Five Important Wordpress Tips For Beginners

Wordpress is now powering nearly 43% of the web so its a good idea to keep up to date with best practises. There are many things to bear in mind when planning out your project but here are a few tips to making sure your site performs as best as possible.

1. Pick An SEO-Friendly Theme Wordpress has become a hugely successful CMS due to the wide variety of themes available ranging from free, simple options, to more expensive, advanced packages. The wide ranging variety of attractive and functional themes can be overwhelming when trying to pick one. However, there is one differentiating quality that you should factor in when choosing potential themes for your WordPress site.

This is SEO-friendliness. When browsing through the WordPress themes, you will see that many themes sport an “SEO-friendly” tag. Make sure that the theme you choose has this tag, as well as following capabilities:

Responsive Design: One of hallmarks of an SEO-friendly theme is responsiveness. With visitors browsing your site from desktops, smartphones, and tablets, it’s essential that your site’s theme can reformat itself to suit any device. Please bear in mind that mobile is becoming largest category of browsing, accounting for more than 50% of website traffic. Thanks to this, it is a good idea to run your site through Google’s Mobile friendly Test tool to make sure it performs well on mobile devices.

Lightweight-ness: The other crucial theme attribute that influences SEO is how lightweight a theme is. As page loading speed is an impactful ranking factor, your site must load as fast as it possibly can. One of the keys to a lightning-fast page load speed is to have a lightweight website theme. If you are not careful and do not discriminate for this feature, you might end up installing an inherently slow theme. Some themes come with pre-installed plugins that can bog down page speed significantly.

2. Remove Demo Content A lot of people don’t delete the default demo content added by a new WordPress install. This includes a sample page, a post titled ‘Hello World’, and a default comment. Not removing this content allows search engines to crawl and index them. Now if you search for the text in demo content on Google, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of pages. That’s duplicate content and search engines penalize duplicate content as low-quality pages. Similarly, many people don’t change the default WordPress tag line that says ‘Just another WordPress site’. You need to delete all default content and the tag line, as they look unprofessional and create a bad impression.

3. Create Clean Permalinks Another top WordPress tip and trick is the creation of clean permalinks. Permalinks are the permanent links that you see when you access a webpage. When creating pages and posts on WordPress, you will see a box in the top section of the editing page. In this box, you can input the permalink that you want for your new page or post. When creating these links, it’s important that you make them clean and simple. A clean, simple permalink is much more user-friendly than a long, number filled one that is confusing to look at.

For example, “https://scottbrabazon/ehocode23985/f57ksss” is much less user-friendly than “https://scottbrabazon/what-are-permalinks”.

Besides being easy on the eye, and easy to understand, clean permalinks are also more trustable. Strange permalinks, that are long, and random-looking often look suspicious to internet users. A page that has a complicated, strange string of numbers, letters, and symbols as its link, might make you wonder if you are landing on a scam site or a malicious URL.

4. Choose the correct Plugins The real power of WordPress comes with its plugins. There are thousands of free WordPress plugins that you can install with a few clicks. However, not all plugins are recommended. In fact, some plugins are counter-productive and could affect your website’s performance and security. Often users end up downloading plugins from unreliable sources that distribute hidden malware.

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when choosing plugins:

Only install plugins from WordPress.org or WordPress companies with good reputation. Look for plugin reviews and support forums because they are a good indicator of a plugin’s quality Check trusted WordPress resources like WPBeginner for plugin recommendations 5. Optimize Your Site Speed According to Google, mobile browsers will leave your page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Similar figures are true for users browsing from desktops. So it is essential that you optimize your WordPress site for speed. Some of the ways in which you can maximize page speed include:

Optimize images for web Reduce redirects Utilize browser caching Improve server response time Hopefully these tips will help get your website up and running quickly, and help with the overall performance going forward. To get all of the latest news and updates, it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on the Wordpress official blog. Good luck!