Using WordPress is not child’s play. If you lack familiarity with this platform, any advice is beneficial to you. You will become a better blogger when you take the time to learn about WordPress. The following advice can help get you started.
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.
Utilize Alt and Title. When you are adding images to your posts, don’t forget to use titles and alt text. This will let you add more SEO phrases and will let users that block images know what they are missing.
WordPress is something that people can use to get video blogs onto their sites. While this might take a little extra preparation on your part, it is worth it. Visuals grab your readers’ attention. A video is able to show people what words cannot, and that is why it’s so powerful.
Sidebars are generally packed full of useless information. To help streamline them and only include information that your visitors want, navigate to Appearance & Widgets. Remove everything from your sidebar that does not get more people on your list, make visitors take an action or make you money. By paring down your sidebar, your WordPress site will become successful.
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.
Get to know your WordPress WYSIWYG editor. When you write a new post, you’ll see a small bar that goes across the text input area. This is your WYSIWYG editor – meaning whatever you push will happen to whatever text you have highlighted. If you choose bold in the editor, the text you have chosen will become bold. It’s similar to using Microsoft Word.
Don’t forget to spellcheck your WordPress story. WordPress makes that easy through a spellcheck button on the editor itself. Look for a button that has the letters “ABC” on it. It’ll then scan your post for spelling and common grammatical errors. Check any word or phrase that has a red squiggly line under it.
Your WordPress is nothing without plugins, and lucky for you, there are plenty to choose from. However, it is very important that you use caution when installing plugins and keep in mind that they aren’t disposable. You can uninstall them, but most of the time they will still affect your content and leave shortcodes behind.
Take the time to log out of your site every once in a while. Go back and look at it as a visitor. Doing so could allow you to see something that you are missing when you are logged in as an administrator. This step will not take very long, but it should set your mind at ease that everything is functioning the way that it should be.
Always save a backup copy of your blog. You must do this on a regular basis. In WordPress, you can use a plugin for this, such as Xcloner. Use whatever site or plugin you’re comfortable with to back up your blog, but make sure you back it up in more than one location. It would be devastating to lose your whole blog.
Use a security plugin. Keeping your blog secure is important, and there are plenty of plugins out there that promise to do just that. Try a plugin you feel you can trust. Wordfence is a good choice. It offers a firewall, does virus scans, blocks any malicious networks, and is free.
To keep tabs on comments, you don’t need to visit each post separately. Instead, use your dashboard’s comments section to see what has been posted recently. You should check this page daily so that you know what people are saying and can reply if anyone requests more information or asks a question.
Want to create a new link in your post? There is no need to click the link icon any longer. Use ctrl-shift-A instead to start the link creation process using the keyboard and not the mouse. When you create many links within your content, this can shave time off the creation process.
Using WordPress is not so simple, which is particularly the case if you have little familiarity with it. However, this article has given you helpful advice. Use the information you have learned to get more out of WordPress.