More blogs appear online every day. WordPress is the most popular choice when it comes to blogging. WordPress is great but it may also be overwhelming for beginners. If you haven’t used WordPress before, you are sure to find these tips helpful.
Don’t choose a design that’s identical to what others that have a WordPress website use. Although creating an individual design takes more time, it will make your website look more personalized. Make sure your blog emphasizes your individuality.
Spend some time learning about the tools and features WordPress offers bloggers. For example, clicking the Kitchen Sink will give you choices such as importing and formatting posts. You can make use of this to control many elements of formatting.
Try learning all the options and tools you can when you blog on WordPress. It’s important for you to understand what the different features do and how each option improves your webpage. Use this to control a wide variety of formatting elements.
With WordPress, users can easily have video blogging on their site. Although you may have to put in a little more time, you will get rewarded for your effort in the end. Visitors to your site will appreciate how visual a video is. Videos offer perspectives that written content cannot, so they are quite helpful.
Video blogging is easy with WordPress. It can takes some extra preparation time, but it can be worth the effort. A lot of web users are drawn to video blogging because of their personal visual preferences. A video can add interest to the site, and it is a great tool.
Get rid of special characters from the URLs of your blog posts. They make life hard for search engines when they spider the site, so get rid of them. Attempt to keep your URLs simple for visitors as well.
When you take time to adjust a WordPress blog, you may not realize that your changes weren’t saved at all. This is most often not the case. Clear the browser cache to avoid this issue. Just press and hold your “shift” key while refreshing your browser and your changes should appear.
Unless you change it, posts will appear chronologically. If you want to rearrange some posts, you will have to modify the date of your post. In order to do that, open one of your posts and you will be able to see the date at the top right hand corner. Click the date, edit it, and save it to reorder its position.
Posts are filed chronologically by default. Change the date if you want to rearrange the list. First, open the posts and look for the date in the top-right corner. Click on the date, change it and then save your post in order to change its position.
Do many people comment on posts you write? In these instances, it might be hard to navigate the comment section. A plugin can separate your comments into pages. This makes for a more organized site that is easier to navigate.
Do your posts have many comments? If so, it can be hard to weed through all of these comments. A plugin can separate your comments into pages. Not only will your blog look more organized, but it will also make navigation a lot easier.
If you spend more time on your pictures, your search engine ranking will increase. Always remember to add alternative text and title tags. If someone uses Pinterest to pin your image, the title will be captured by the pin.
Make your greeting engaging on the top of your WordPress home page. A good greeting is more intimate for visitors and can relate to how this visitor found your blog. This is much less robotic, which makes things accessible through the plugin.
Make sure you have a unique greeting. This helps your visitors feel more welcome and interested, and the messages can be personalized depending on how the visitor got there. This males you appear less robotic and you can use the Great Box plugin for this.
Allow users to email your articles if they want to. This is important to promote exposure, since many readers cannot use social media sites at work. The WP-Email plugin is great for this.
Your username should never be “admin” or anything similar. When you are showing as “admin”, your site has a higher chance of being targeted by bots. This poses a real threat to security. Any user names on your users page that are “administrator” or “admin” should be removed. Choose another username altogether.
Security is key to a WordPress site, so be sure to keep passwords to yourself. On top of that, only download plugins from sites which are reputable and check the reviews before you install anything. If your are hacked or infected with malware, all your hard work on your site will be lost.
Keep your WordPress password secret. Additionally, only use reputable sites when downloading plugins. It just takes one instance of malware to mess up all your hard work.
Maintain organization with your media from the start. Uploading images without thinking of organization can cause havoc to your site. Instead, make folders and organize your pictures that way. Further down the line when you need to find the image, this will make things easier.
Be certain that your plugins are always up to date. Your WordPress plugins are a terrific way to add unique power to your website. Just like anything else, though, there are regular updates available for most of them. If you fail to update your plugins, you may miss key upgrades and the plugin may even stop working completely.
Make sure that your plugins remain up to date. You can really improve your website with WordPress plugins. But as is the case with most software, they are subject to updates. If you don’t wish to keep up with the update installation, you may miss important upgrades, or they may stop working.
