WordPress is an incredibly valuable platform, largely because of the amazing accessibility it provides to a wide range of potential bloggers. Its ease of use is truly remarkable, but that is not to say that some amount of education is unnecessary before putting it to work. Use the information below to get a good grounding in WordPress so that you can get started blogging today.
If you plan to start a WordPress blog, make sure that you offer readers more than just content. Even if you say many useful things, it may be quite difficult to engage readers with text. It would be a great idea to implement videos and pictures since this is a great attention grabber.
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.
With WordPress you have lots of choices in themes so you can have a really good looking blog. Take plenty of time to peruse all of your choices so that you can select just the right one to suit your style and your topic. For a truly unique theme, select a premium theme. This will really help your blog stand out from the crowd.
Always upgrade WordPress as soon as possible. Hackers will target WordPress because of the large amount of users. Updating WordPress as soon as updates are available can be on of your most valuable security tasks. The longer you wait to update, the better opportunity for hackers to get into your business.
Create a members only section to your website to make it more exclusive to the people who visit your site on a daily basis. This will allow them to actively engage in discussions with other members who have the same level of intensity. This will develop a solid bond between your top visitors.
WordPress has many keyboard shortcuts which make working with posts a snap. For example, ctrl-c allows you to copy text, while ctrl-x lets you cut it. Ctrl-v will paste it somewhere else. Ctrl-b is bold, ctrl-i is italic and ctrl-u is underline. These basic keyboard shortcuts will save you a lot of time if you memorize them.
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.
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.
Organize your permalinks. You need to make your links easy for the search engines to find your important information. You should learn proper SEO to do this. In the meantime, you can use WordPress’s included permalink form to clean up links before publication. Cut words down to only the most important ones. Also, try cleverly adding your keywords to your descriptions.
Consider using a password manager. Choosing a secure password for your blog is important. It’s important that your password be difficult to guess and changed regularly. Unfortunately, a password that’s hard to crack can be just as difficult for you to remember. Password managers can be used to randomly generate and keep track of your passwords.
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.
Internal linking plugins can connect posts and allow readers to view more content. With these plugins, up to five links appear following each post. These links are related to the tag relevance of the posts that appear on your site.
Most visitors to your WordPress site will have some type of social media account, whether it is Facebook or Twitter. If they see something and want to share it on their accounts, you want to make that process as easy as possible. Therefore, download a plugin that allows for social sharing.
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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.
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.
No one manually approves comment any longer. Instead, let Akismet perform that job for you. You’ll be emailed once there’s a comment, but you should uncheck manual approval so that the authors get to post comments without delay. You won’t save yourself time.
There is little debate about the tremendous appeal of WordPress among bloggers of all types. It is terrific way for beginners to get their foot in the door, but it can also be used by more advanced bloggers as well, to great result. Keep the tips found above handy, and WordPress can become a versatile tool that will be employed for years to come.