If you are joining the growing WordPress family, check out our list of tips and tricks for getting started with WordPress. This will make your life easier and make your website more beautiful.
WordPress powers 30% of the Internet. This is not really surprising – WordPress is a powerful platform that allows you to create your own website, design to your liking, and add features to suit your needs. Bloggers, businesses, online vendors: they are all welcome in WordPress.
The WordPress family is waiting, but first, you need to create and publish your own site. Throwing in the world of hosting, SEO, coding, plugins and much more you may need a few simple tips and techniques along the way.
We can help here. We learned how to make the best use of our experience, expertise, and great WordPress and made this list of 15 tips for getting started with WordPress.the tips is bellow:
- Choose your hosting
- Watch the theme demo
- Install SEO plugin
- Install Google Analytics
- Choose your theme carefully
- Collapse your images
- Restrict your plugins
- Set up your gravatar
- Stay up to date
- Manage your comments
- Keep your content free of clutter
- Edit your WordPress Permalink
- Put protection first
- Use title tags and alt text
- Set featured images
- Choose your hosting
It covers a wide range of tips, but finding the right hosting provider for your WordPress site is essential for success. Your site cannot go live on the Internet without hosting.
This is not an important factor. You need to provide your hosting provider with adequate resources to manage your site traffic, avoid crashes and downtime as much as possible, and speed up your site.
First, you need to find the right hosting plan for your site – there are a variety of features with different levels. WordPress has specific hosting plans, which will make it easier to set up and manage your site – we recommend visiting Bluehost once, as it is in the hands of the best WordPress hosting provider.
- Watch the theme demo
It is a good idea to use theme demos when you are choosing your theme. That way, you can see a theme – and sometimes even try it out before using it.
Your theme forms the basis of your website’s design, so it’s important to choose the one that suits you, the one that suits your project, and the one that you will enjoy using. Yes, you can customize WordPress, but it is wise to start with the appropriate theme without being proficient in coding or working with any developer.
- Install an SEO Plugin
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Criticism for the success of any website. Without SEO your site will not rank high in search results – not ideal for growing your audience! If you are not a real technician and probably still need a helping hand with your SEO.
Installing SEO plugins can make your life easier and make your site more successful. These plugins can analyze your content and keywords and handle all the technical things for you such as sitemaps and robots text.
Just go to the WordPress Plugins directory and find the right SEO plugin for you. We can’t suggest Yoast SEO enough – it has over 5 million active installations and over 25,000 five-star reviews. This is a very happy customer!
- Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a well-known tool for performance tracking, data recording, and insights into how people interact with your site. This makes it an invaluable tool for measuring the success of your site.
The best (and easiest) way to install Google Analytics is the plugin Monsters Insights. Google Analytics and MonsterInsights come with free versions. When you create your Google Analytics account you will need the tracking code provided and MonsterInsights will guide you through the installation process. Installing Google Analytics lets you view your data directly from your WordPress dashboard which means you can see how many people are on your site. How long is the stay and much more going on your site? All the juicy information is at your fingertips, including Google Analytics.
- Choose your theme carefully
There are plenty of themes to choose from and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Our top tip is to pick and focus only on quality themes.
Always read reviews, choose the right one for your project, and don’t be afraid to pay for a premium theme. It’s important to choose a mobile-responsive theme – if you don’t, you’ll get Google into trouble with the line and give your mobile users a poor online experience
Comes pre-packed with some theme features. This can be interesting, beware – these themes can slow down your site which is a big problem you really want to avoid. Pick, be minimal, and be happy with your theme at the end. If not here’s a new product just for you!
- Collapse your images
Compressing an image reduces file size, helps your site run faster, and saves you valuable storage space.
Fast site speed is like a holy grail of running a website. Increasing the speed of your loading time can breathe new life into otherwise dead pages and both visitors and search engines prefer a fast-loading site. That’s why you must always summarize your images and videos.
There are many online tools where you can compress your images for free, such as Kraken.io, ImageResize, and Optimizilla. Upload the images you want to compress, then download when the final versions are customized. It’s fast, easy and you don’t need to download any software.
- Restrict your plugins
Plugins add functionality to your website. If your theme does not have built-in features, you will need plugins to add features like contact forms, newsletters, or live chats to your site. However, having too many plugins can slow down your site and even jeopardize the security of your site.
Only install plugins that you really need that will benefit your users and your website – don’t be tempted to choose as cool as you can get. Slowing down the loading speed of your site to bring additional code plugins down
Since anyone can create plugins, there are lots of different levels of choice and quality. Plugins are officially reviewed for security but not for quality, so it is always best to read user reviews.
- Set up your gravatar
Gravatar? What is that?
