Top 20 WordPress Tips & Tricks – Full Guide
WordPress is becoming a more user-friendly CMS due to the availability of high-quality themes, plugins, and tools. As a result, more people are turning to it to create informative websites.
WordPress has evolved dramatically over the years, from a simple blog to a CMS that can create virtually any website type. You can use WordPress and many WordPress themes to construct a great website for anything from a personal blog to an e-commerce site to a niche social network. The most popular articles are Divi and Avada, which we’ve looked at and analyzed in-depth in separate pieces here and here.
Granted, this does not suggest that it is a simple platform to create a small company website, and anyone who has used WordPress before knows that it takes some time to get used to. We’ve compiled the best WordPress ideas and recommendations to help you get through the otherwise high learning curve. For small businesses, here are 25 WordPress ideas and tips:
1. Sign Up for Web Hosting First
The most common rookie error is to set up a WordPress account before purchasing web hosting. While it may sound like something a web hosting provider would want you to hear, it is exactly what you should listen to. You will save a lot of time and money if you purchase web hosting initially. Why?
The finest web providers include features like a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and one-click WordPress installation, so your domain, web host, and WordPress website are all connected automatically.
DreamHost one-click WordPress set up.
Looking for a number that features every part, is it advisable to get began? Get a free area title, SSL certificates, and one-click WordPress set up for as little as $2.59 per thirty days with DreamHost. Visit DreamHost
2. Invest within the Right Theme
Your website’s muse is your WordPress theme. It determines how your website seems, how it functions, and how difficult it is to create. As appealing as a free theme may appear, the truth is that paid themes are usually the best option.
Premium themes allow you to start with a website that looks and functions exactly how you want it. This means it requires fewer adjustments, making your life easier and allowing for a faster launch.
Search for WordPress themes on ThemeForest
Need to assist discovering the fitting one? Check out the best WordPress themes for enterprises.
Build for Website positioning
Search engine optimization (Website positioning) typically comes as an afterthought. However, you’ll save yourself a whole lot of time by building it for Website positioning from the beginning. Start by getting a good understanding of your target market, after which analysis your goal key phrases.
From there, set up a website positioning plugin corresponding to Yoast SEO, which lets you already know what it is advisable to do to jot down pages and posts that can be Website positioning-friendly.
Ubersuggest key phrase analyzer
New to search engine marketing? Get all of the information, and it is advisable to rank on Google.
3. Edit WordPress Using a Drag & Drop Editor
Let’s be frank: The WordPress web page editor isn’t user-friendly. As you possibly can discover ways to build web pages with it, you’ll find that the pages seem like a novice weblog post from 1999. That’s not what you need for a knowledgeable website—or any website within the twenty-first century.
Instead, use a web page builder plugin, corresponding to Elementor or Beaver Builder, to rework the web page editor right into a drag-and-drop interface that works equally to web site builders like Wix and Squarespace.
4. Compress Your Images
Compressing pictures sounds technical, but it indeed’s surprisingly easy and requires zero tech experience due to the assistance of free picture optimizer tools corresponding to Compressor.io or plugins, corresponding to reSmush.it.
Compressing pictures is, without doubt, one of the best and best methods to enhance your website load time, which performs a significant function in how well your website ranks in Google. A website that hundreds shortly additionally have a decrease bounce rate, so it’s a win overall.
Compress pictures for WordPress utilizing Compressor.io
5. Create Internal Links on Your Website
Both a critical on-page Website positioning technique and good personal expertise (UX) design apply to incorporate inside hyperlinks in your web pages. This helps inform serps corresponding to Google that your website is a good search outcome on your goal key phrases, and it helps your website guests effortlessly navigate by your website. For instance, think about
YouTube’s “Up Next” column. It creates a rabbit gap of content material, which retains folks engaged and may flip guests into leads or clients.
Internal linking instance from Freshworks
This is an example of minor details that can have a significant effect. Adding ALT tags to all of your images also aids search engines like Google in determining what your website is about. As a result, your website has a better chance of ranking well in search results.
Add ALT tags to photographs, go to the picture block and look in the right-hand column under “Block” for “Image Settings.” There, explain the picture with only a few terms (preferably essential phrases).
How to add ALT textual content to photographs in WordPress
Pro tip: Your ALT description should correlate to your meta description and permalink so that your web page or post content material is constant.
7. Change Your Permalink Structure for Better Website positioning.
The date of your posts is used in the default WordPress permalink structure. On the other hand, most SEO experts think this isn’t the best permalink structure for search engine optimization.
The good news is that you can alter the default configuration. To do so, go to your website’s WordPress dashboard, select “Settings” from the left menu, and then “Permalinks” from the menu that appears. Choose the “Post name” radio button and then “Save Changes” from the drop-down menu.
Update Permalink construction in WordPress: Settings > Permalinks
8. Monitor Your Website Speed
No one, including Google, has the patience to build a slow website. The slower the location, the higher the bounce rate, which can be detrimental to your bottom line. Of course, knowing that your website loads at a snail’s pace are difficult to tell until you examine your site performance.
There’s no excuse for not checking your web page load time when many great (and free) tools are available. Pingdom, for example, is a popular website speed test tool that evaluates and rates your website.
Pingdom free website speed tool
Want to be taught extra about website speed? Check out our article on the best website performance tools to extend your website speed.
9. Design for User Experience
Web design is an issue where nobody notices if it’s good; however, everybody sees it’s unhealthy. The best websites aren’t merely designed to look good. However, to create good personal expertise.
This includes realizing your viewers, giving them seamless expertise to find what they’re searching for, and decreasing website friction. For extra insights, get the whole breakdown on methods to design for UX.
