Need Help Understanding WordPress? Try These Tips!

Are you intimidated by wordpress? Are you overwhelmed trying to figure out all of the different aspects of the site? If so, you are in luck. This article has some information to help you get started. Once you have read it, wordpress should be de-mystified for you. Then, you can start improving your site.

Get rid of special characters from the URLs of your blog posts. Spiderbots may have difficulty with them. Your URLs should also be shortened to just include keywords, so they do not overwhelm your visitors.

Unless otherwise specified, your posts will appear chronologically. To rearrange your list, you need to first change the date. Open a post and look at the upper right hand corner. There you will find the date. Change its position by clicking the date, changing it, and saving the post.

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.

Write a personalized greeting near the top of your blog. You will be able to understand how your user located your blog, and this will provide your user with a more personal experience. Using a plugin like WP Greet Box will make your blog appear less robotic.

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.

Know that you can write posts and send them in the future via WordPress. All you need to do is change the post from “Publish Immediately” to a specific date and time in the future. This way you can write posts and have them set up to go out even while you are on vacation!

Include useful links at your footer. The footer is located at the bottom of your site. Most sites include contact information, copyright information and links to other sites in the footer. By including useful information in your footer, you can increase the sales, referrals and traffic to your site.

Incorporate a social sharing plugin for your WordPress blog. Integrating social media with your blog will be a great boon to your traffic. Your users can instantly share your article through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Look for a plugin that will allow liking and sharing, since both will be beneficial.

Differentiate the look of your WordPress blog. It may be tempting to just roll with the standard WordPress themes, but you’ll look like many other blogs out there. Consider a few other themes. Even install them so that you can preview them with your current crop of content. It can make all the difference to audience engagement.

Back up your content on your WordPress blog. Sure WordPress is a very well-known and stable platform, but things still do go wrong from time to time. You don’t want to be caught without a content backup if somethings gone the wrong way. You can simply copy and paste your articles into Evernote or another notes platform.

If you want to put two images side by side, try using an invisible table in your WordPress post. You can create a one row/two column table via your post editor and then embed a photo into each cell. You could take the next step and add another row underneath to add captions below each photo.

Did you spend a lot of time making changes to your blog, only to check it out and see none of the changes took effect? Do not fret, you just need to clear your cache. Find out how to clear the cache on the browser you are using, clear it and the changes should show up.

A great commenting plugin that is useful for WordPress is Disqus. This free commenting system works well with its API. You have the ability to import and back up your comments with it. It also adds essential SEO to your comments so that the search engines can index them easier.

When linking internally, you don’t have to enter your domain name into the URL field. Instead, just include the information which comes after the first /, such as /index.html. Don’t forget to also insert an SEO keyword-rich title so that you can get even more bang for your search rank.

Incorporate images on your site. After all, pictures are worth thousands of words. Your site will have that much more drama to it. Make picture descriptions with text tags so search engines have an easier time finding it.

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.

You can make sticky posts in WordPress. These are the posts you may want to show above other posts no matter the date. There are a couple ways to do this. You can go to “Edit Post,” and “Visibility.” Click “Edit” and “Stick this post to the front page.” The other way to do this is by going to “Posts,” “All Posts,” and “Quick Edit.”

Make sure that the font you are using is easy to read. It doesn’t matter how nice your blog looks overall, if it’s hard on the eyes you’re going to lose readers. Make sure that your font is an appropriate size, and don’t let the color of the text clash with the color of your background.

As you can see, wordpress does not have to be intimidating. If you follow these suggestions, you can learn how wordpress works. Once you have that knowledge, you can create a successful site. Your visitors will be impressed with the navigability of your blog. The return traffic created by the professional appearance is just what you need.