Gravatar means a globally recognized avatar. It is a service that integrates with WordPress that provides the user image associated with your account. Having a personalized, unique image like this helps you recognize people and gives you a clear identity across different websites. The image of your gravatar will appear in your author’s bio when you post; When you make a comment, a picture of your gravatar will sit next to it.
Gravatar is already integrated with WordPress – all you have to do is go to your profile section in WordPress and scroll to the profile picture section. Click on the Gravatar link – Once on the Gravatar site, you can upload any image you want to use and link it to the email registered with your WordPress account. This will drag the image into your WordPress account.
- Stay updated
You’ve probably heard of the famous WordPress updates, but what are they? WordPress updates its software regularly to keep the platform secure. Minor updates occur every two weeks, while major updates occur about once a month.
You don’t have to worry too much about those minor updates – it just requires WordPress to create tweets and fix a few bugs. But you should check for regular updates to make sure you haven’t missed anything new – otherwise, your site may be at risk for old and bad bugs.
Just go to your WordPress dashboard, where it notifies you if you need to update your plugin, theme, or version of WordPress. There will be easy “update” buttons to keep things nice and simple.
Be sure to back up your site again before updating and after you’re done.
- Manage your comments
Comments can be a great way for your readers to interact with you and your content and build a real community on your site. You can manage your comments through your WordPress admin panel.
You may not want to enable comments for certain pages or for others, you may want to restrict any comments you want to be published on the site. Google actually crawls your content as well as comments, so it’s worth avoiding spam comments.
To manage your comments, simply go to your settings, search the discussion section and select your preferences
- Keep your content free of clutter
It can be easy to run with all the fancy widgets, banners, ads and much more that you can put on your site. It may be fun for you, but it’s not so much fun for your readers.
The clutter of your site can distract you from your content – or worse, make people reluctant to stay on the page. Take a look at your sidebars and footers and make sure any widget is contributing to the page – usually, more or less!
- Edit your WordPress Permalink
Permalinks are only permanent links (got it?) Such as the address of your website, or the address of your individual blog post. WordPress automatically makes permalinks when you create a new post, but the default settings are clunky and not very SEO friendly.
If you leave the Permalink settings that way, you will probably end the date included in the Permalink. This is no less than ideal, especially for SEO. To change your Permalink settings, simply go to your Dashboard, enter your settings, and select Permalink.
You can choose your new permalink structure from a number of options, but we recommend post name settings, as it is the most SEO-friendly. Make sure you save your changes at the bottom of the page!
- Put protection first
Security should be one of your top priorities when running your WordPress website. We’ve already mentioned updating your site to keep out any bad bugs or hackers, but there’s more to it than that.
Don’t let our 13th tip be your unlucky number – here are a few specific steps you can take to make sure your website is ship-shaped and airtight:
Receive an SSL (Secure Socket Level) certificate
Why? Encrypted SSL certificates through your site with payment details and login. Visitors have been warned against using unsafe sites and will avoid Google without SSL.
How? Good hosting providers like Bluehost will include free SSL protection in their plans, otherwise, you need to do it yourself. With Let’s Encrypt you can get a free SSL or pay for a more advanced SSL certificate if you want more advanced security.
Give regular backups to your site
Why? If something goes wrong with your WordPress site, backups are literally on your back, your site is hacked or you accidentally delete half of your code, you will sign with the relief that you have backed up your site.
How? Good hosting providers will back up your site for free as part of your hosting plan, but it is always best not to rely on 100%. An effective and easy way to backup your site is to choose a backup plugin to create and save a backup of your site. A popular choice is UpdraftPlus which uses more than 2 million websites.
Install a security plugin
Why? It’s always better to be safe than sorry – these plugins can protect your site with firewalls, malware scanners, and more.
How? Easy choose a reliable security plugin and install it on your site. WordFence is popular and highly rated with an all-round security service
- Use title tags and alt text
Images can create a website. They keep readers engaged, highlighting the main points, and generally lifting a page out of fear and into the light. But not only do they look good – they can also work hard behind the scenes for your site.
When you’re adding an image to your site, be sure to include a title and some alt text.
These may seem strange to start with but it shouldn’t be too complicated to get the hang. Alt Text tells viewers what the image looks like if for some reason they can’t see the image – perhaps if they’re using a screen reader or the image just doesn’t load.
Both the title and the good text should be clear, not too long, and offer enough detail to give your readers – and Google – enough information about your image. Remember, Google can’t see your images, so it depends on your title and alt image to understand what your images are.
- Set featured images
It’s a good idea to set up featured images for your posts. It will appear as a thumbnail image next to your blog post whenever it appears on another page or linked to other sites or social media. Draft in WordPress.
There should be a section with a link that says “Set featured image” – click it, upload the image you want to use and you’ll be fine to go.
You still need to add a title and well text for your featured image, so don’t forget!