WordPress has been around for years and has helped many bloggers create their own space. There are many aspiring bloggers that lack essential WordPress knowledge. The WordPress blogging tips below can help those people.
Make sure your sidebar is not too cluttered. The sidebars on most WordPress blogs are a chaotic mess, full of social media icons and ads and links. Prioritize what goes in your sidebar. Make sure visitors to your blog don’t have to search for anything they might be looking for.
Remember to make your sidebar as concise and clean as possible. You don’t want it to be full of 100 links, ads and buttons. Instead, only put what is important in your sidebar and, if you need more links, put them into submenus which appear when the user mouses over your main menu.
You are unable to change the images 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.
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.
Keep your WordPress password secret. Before installing plugins, make sure to read reviews. If your site is hit with malware or by hackers, you can lose everything you worked on.
As you begin getting comments on your posts, consider allowing people to post with an avatar. It helps your site feel like more of a community, and it only takes a minute to do. Simply go to the settings area of your dashboard and then click on “discussion.” You should see the option there to enable avatars.
Make sure that your plugins remain up to date. One of the best ways to have a strong presence is through well-made, up-to-date plugins. Just like anything else, though, there are regular updates available for most of them. If you don’t keep up with installing the updates, you could miss out on key upgrades or you may even find that the plugin no longer works properly.
When looking for a template, look for one that has the basic layout and design that you desire for your site. This way, you would not have to customize it too much in order to give it the look that you want. This will cut down on your site development time.
Back your blog up. It’s important to make sure you don’t lose any valuable information. Consider a plugin such as Xcloner to assist you. Make sure that you create a backup to your blog. This can be done by installing a plugin. It would be very unfortunate to lose your entire blog.
Differentiate the look of your WordPress blog. It may be tempting to just roll with the standard WordPress themes, but you’ll look like many other blogs out there. Consider a few other themes. Even install them so that you can preview them with your current crop of content. It can make all the difference to audience engagement.
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.
Make sure that you keep any plugins or themes you are using on your blog up to date. Exploits and general weaknesses in the security of a plugin or theme are almost always found eventually. Updates will keep them running smoothly and securely, but it’s important that you remember to keep them updated.
Always look at user reviews before using plugins. Keep in mind that everyone who can code can create plugins. You do not want to use a plugin that has many reported bugs and flaws. To help protect your site only use plugins that you have researched with a lot of downloads and high ratings.
If you have made a mistake in spelling of a name in multiple posts, or just want to change a certain word across your site, use the Search and Replace plugin to do the job for you. The time it takes to do this manually is horrific, so instead let the plugin get it done.
When linking internally, you don’t have to enter your domain name into the URL field. Instead, just include the information which comes after the first /, such as /index.html. Don’t forget to also insert an SEO keyword-rich title so that you can get even more bang for your search rank.
Do not keep the default sidebar. Go in and customize both the titles and sections in the theme directory. This will ensure that your site is unique. In addition, while you can have different sidebars on different pages of the site, you may want to consider keeping everything uniform for your visitors.
Create a vision for your WordPress blog before you begin. Write down a to-do list for your site. Do this and you’ll save time trying to add the things you forgot later.
WordPress comes with a anti-spam plugin called Akismet. This usually works to block the spam comments from posting on your blog, but some people find it lacking. If you want extra spam protection, install Growmap. This plugin adds a check-box for the poster to click to confirm that it is not a bot.
WordPress is a great platform for blog creation and useful content promotion. Anyone who is familiar with WordPress can easily enjoy the process of creating and maintaining a hassle-free blog. The preceding information will be invaluable to those trying to start a great blog.
