WordPress Tips And Tricks
There’s a lot you can do with WordPress, from creating an impressive blog to building a fully functional website. But how do you get started? And once you have, where do you go next?
In this post, I’ll share some of my favorite WordPress tips and tricks to give you a head start. They are grouped into 4 main categories, each focused on a certain aspect of your website and business.
Before we start with tips, check this article if you’re interested in WordPress Website Builders.
WordPress Speed and UX tips
WordPress is a great platform to build websites on, but sometimes they can get slow. If your pages take too long to load, your UX (User Experience) will be greatly affected. Even Google hates slow websites and keeps them off the first positions.
If you want to improve your WordPress website speed and get at SEO, you can try the following tips.
1. Compress JPEG images
Most images on a website are usually in JPEG format. This file format is convenient for web designers and users because of its high compression ratio. However, it is not good for your website’s speed as it takes the browser a long time to download them.
Optimizing your images will improve your site’s page speed significantly. You can use optimization tools such as WP Smushit, Imagify, or ShortPixel which offer lossless and automatic compression of JPEG images.
These tools allow you to compress your images without losing quality. The files will be smaller in size but retain all the relevant details.
2. Lazy Load images
Lazy loading images simply means that they will not be loaded on your pages until the user scrolls to that section of the page. This can greatly boost your website’s speed as the browser doesn’t have to download the images before it can display the text.
All you have to do to enable this feature is to install Lazy Load by WP Rocket. The plugin does all the work right after you activate it.
Combine lazy loading with compressed JPEG images and see your website load almost instantly.
3. Minify CSS and JavaScript Files
By default, WordPress includes a lot of unnecessary CSS stylesheets for the different features it supports. All this unused code slows down your website by increasing its file size.
A sure way of boosting your website’s loading speed is to minify your CSS and JS files. This is extremely easy as all you have to do is to install a free plugin called WP Super Minify.
According to the developer: “This plugin combines, minifies, and caches inline JavaScript and CSS files on demand to speed up page loads, using Minify PHP Framework.”
4. Install a caching plugin
WordPress is an amazing platform that allows you to do anything you can think of with a website, but it also has some limitations. The biggest one is speed.
WordPress was not built from the ground up with performance in mind, and even on a decent hosting plan, it can be slow if you don’t optimize it properly. With a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache (it’s free), the difference can be staggering!
WordPress Marketing Tips
As a human being, you have a certain amount of time every day to spend on creating content. It’s a very limited resource, so you need to spend it wisely.
You don’t have enough time to write high-quality articles AND do social media marketing AND outreach AND email marketing. Most people think they can just spend their time on the most important thing: writing articles. But that is not how it works.
Here are a few tips that can help you get more traction and increase traffic to your blog posts (and pages in general):
1. Boost your organic traffic with Yoast
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. It’s also pretty easy to use and customize. But because it’s been so popular for so long, there are tons of WordPress websites out there competing for top spots in search results.
The thing is, it’s not enough to have a cool-looking site with helpful information if your competitors have even cooler-looking sites with even more helpful information. If you want to create a successful WordPress business, you have to get on top of your competitors.
The best way to achieve this is to optimize your website for SEO. Here’s where Yoast comes into play. It helps you automate this process and gives you personalized tips and recommendations based on your content.
With Yoast, you’ll get a better chance at outranking competitors all while delighting users with your content.
2. Capture and send emails with Sendinblue
Email marketing is one of the most direct ways to connect with people. It allows you to easily market your products and services to your customers or subscribers, request feedback, and build relationships.
The great thing about email marketing is that it can be accomplished by anyone with a website.
To get started with email marketing you need to do 3 things:
- Set up an email campaign;
- Capture email addresses;
- Send emails to these addresses.
The fastest way to do so is by using the Sendinblue plugin. It blends seamlessly with your WordPress website and helps you get started with email marketing in a matter of minutes.
Bear in mind that the faster you implement an email marketing strategy the more emails you will get.
3. Get social media engagement with Grow Social
Social media provides all the benefits of face-to-face marketing, but with a larger audience. It is an ideal marketing platform for businesses of all sizes, and it is free to use. The best part of all this is that you can get your readers to share your blog articles without doing anything besides installing a plugin.
If users find your articles interesting and worth reading then they will definitely want to share them with your friends. Your job is to make this process as easy as possible.
All you have to do is to install the Grow Social plugin and activate it. The free version lets you display share buttons in 4 different locations on your blog articles. You can also configure these buttons to only appear on specific post types.
WordPress Security Tips
Security is vital for any website, whether it is a business site or a personal blog. As WordPress continues to be the most popular content management system in the world, there are an increasing number of threats to your website.
To protect against hackers, you need to take some basic security steps. Some of these steps may seem a little over-the-top, but if you have something really important on your site it may be worth the extra effort to beef up your security.
Your first line of defense is running the latest version of WordPress. This prevents a lot of common exploits that hackers would use to break into your site. In addition, you should always keep your theme and plugins updated to reduce the risk even further.
Some hackers will try a DDoS attack on your website. This means they will try to make your website unavailable for users, basically taking it down. To protect against this type of attack you can use a CDN service with built-in security. There are a lot of options on the market but the best one out there is Cloudflare. It does require a bit of technical expertise to set up, so if you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself you should consider hiring a developer. This can involve an upfront cost but it’s definitely worth it in the long run.
Hackers will also try to steal your login credentials and log you out of your dashboard. To mitigate this risk you should use a strong username and password combination. If you are currently logging in with the “admin” username and “admin” password be sure to immediately change them.
Last but not least, you will need a firewall and malware scan plugin. Wordfence Security is one of the most complete solutions out there, plus it’s free.
If you follow all these tips your website will be protected and hackers will have an extremely difficult time breaking it.
WordPress Backups Tips
At the end of this article, I want to share a very important tip that most people choose to ignore – backing up your website.
Let’s face it, the inevitable can happen, it always does. Even the most secure websites on the web can be hacked. Databases can be accidentally deleted. Updating a plugin can break your website.
What will you do if this happens to your site? If you don’t want to lose all your investment and hard work then constantly backing up your website is of utmost importance.
This process is rather straightforward if you use the right plugin. Here’s where UpdraftPlus comes into play, it’s the most installed backup plugin and the best-rated one with over 5.3k 5 stars reviews.
It lets you back up your website on a plethora of platforms including Dropbox, Google Drive, and even your email.
Make sure you save yourself a nasty headache and start backing up your website consistently, you may never know when the inevitable happens.
Learn how to go beyond a simple website with the Ultimate WordPress Guide.
Further reading – Useful WordPress snippets.