5 Helpful WordPress Tips for Beginners

Last updated - December 20, 2021

Are you planning to develop a website using WordPress? Did you know that almost 30% of the sites today use WordPress? WordPress is a highly customizable and easy-to-use platform, to say the least. Therefore, WordPress is probably the best that you can be doing to your website today. But how do you go about developing your site on it? First off, understand that every time you start a new thing, you surely must learn about it. Most of us have issues resolving problems that are new to us. The Content Management System at WordPress is, and it is okay to struggle a bit. The secret to a stellar site is to educate yourself on the tricks and tips of the platform that you are going to use. Here are five helpful WordPress tips for you to begin.

Select a highly customizable and adaptive theme:

What is it that catches the attention much before you start using the website? Well, for any viewer visiting your site for the first time, it is the design that sets the first impression. But that’s not the only reason why you should be caring about the design and usability. Themes are easily the backbone of your site if you are setting up your website using WordPress.

The standard issue that people face is with the responsiveness of the theme. It is utmost essential to use an adaptive theme. While selecting a theme for your website, make sure that it is responsive to mobiles and tablets too. More because you generate website traffic from almost all kinds of platforms. Nearly all free themes on WordPress look great on the desktop. But only a few do not crash when used on a device with a different resolution. It is essential to consider how your theme adapts itself to different screen sizes. That too, without compromising on the layout and the quality. You can always check the responsiveness of a theme. You can do so by clicking on ‘live preview’ and screen size under customize.

Not just responsiveness, it is also essential to select a theme that allows you the liberty of greater customisation. A theme that will enable you to customise the site and has space for negotiations in it is always the best. Most people face issue personalising the header image or finding the right location for their menu. Therefore, it is always better to choose a theme that offers more excellent options. While paying the price for a theme is a great option, there are free themes that can suffice your purpose too. You only need to have the eye for it!

Secure and backup your data:

Another important tip is to back up all that your site contains, while you’re developing it. The general notion of beginners is to avoid backing up data until the site is completely ready. While it may seem like a smarter option, it indeed isn’t. More because there’s no guarantee of you not losing your piece of code or content even while you’re on it. Also, it is ubiquitous to face a virus attack anytime. Caring about your website’s security is much more important than owning a website itself. Therefore, you must get your WordPress site secured. You can use any plugins or software that fights malware and threats to do the same.

You must run your website through performance checks always. Moreover, you must also install a plugin that can catch spamming attempts. Having a backup also lets you fight with virus attacks the best way possible. More because a backup can get you back to the starting point of the website and eliminate the virus attack. Thus, making you run your site in a way like nothing happened.

Make it search engine friendly:

You want your viewers to find you on search engine platforms. But have you noticed the links that point to your content? Are they haywire and way too long? If yes, then the chances are that Google and Yahoo might have issues locating them. Therefore, it is important to always clear such links. In fact, one must use shorter versions for better navigation. But how do you do it? The most ingenious way to review your permalinks is to use the permalink field in the WordPress editing page before publishing them. While doing so, try and use intelligent keywords and eliminate all unnecessary words. The goal should be to keep your permalink as compact as possible. Also, do not forget to include the keyword that you’d want to rank for.

For Google to rank you higher on its search results, it is crucial for you to provide relevant information to it. No search engines can appreciate your work without knowing you better. Hence, it is vital to perform search engine optimisation for your websites. Be it pages, videos or images; you must try and deliver information about everything on your site. Using internal and external links on your pages is a great SEO practice. Another vital SEO practice is image optimisation. Best websites always add the targeted keyword in the title and meta description for their content’s outreach. However, overdoing any of these can also land you into trouble. The key is to strike the right balance of linking and keywords. While one-two links work fine for a page, the keyword density must fall under 1-3% of your text. As for techniques, there are many SEO techniques in the market today. However, the best for WordPress is the plugin called YOAST that covers them all.

Keep track of analytics:

Unless your website is just there for fun and means no business to you, analytics play an integral part. For any company to leverage its resources, it is essential to know the source of all attraction. Similarly, for any website, it is necessary to understand where the users are coming for. WordPress is undoubtedly a fantastic platform, but it isn’t well-known for analytics. Most of the website developers hence focus on using tools that can help them get insights to the site. Adding tools for analytics enables you to understand your traffic source and the general interests of your buyer. Analytics plays an integral role in helping you improve your website. You can also track all the campaigns and the ads using analytics.

Once your website is live and, in the running, make sure you connect it with Google Analytics. More because, it is the best tool in the market for an analytical report. To further understand the demographic location and interests of the traffic on your website, you must install Google Tag. Google Tag is a Google Analytics feature. You can also rely on various other plugins to pull in specific and targeted information you want. There are plenty in the market to help you through analytics.

Use tutorials and plugins:

Even if you were a pro in WordPress, I’d have still suggested you a tutorial. More because there is no harm in learning better. However, as a beginner, it is almost mandatory to be using tutorials as your secret weapon to win. There are a number of tutorials on the internet to understand every detail. From setting up the website to backing it up to securing it, there are tutorials to guide you through the phases. The help section in WordPress also comes with a lot of information. You can clear all your doubts or read about all that can be done, using it. FAQs are also a great way to save time and work more efficiently.

Plugins are a set of valuable assets to your WordPress site. There’s almost a plug-in each for every issue you face in WordPress. From security to back up to the responsiveness of the theme, there’s a plug-in for everything. There’s Akismet to prevent spamming, W3 Total Cache for speeding up your website, and iThemes to secure your site. While some of the plug-ins are free to use, there are others that come at a cost too less for all that they offer.  However, you must spend time reading and researching on multi-purpose plug-ins. For example, All in One SEO Pack is that one plug-in that can solve all your concerns related to SEO. But why use one instead of many? Well, plug-ins are fundamentally great at what they do, but more plug-ins may slow down your website’s speed. Also, they add up to a lot of vulnerabilities on the site. Hence, the lesser you use, the better is the user experience for people visiting your site. Whatever you choose, always download high-quality plug-ins from trusted sources. Also, keep all your plug-ins updated to prevent a malware attack.

Conclusion

Creating a website is a tough task but maintaining it is the more significant challenge. You must keep learning and improvising your site for it to outperform the basic ones. WordPress helps you do that since it is a win-win deal for easy customization. Not only that, but when you learn to use this platform, you save yourself money and extra efforts of coding too. Also, many tips will come your way while you develop the website. But the tips mentioned above are the most essential, to begin with.