Top Tips And Tricks To Use WordPress

Blogging is one of the most popular ways to express yourself online. With a blog, you can share your ideas and insights with the whole world. One of the most popular blogging platforms is WordPress. If you are interested in learning more about this powerful tool, the following article can help.

Check out add-ons to find simple tools which will make your site or blog better. For example, you could add a calendar to your side menu bar in order to share events which would be interesting to your readers. You can also find many great add-ons which provide control for advertising, turning your site into a revenue maker.

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.

Do not let your theme get stale. The first thing you should do if you notice a decrease in traffic is check and see when you last changed your theme. As your site grows and changes, the theme should as well. Make sure that it accurately reflects your brand, and you should see a rise in traffic.

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.

If you want a post to stay at the top of the page, there is no need to set it’s date way in the future any longer. Instead, go to the post and click on Edit under Visibility. Choose the option which allows you to make the post sticky and enjoy!

If you upload changes to your WordPress site, but they don’t appear to have taken effect, try to refresh from a clear cache. Hold shift as you click the reload icon in your browser, or hold shift-ctrl-r at the same time. This will give you a clean version of your site which should be updated.

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.

Back up your blog. This is an important step in ensuring that you don’t lose your entire blog. Xcloner is a great plugin that you can use. Use whichever plugin or website you feel comfortable with to keep your blog backed up, however make sure you use more than a single location. It could be devastating to lose your whole blog.

Be sure to use a robust spam plug-in to filter out spam and bad content. People with ill-intentions are always looking for ways to spam a blog for link building purposes. This kind of spam will create a bad impression on your blog because your legitimate readers will think that your blog has security issues.

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.

Approving comments manually is a thing of the past. Akismet is great for this. It is possible for you to receive an email whenever a comment is posted, but unchecking manual approval is the best course of action so that authors need not have their comments approved prior to posting. Failing that, you won’t really save any 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.

Your first WordPress plugin install should be Jetpack. The plugin extends the usability of WordPress in a lot of important ways. For instance, it gives you some basic analytics on the main page of the dashboard. It also increases your social media options for your website and adds in contact form options.

When you are designing your WordPress site, it is a good idea to take out any display of the word “WordPress” in the footer area or in the header of your code. A lot of bad web bots troll the web for WordPress blogs and find security holes. If you remove the word “WordPress” from your site, you have another layer of defense against these bots.

Make sure your site can be found by the search engines! Otherwise, you are not going to generate the type of traffic you were hoping for. Go to the Settings area of WordPress and look for “Reading.”? Then, ensure that there is no check mark next to the statement, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”

Have you ever wanted to start your own blog? Now that you have read this article, you should have a better idea of how you can use WordPress to blog. Getting started is really not so hard once you take the time to learn the basics. Use these tips to get started today.