Expert Advice On Getting WordPress To Work For You

Bloggers everywhere praise WordPress as the valuable and intuitive platform it is. Unfortunately, there still are many potential users who lack enough knowledge on this topic to achieve the results they want. Keep on reading to gain insights that alter all that for you.

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.

When you use different tags for the topics on your blog, keep in mind that these are strictly for searching the content on your blog. These can’t be used by search engines. If you want your pages to be searchable on Google, you have to install an SEO type plug-in such as Headspace.

Posts are always shown chronologically, until you say otherwise. First you must modify the date, then you can rearrange the list. In order to do that, open one of your posts and you will be able to see the date at the top right hand corner. Change the date by clicking on it, and save the post to change the order of posts.

If you haven’t customized your WordPress sidebar, it could be cluttered with useless items that are doing nothing but confusing your readers. Your sidebar should only contain things you actually want visitors to click on. Navigate to Appearance & Widgets to edit the appearance of your sidebar and remove anything there that doesn’t actually benefit you or your visitors directly.

Encourage your users to share your site with their friends, family and loved ones on the top social media sites. Twitter and Facebook are the most optimal sites that come to mind, as this can get your name across to millions of different people. A social sharing plugin can be used to facilitate this.

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.

You can insert media into your posts just by pasting the URL where you’d like the media to appear. For example, paste in a YouTube video just by putting the URL within the text where you want the video to play. Be sure that the URL doesn’t turn blue – if it does, highlight it and click the unlink button.

Want to change authors on a post? Just edit the post and click on “Screen Options”. Next, choose Author and then choose whomever you want to become the author of the post. Next, click “update” or “publish” to finish the change and have it go live on your website and you’re done.

Keep close track of visitors to your blog. This is the only way you will be able to improve it to please your reader more. Free WordPress bloggers can use Jetpack stats to do this. Both free and paid bloggers can use Google Analytics. Be sure to make good use of both services if you can because they offer slightly different advantages.

Be sure to back up your site often! The best way to do this is to have your host back up your site every day for you. If they don’t offer this service, instead back it up yourself. There are plugins which will do the job for you, or you can just download it to your own computer.

Only install the necessary plugins that you need. It can be very tempting and exciting to download as many as possible, but doing so will burden your site with a lengthy load time. You may decrease your search engine rankings and popularity because your site takes too long to load. Slow websites tend not to rank as well as ones that have been optimized for performance.

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.

When you upload images into the media gallery, try to keep the image file sizes down. Large image files take much longer to upload. When you use an image like that in your website, it will delay the load time of your page. This may discourage your visitors to stay and browse.

Always back up your WordPress files and database regularly. Although your website has backups, they may not do backups as frequently as you would like. You can find plugins that can make the back up process much easier. When you have your files and database backed up, you can easily restore your site if anything happens to it.

Use the Evergreen Post Tweeter plugin to promote your posts automatically. It can be a chore to choose which posts to retweet daily, so let the software do it for you instead. Once you have it in place, you can literally set it and forget it and then enjoy the visitors it brings in.

Make use of the footer section of your site. Many blogger neglect this area, especially beginners. Put information about yourself in this area, links to any of your other websites and links to important pages in your blog. It is important to make use of any area in your blog.

Learn how to make your WordPress blog posts more SEO-friendly. There is a free plugin called Yoast that can do this for you. It does auto checks of your pages’ SEO, canonical, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, permalink, and more. Using the data that it provides, it teaches you how to optimize your blog posts properly.

WordPress is a reputable site, due to its ease of access and variety of helpful features. Using these suggestions is a great place to begin. Don’t put it off any longer and start using WordPress now.