WordPress Tips to Make Your Website Work Harder! Part One

1. Don’t worry about making mistakes when editing your WordPress website

All pages and posts in WordPress use a brilliant thing called ‘Revisions’ – if you make a mistake, go to revisions, select the previous one in the list and restore it.

NB: If you can’t see Revisions, go to Screen Options in the top-right and put a tick in the box.

2. Preview changes without setting them live

When you are adding new or amending content on your WordPress website, you don’t have to make the content live in order to see what it’s going to look like. Instead of hitting Update and publishing the content, just click Preview Changes and you’ll be able to see what you’re working on.

3. Regularly back up your website

I can’t stress how very important it is to back up your website. In a moment you can lose everything and be in a position where you have to pay to have your website rebuilt from scratch. Just think of the impact it would have on your business if your website was down for weeks and you lost all your blogs, testimonials, content you have created for pages – all gone. Not to mention that if your website is a central part of your marketing or used by your customers regularly to access your service, how would your business continue?

Back up your website at least weekly and you can have it live again within an hour with almost no disruption to your business.

We offer an automated backup service as part of our hosting package. Get in touch if you’re not 100% certain if your website is currently being backed up and we can make certain you’re protected.

4. Don’t use large full-size images on your website

If you take a photo, even on your mobile, the chances are that your camera takes a photo of around 4000×2500 pixels. For the uninitiated, this is a truly massive photo and more importantly probably around 25mb in size. This huge file has to load every time a visitor loads your website, slowing it down, increasing bounce rates, it will also be having a big negative effect your Google rankings! When you add this photo to WordPress, you can choose the size you’d like to show, so use an appropriate size but aim for smaller than 2000 pixels wide and your website, Google and visitors will thank you for it!

5. Add a Future Publish Date to Schedule Content Updates

Are you one of these well-prepared people who would like to write lots of articles on your WordPress website in one go and then let them appear over time? Well, WordPress has got your back on this. When you write an article, edit the publish date to any time in the future and WordPress will schedule the article to be published on that date.

6. Reorder Blog Items Quickly and Easily

OK, it’s a bit of a bodge, but if you have some blog items that you’d like to reorder, the easiest way to do this is to change the date that each post was published. WordPress orders all posts by the most recently published date as a default so that’s why this works.

7. Always Show the Home Page at the Top of the Page List

Do you have a large number of pages on your WordPress website? Always struggling to find the home page, or would you just like it at the top of the list for neatness? Hover over the home page in the pages list and click Quick Edit, then set the Order to -1 and it will always show at the top. You can also manually edit the order number of all pages – I tend to set contact pages to 50 so they appear below most pages and I set policies to 100 so they’re always at the very bottom.

8. Logout if You Forgot to

Your WordPress website can be accessed from anywhere but sometimes you might forget to log out on a computer that is used by others. Oops!  Not to worry, just log in and go to the Account Management section of your Profile and click ‘Log Out of Everywhere Else’

9. Set Up Permalinks to Make it Easy for Google to Find and Index Your Website

Permalinks refer to how WordPress uses URLs to find information. The default WordPress Permalinks are a bit ugly and not good for SEO, so make sure you have at least the Post Name in your Permalinks, so Google can quickly see what the page is about.

10. Show More or Less Blog Items on Your Blog Page

WordPress is set up so that it will show 10 articles on any category page so if you’d like to show some more or a few less, go to Settings, then Reading, and adjust the number in the box labelled ‘Blog pages show at most’.

11. Add a Video to Any Page

WordPress is a clever beast, particularly for showing content from other platforms, such as YouTube and SoundCloud. All you need to do to show a video or other media in a page or post is to grab the address of the video and paste it into WordPress’s editor. Then, some magic happens, and your video will show on the page!