Surely you’ve at least heard about WordPress. More than likely, you’ve even read a blog from someone using this platform or have even messed around with WordPress at some point on your own. If you wish to know more details about just how much this platform can deliver, keep reading.
Be sure to add an author biography to each blog post on boards where many bloggers are posting. In this way, each blogger gets proper credit and it is easier for readers to know who posted what at a glance. Furthermore, readers will tend to stay on your page if they can get all the information they need in one place.
If you want to easily be able to search through the media you upload, such as videos or photos, put it all into a single folder through WordPress. To do this, go into Settings & Media and then uncheck the box which sets WP to sort your media into folders based on the date.
Set a publishing time for your blog posts. When editing an article for publication, you can select when it will be published. It’s a good idea to set regular updates for a specific date and time. To really stay on top of keeping your blog up to date, put your blog posts in ahead of time and let WordPress post them to your blog for you.
Make sure you have a landing page. This will ensure that visitors arrive at a specific page instead of directing them right to your most recent posts. A landing page will help your site gain an air of authenticity and helps it to look a little more professional than it would have otherwise.
Don’t forget to use spellcheck. It may seem obvious now, but many people forget to do it. When using the WordPress editor to post to your blog, make sure you take advantage of its spellcheck function. Even if you have already proofread your post, a quick and simple spellcheck couldn’t hurt.
Remember to make good use of the footer area at the bottom of your WordPress blog pages. In this area, you can include additional information about yourself and/or your copyright. You can also add a link to another page if you wish. Different themes give you more use of this area, so choose your themes carefully to maximize the value of your page footers.
Look into other themes for your WordPress blog. Sure WordPress comes preinstalled with a few excellent themes, but there are many more options out there. Many are free and then there are premium themes as well. These premium themes are very well designed and let you add more advanced aspects to your blog with ease, such as e-commerce plugins.
You are unable to change the image sizes yourself if your site has its own gallery plugin. The gallery plugin automatically sets the sizes of the images, and you don’t actually have any control over this. If you really need the image sizes changed, ask your developer to help you change the settings.
Want to change authors on a post? Just edit the post and click on “Screen Options”. Next, choose the Author and then choose whomever you want to become the author of the post. Next, click “update” or “publish” to finish the change and have it go live on your website and you’re done.
If you want to have a landing page as the front page of your site, you will first need to create a “home” page and then a second page for your blog. Next, go into Reading Settings and click the static page radio button. Choose your home page for the front page and your blog page for the posts page.
Most visitors to your WordPress site will have some type of social media account, whether it is Facebook or Twitter. If they see something and want to share it on their accounts, you want to make that process as easy as possible. Therefore, download a plugin that allows for social sharing.
Be sure to use a robust spam plug-in to filter out spam and bad content. People with ill intentions are always looking for ways to spam a blog for link-building purposes. This kind of spam will create a bad impression on your blog because your legitimate readers will think that your blog has security issues.
If you find that writing new posts is cluttered and confusing because of all the stuff on your page, clean it up! Use the Screen Options link to choose what shows up on the composition page and what remains hidden. Many of your plugins may add content you don’t want, so remove it there.
Nobody wants to manually approve comments anymore. Instead, Akismet can do this for you. Don’t bother with manual approval. Otherwise, you are not saving any time.
Always back up your WordPress files and database regularly. Although your website has backups, they may not do backups as frequently as you would like. You can find plugins that can make the backup process much easier. When you have your files and database backed up, you can easily restore your site if anything happens to it.
If your WordPress site is running rather slowly, consider adding a caching plugin. These plugins speed up page loads by caching pages that are rarely changed. This means that your site can increase in speed by 20% to 30% just with the plugin installed. There are a few different options, but W3 Total Cache is very popular.
A great commenting plugin that is useful for WordPress is Disqus. This free commenting system works well with its API. You have the ability to import and back up your comments with it. It also adds essential SEO to your comments so that the search engines can index them easier.
If you had any WordPress Experience prior to reading this article, then you were already aware that it’s not a complicated platform at all. However, there is much to know and explore so that you can do more with WordPress, and this article has given you some assistance. Get ready to put those new skills to the test.
