The popularity of WordPress has been growing day by day. WordPress now powers more than a third of websites. That means that it is responsible for being the top website builder in the world through powering 30% of the internet. It is the best content management system for Search Engine Optimization. The key to maintaining a decent website is to keep WordPress running like a well-oiled machine. Here are some essential tips and tricks for using WordPress.
1. PICK A THEME THAT IS SEO-FRIENDLY
WordPress has an abundance of high-quality free and paid website themes. When choosing one, make sure that it’s SEO-friendly. One of the hallmarks of SEO friendliness is responsiveness. Responsiveness means that the site’s theme can reformat itself to suit any device.
2. WEBSITE SHOULD HAVE AN SSL CERTIFICATE
Getting an SSL certificate is a great way to increase trustability on your WordPress site. SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer ) is a level of coding that encrypts the connection between webpages and browsers, which protects anyone who uses the site. If you have an SSL certificate, Google’s algorithm will favor your website on search result pages.
3. WEBSITE SHOULD CREATE CLEAN PERMALINKS
A clean permalink is more user-friendly than a longer one, andthey are also easier to understand and hence, more trustworthy. Pages that have a complicated string of numbers and letters make people wonder whether they are accessing official sites or are accessing malicious links.
4. INCLUDE OPTIMIZATION FOR VOICE SEARCH
The usage of voice assistants is at an all-time high. People are relying on voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Bixby to browse the web for them. You need to make sure that your website should optimize for voice search. You can do this by updating Google My Business listing and using conversational language in your content. You can found other essential tools like this at WordPress Hosting Australia.
5. INCLUDE BACKLINKS IN YOUR WEBSITE
Though backlinks are an old SEO practice, they are still an important ranking factor. Backlinks give authority to your page. When Google’s algorithm catches that a well-ranking site links to you, it makes your page appear more valuable. You can build good backlinks through strategies such as commenting on blogs, email outreach, and guest-posting.
6. INCREASE THE SPEED OF YOUR SITE
An article by Google found that if any site takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile browser, users leave that site. You can use different methods to maximize the speed of your browser. You can do this by optimizing your images for the web, improving server response time, reducing redirects, and utilizing browser caching.
7. FIND THE PERFECT HOST FOR YOUR WEBSITE
To make sure that your website is a success, you must find the perfect host for it. A good host will provide you with enough resources to handle your site traffic and avoid crashes. It will also give you fast site speeds and avoid downtimes as much as possible. You can look at different hosting plans until you find one that works for you.
8. COMPRESS ALL IMAGES ON YOUR SITE
Things like images and videos are something that can cause webpages to load slowly. A slow website can push away users. By compressing your images to a small size, the browser will take less time to load. You can download various plugins that would allow you to bulk-compress image files and load them on your page.
9. INSTALL GOOGLE ANALYTICS
It is a brilliant tool for tracking the performance of your site. It records data and gives you an insight into how people are interacting with your website. Through Google Analytics, you will be able to see how many people are visiting your site, how long they are staying on your site.
10. GIVE ALL YOUR IMAGES TITLES TAGS
Title tags on your images are a great addition to your website. Not only are they great at showing people what you’re talking about, but they can aid in search engine optimization too. If you add keywords to your title tags, then those keywords can be used for SEO. However, it would help if you made sure that the tag relates to your permalink or your Meta description.
11. LIMIT THE NUMBER OF PLUG-INS
While plugins are an essential part of your website, adding too many of them can slow down your website. You should only add plugins that add functionality to your website and benefit users. Pick themes that come with built-in features like live chats and newsletters, so you don’t have to add extra plugins to get those features.
12. REGULARLY BACKUP YOUR SITE
Maintaining the security of your website is a huge deal. You need to backup your site’s database and file structure in case of any problem. Ideally, you should install a plugin that backs up your website monthly. After creating a backup, you can safely update the site as you have a safety net to fall back on in case anything goes wrong during the update.
13. KEEP MONITORING THE SPEED OF YOUR WEBSITE
A slow website is your biggest enemy. It would help if you saw how the page performs in the eyes of Google, and that can be done by Google’s free Page Insights tool. This tool will tell you all you need to know about your site’s speed, from details about specific files contributing to slow loading to suggestions on how to improve the performance of your website.
14. KEEP CLUTTER OUT OF YOUR CONTENT
The extra clutter there is on your website, the more users are going to be put off by the website. Don’t get carried away with additional content like banners and widgets that contribute nothing to the site. The more useless content is there on your site, the more time it will take users to find content that is relevant to them.
CONCLUSION
We hope these tips and tricks work wonders for you and help you take your website to the next level. The great thing about WordPress is that it’s continually evolving and adapting to make itself better. Despite it all, it remains a relatively easy-to-use platform. We hope you find it super easy to use too.
