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If like thousands of other website owners, you’re using WordPress for your website, you’re in good hands. There’s a reason why WordPress is one of the most used content management systems in the world, and that’s because it’s so easy for all varying levels of users. Whether you’re a developer with A-class coding skills or you’re a marketer with limited experience of loading content onto a CMS platform, WordPress makes your life so easy.
That’s not to say there aren’t things you should take note of when using WordPress, however. A website’s functionality and its optimum performance can be very complicated, and time-consuming, so we thought we’d give you a few quick and easy tips that you can use to take away the stresses of a slow website, low-ranking pages, page builds and more. Get WordPress’ing!
Keep your WordPress plugins to a minimum
It’s so easy to install all the plugins on the list on WordPress, mainly because there really is a plugin for absolutely everything, and they’re easy to install too. Unfortunately, it can be hugely detrimental to your website if you download too many plugins into the backend. You’ll start to see your website’s loading speed slow significantly, and you might even experience downtime. Limiting the number of plugins you need just to the absolute necessities is a rule of thumb; we’d suggest your e-commerce plugin, Google Analytics, and an SEO tool, for starters.
Use Yoast SEO for page optimisation
Talking of SEO tools, WordPress does offer Yoast SEO which is a great little tool in my opinion. For starters, it makes SEO seem simple and that is always a tough feat if you ask me! Yoast SEO is easy to use and it’ll tell you using “traffic light colours” to tell you how successful your on-page SEO is. You’ll also get to see if your page URL is structured correctly and if your meta description is within the character limit whilst including your keywords.
Consider SSL certificates for WordPress security
Because WordPress is one of the most used content management systems in the world, security has become a very big talking point for website owners. You might be asking, how do I make my website the most secure it can be then? My suggestion would be, with an SSL certificate. SSL certificates are so easy to get and implement, and they build customer trust and protect your website. You can even use StatusCake’s SSL monitoring once you have it in place to ensure it’s set up correctly, valid, and when expiry is coming up.
Only use Widgets, videos, carousels when necessary
When you have access to a library of different features that you can add directly onto your site with the click of a button it can be really tempting to throw everything in and hope for the best. A cool widget? Yes, please! A video? Why not! A carousel of testimonials? Go for it!
A word of warning if you’re currently doing this or tempted to do so – they can have a negative impact on your website if overused. Once again, these features can significantly slow your page load speed, meaning you run the risk of failing Google’s Core Web Vitals and SEO rankings being impacted, and increase the risk of breakage on your website. Also, it’s important to check that any features you do add to your pages like a widget are mobile-friendly, as it’s common to find that some of these don’t display on mobile devices.
Take advantage of the Media library
One of the best parts of WordPress is its media library. This lovely little part of the CMS keeps all of your images in one easy to reach folder so you can reuse images across your website with the click of a button without having to hunt them down in your computer folders. Better yet, on the right-hand side of your chosen image, you can fill out all of the details of the image like alt tag, title, caption, and description helping you to rank for your images and push your page’s keywords.
These are just 5 things to take note of when you’re using WordPress; don’t forget that you can also duplicate/clone pages so you can keep all of your pages in unison without having to spend hours on end matching them up manually, you can save sections on pages as templates so you can again save time building, and use geo-targeting on your pricing to personalise the currency of your product to your audience!
StatusCake Team
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