Search Engine
Minimize the number of WordPress plugins you use. While they can be very valuable, they also have a tendency to make your load time much longer. They can slow down your site to the point that will negatively affect your search engine rank. Optimized websites perform best in search engine rankings.
Only install WordPress plugins you will actually use. The more you have, the more time it will take for your site to load. They can slow down things considerably, impacting your search engine rank. A faster website tends to be higher up in the search engine results.
Try a linking plugin to help join your posts so that readers see a greater amount of content. These plugins will add 3 to 5 links underneath each post according to the pertinence of tags on the posts of your site.
Make sure the WordPress you use on the site is always the updated version. Updates usually contain patches that solve security issues and get rid of vulnerabilities. Using an older version of WordPress opens up your site to malware attacks. Be diligent about looking for and installing the updates as soon as they become available.
Manually approving comments is the way of the past. Install Akismet or something similar to do this for you. You’ll get emails when comments are made, but you can also uncheck manual approval. This will end up saving you quite a lot of time.
Do not go without proper backup when blogging. It is important for your blog to be backed up regularly. There are some WordPress plugins available for this purpose, such as Xcloner. Back up the blog however you wish, but be sure to do it in multiple locations. It would truly be difficult to start from scratch if your blog disappeared one day.
If you’d like to choose a header, avoid a drop-down menu. Use keyboard shortcuts instead. Press down the CTRL button, followed by a number ranging from one to six. If you frequently use headers, this saves lots of time.
You can schedule blog posts using WordPress. You can have a post added to your blog at any time, and you don’t even need to be near your computer. Find the Publish box on your Edit screen. Beneath that, look for “Publish Immediately.” Input the military time, day, month, and year that you want your post to be published. When the correct time and date are on your screen, select ‘ok’. Make sure the information on the “Schedule For” display screen is correct and then hit “Schedule”.
Let readers comment on your blog. This engenders some community spirit, and you get to know a bit more about your readers. Don’t worry about spammers, there are plugins that allow you to screen comments before allowing them to be seen on your site.
Approving comments manually is very outdated. Akismet does it for you. Make sure that “manual approval” does not have a check mark beside it so that the comments go up automatically. You won’t be saving any time if you do not.
Use a variety of blog authoring tools. Is the WordPress dashboard unappealing to you? Try a blog authoring program like Windows Live Writer. A lot of tools are out there that are WordPress compatible but far more efficient. Give some of them a try, and you will surely find just the right tools for you.
Does your WordPress page look cluttered? Just disengage a few of the boxes on your page. To do this, go to the top of WordPress’s window and go to “screen options”. Click this option, which enables you to choose which boxes you want.
Highlight your own comments. It’s very common for users to express opinions and ask questions in the comment section. Don’t let your response to a question get lost. Use a different color to highlight the comments and draw attention to them. This allows you to find and recognize them easily.
If you need a host to keep your WordPress blog on, pick one that comes with installation tools that are compatible with WordPress. This will help you save the trouble of creating a separate database. With a simple click, your host will be able to create your blog domain and your database.
Use the “Read More” button for lengthy posts. No one wants to click on to your blog’s front page and be greeted by a huge wall of text. Let your readers have the option of clicking to read more. Failing to do so could make your blog look uninviting and cluttered.
Experiment with a number of blogging platforms. Don’t find WordPress’ dashboard particularly helpful? Authoring programs designed for blogging sites may be the answer. There are several tools that work with WordPress that make your workflow more efficient. Try some out, and choose the one making your work easier.
Keep in mind, it isn’t necessary to do everything on your site by yourself. If you can bring someone hired or a volunteer, you can save time by doing work done correctly the first time. If that’s the case, you should have this person join you.
If you would like to do work on your website without making live changes, copy your blog to another folder and work on it there. This helps you avoid mistakes that could cost you money or your site.
Regularly backup your site by using WordPress’s Export function. This will make sure that your site has a database of historical backups, allowing you to choose an older, clean copy of your site if you get hacked, or the most recent backup in case of a server crash.
Ideally, you learned a bit about using WordPress from this article. Sure lots of people use WordPress, but few understand it to the level you now do. These tips will help you out in a great way.
When using WordPress EXPORT function, be sure to backup your files and images. Log into your server control panel or FTP and copy the folders and their contents.