with all the fancy widgets, banners, ads, and more that you can put on your site. But while it might be fun for you, it’s not so fun for your readers.
Cluttering up your site can distract from your content – or even worse, make people reluctant to stay on the page at all. Take a look through your sidebar and footer, and make sure that any widgets are contributing to the page – usually, less is more!
12 - Edit Your WordPress Permalinks
Permalinks are simply permanent links (get it?), such as the address of your website, or the addresses of your individual blog posts. WordPress automatically creates permalinks when you create a new post, but the default settings are clunky, and not very SEO friendly.
13 - Put Safety First
Security should be one of your main priorities when it comes to running your WordPress website. We’ve already mentioned updating your site to keep any nasty bugs or hackers out, but there’s more to it than that.
14 - Use Title Tags and Alt Text
Images can make a website. They keep readers engaged, highlight key points, and generally lift a page out of dreariness and into the light. But they don’t just look good – they can also work hard for your site behind the scenes.
When you’re adding an image to your site, make sure to add a title, and some alt text.
15 - Set Featured Images
It’s a good idea to set featured images for your posts. This appears as the thumbnail image next to your blog post whenever it appears on another page or is linked to on other sites or via social media.
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