Example of good UX web design
10. Keep URLs Short
Shorter URL addresses make it easier for people to figure out what the content is about quickly. Shorter URLs have also been found to attract more hits than long URLs, so it’s no surprise that they’re becoming more popular among strategic business websites.
On the control panel of WordPress, you can set the URL structure for each article you’re writing. So, while customizing your permalinks, make sure to mention them and, if possible, include your goal key phrases in your URL.
WordPress tip: Keep URLs quick
11. Secure Your Site
Hackers are looking out for WordPress websites with poor safety. Don’t make your website, your corporation, and your clients a goal for online assaults. Instead, defend your website by utilizing a strong password (and no, that very same one you employ for every part doesn’t depend), set up an SSL certificate to guard delicate person information (e.g., contact and cost information), and use a safety plugin, corresponding to Sucuri or Wordfence.
Sucuri WordPress safety plugin
12. Change Your WordPress Login Page URL
Take it a step further and change your WordPress admin login URL while we’re on the subject of website security. That’s correct; you can alter the specific URL (or permalink) of your login page. Why would you do something like that?
Well, each WordPress site creates the same generic login page (for example, yourbusiness.com/wp-admin). This makes it simple for hackers to try to log in if they find hints to your password.
WPS conceal login plugin
13. Limit Your Use of Plugins
Yes, WordPress comes with hundreds of free and useful plugins, but it doesn’t mean you’ll use them all. Having too many plugins can cause a website to slow down, so while they’re supposed to help you, they could instead be working against you.
There’s a good chance you have a couple more plugins installed that you’re not using. Check your installed plugins and turn off any that you aren’t using.
14. Use Custom Permalinks
WordPress’s permalinks used to use the “simple” permalink settings, which looked something like www.example.com/?p=123.
This was damaging to both SEO and user experience.
Thankfully, WordPress now defaults its permalink settings to “day and name,” which looks like www.example.com/2020/01/01/sample-post, assuming you’re installing it today.
This is a considerable improvement. But there’s a catch: your permalink includes the date.
This could lead to complications, such as readers believing your post is no longer relevant after some time has passed. If your content has recently been changed, it could potentially be a problem, but your permalink still shows the previous date.
The solution is to use the permalink option for the post name.
To do so, navigate to Settings > Permalinks and pick Post Name from the drop-down menu.
For SEO purposes, this is the best solution.
15. Reset WordPress as If It’s a New Install (Using WP Reset Plugin)
If you’re building a site, a developer, or even a writer who writes WordPress articles, you may find that you need a fresh WordPress install from time to time to test different things from scratch. This can take a long time, especially if you have to make several new installs regularly.
However, you don’t have to do a full install every time you need a new WordPress installation! WP Reset is a plugin that allows you to reset WordPress as if it were a new installation.
Install the plugin, then go to Tools > WP Reset to use it.
Go to the Reset tab and scroll to the bottom of the page once you’ve arrived. To use the Reset Site button to reset your site, type the word “reset” into the box provided. This will now reinstall WordPress as if it were a fresh new installation.
reset WordPress
This differs from the built-in reinstall function in WordPress, which reinstalls WordPress while keeping your site’s data intact. WP Reset, on the other hand, restores your WordPress installation to its original state. Your username and password are preserved, but everything else has been erased.
Remember that the files in your wp-uploads folder will remain (though they will no longer appear in your site’s media library). To repair this, go to the Tools page of WP Reset and utilize the Clean Uploads Folder function.
Today’s social networking sites are top-rated. Hundreds of millions of people use various social media sites daily, so having your material shareable on all of them makes sense.
Shared Counts is one of the most fantastic plugins for adding social network sharing buttons. It’s a lightweight and essential plugin that lets you add:
Button for Sharing on Facebook
Switch to Pin on Pinterest
Button Yummly
Button for Tweeting on Twitter (using the third-party Twitcount.com API)
Email Exchange (with reCAPTCHA support to prevent abuse)
Total Number of Shares
Button to Print
Button to Share on LinkedIn
17. Improve the Speed of Your Website
According to Google, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, mobile browsers will abandon it. Users browsing from desktops have similar statistics.
As a result, you should speed up your WordPress site. You may improve page speed in a variety of ways, including:
Pick a lightweight theme.
Select a mobile-friendly theme.
Image optimization for the web
Redirects should be minimized.
Make use of browser caching.
Improve the response time of the server
Check out this article on website speed for additional information.
18. Add the Facebook Pixel to your website.
For businesses that use Facebook Ads, this is a must-have. Facebook Pixel is a sophisticated analytics tool that can help you acquire traffic insights and measure and improve conversions from Facebook Ads.
It also allows you to create bespoke audiences based on their age, interests, and geography, as well as retarget people who have previously visited your site.
There are two ways to include Facebook Pixel into your website:
Manually
Using a plug-in
Check out our step-by-step guide on adding Facebook Pixel to WordPress if you want to optimize your campaigns and unlock the full potential of Facebook Ads.
20. Make a backup of your database
Backing up your database regularly will protect it from the majority of threats, such as system crashes and website hacks. You can keep your website safe, quickly restore your database, and avoid problems if something goes wrong with the backups.
As a result, you must back up your data regularly (at least once a week). You can do this manually or with the help of plugins in cPanel.
It’s a straightforward process that allows you to export, download, and store your files. You may then effortlessly import that backup if you have an issue with your site. Check out this step-by-step guide for more information on backing up your WordPress site.
Final Thoughts – WordPress Tips & Tricks
Of course, we’ve included these 101 WordPress tips, tricks, and changes in this article because we believe they’re some of the best WordPress improvements you can do yourself without hiring a developer.
These are minor code tweaks that you can make without risking your website or WordPress template breaking 😉
