Follow This Great Article About WordPress To Help You

Surely you’ve at least heard about WordPress. More than likely, you’ve even read a blog from someone using this platform or have even messed around with WordPress at some point on your own. If you wish to know more details about just how much this platform can deliver, keep reading.

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.

It is simple to add video to a site created with WordPress. This will require you to spend more time prepping, but this is worth it. Most Internet surfers respond to visuals. A video can show them things that the written word just can’t convey, and as a result, it can be a very powerful tool.

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.

When it is time to begin posting, set up a schedule. If you schedule when things must be posted, you’re more likely to actually post them. You can make your posts all at once and schedule them to upload at a specified time.

Do you get many comments on your posts? If so, weeding through all the comments may be difficult for you and for other visitors. Use a plugin to add page numbers. It will be easier to navigate your site, and it will look more organized.

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.

If you don’t like your theme, change it! There are thousands of free themes available online which allow you to quickly and easily change the look of your site without having to know much about HTML coding. Be sure to choose themes from reputable sites to ensure they don’t affect the security of your software.

Do not forget about Facebook. Visitors to your site should be able to leave comments or register with your site through their Facebook account. There are plugins that will help you getting things rolling on your page, and they are easy to download and use. Since so many people are on Facebook, it is important to ensure that your page incorporates the social media site in some way.

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.

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.

Avoid using a drop-down menu to choose headers for your blog posts. Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts instead! There are six different options for adding a header to your post. If you frequently use headers, this saves lots of time.

If your WordPress site is running rather slowly, consider adding in a caching plugin. These plugins speed up page loads by caching pages that are rarely changed. This means that your site can increase in speed by 20% to 30% just with the plugin installed. There are a few different options, but W3 Total Cache is very popular.

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.

Join an online forum full of WordPress users. This way you can brainstorm ideas and get suggestions for your site. People are going to be happy to help you avoid their own WordPress mistakes. Just do a little reading to get some information, and you’ll find that a good forum is better than buying a lot of books.

Draft an outline of your potential site before you attempt to create it with WordPress. List what you would like to include on the site and the information that your visitors would enjoy reading about. It’s much easier to build a well-designed website from the beginning than it is to add plugins later.

Always extensively examine your blog before and after adding a new theme or plugin. New plugins can have some nasty and unintended side effects. Identify these before they cause you any issues. After installing a new theme or plugin, look your site over carefully. Make a few test posts to ensure that your blog is functioning as it should.

WordPress.com has limited functionality for its users, yet it does have advantages. When your blog is hosted on WordPress.com, WordPress will take care of spam filtering, backups and restores, and address any security issues on your site. However, if you are hosting WordPress yourself, you will have to deal with these issues yourself.

If you had any WordPress experience prior to reading this article, then you were already aware that it’s not a complicated platform at all. However, there is much to know and explore so that you can do more with WordPress, and this article has given you some assistance. Get ready to put those new skills to the test.