10 Amazing WordPress Tips and Tricks for Beginners

If you’re looking to develop a WordPress website but find yourself unsure if you’re doing things correctly, worry not. We’ve compiled 10 valuable WordPress tips and tricks specifically for beginners. Before diving into the main topic, let’s understand what WordPress truly means.

WordPress is a user-friendly content management system that lets you host and build websites without extensive coding knowledge. When it comes to using WordPress, there are many themes and plugins available to assist you. However, it’s important to be selective and have to know some tips and tricks about WordPress up your sleeve.

10 Tips and Tricks:

These tips and tricks cover most of the basic things you need to know while starting out with WordPress.

1. Getting a Proper Hosting Service:

The hosting service you choose is really important while building a WordPress website. It’s like the foundation that allows your website to go live on the internet. You need to pick a good host that can handle your website’s traffic and keep your site running smoothly without any downtime.

The hosting service also affects how fast your website loads and performs overall. There are many good hosting services available for WordPress, but Bluehost is considered one of the best. It’s even recommended by WordPress, which shows that it’s really reliable.

2. Choosing the Right Themes

There are thousands of impressive WordPress themes available online. However, the crucial question remains: which theme is the most suitable for the website you intend to create? While there are countless options for e-commerce, blogging, agency, and other themes, it is essential to select the one that perfectly aligns with your requirements. Prior to making your theme selection, it is important to consider a few things, including

• Responsiveness
• SEO-friendly
• Page Speed
• Browser Compatibility
• Customization Options

WalkerWP’s themes all come with these features and so you can explore WalkerWP’s theme library and choose from some of our expertly crafted ones. All of our themes are freemium models, so even if you don’t want to spend money on your themes you are free to experiment on the free themes library.

3. Installing Plugins

Plugins can significantly enhance your website and take it to the next level. While your theme might include some plugins, if not, you will need to install certain ones to integrate features such as Contact Form 7, newsletters, live chats, or other functionalities into your website. These plugins serve as valuable tools to enhance your website; however, it is important to consider that using an excessive number of plugins can negatively impact your website’s speed, causing it to load slowly. This can result in a poor user experience and ultimately lead to a decrease in traffic on your website.

Here are some important plugins that we recommend installing:

• Elementor (Page Builder)
• WooCommerce (E-commerce Functionality)
• Contact Form 7 (Create and Manage contact forms)
• Smush (Auto-Optimize images)

4. Installing Yoast SEO

If you have an amazing website with compelling content and stunning images and an attractive interface, but you haven’t implemented SEO, it’s like having a magnificent billboard in a remote, deserted area. Regardless of how great the content on the billboard is, there’s no one around to receive its message. SEO plays a crucial role in increasing the visibility of your website by improving its search engine rankings. For WordPress websites, Yoast SEO is an excellent choice.

Having Yoast SEO makes your job much easier by providing guidance on the changes you should consider to enhance your SEO. It analyzes your content, images, and keywords, enabling you to achieve better rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). With Yoast SEO, you can optimize your website to attract more organic traffic and reach a wider audience.

5. Setting up Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC)

It’s important to keep track of how well your website is doing and understand its performance. This will give you valuable insights and help you make any necessary changes. To do this, you can use Google Analytics, which requires you to verify your ownership of the site with Google. Once that’s done, you can easily set it up in your WordPress dashboard and see how your website performs.

If you want to check your backlinks, URLs, and how your website is indexed, Google Search Console is a must-have tool. It’s also crucial for optimizing your website’s SEO. Make sure to set up Google Search Console to get the most out of your website’s performance.

6. Compressing Images

We all love the idea of having high-quality, HD pictures on our website. They make it look incredibly cool and impressive! However, there’s a small challenge when it comes to high-quality images: their file size. Including multiple images with large file sizes (>150 KBs) can actually slow down our website and affect its performance. We certainly don’t want that!

But guess what? There’s good news! We’ve got some fantastic free tools that can help us compress those images without sacrificing too much of their quality. One of our personal favorites is the “Compress PNG to 100KB – Free PNG Image Compress” tool. It’s super handy and does a great job of reducing file sizes. So, before importing any image to your website, make sure to give it a quick compression using this tool. Alternatively, you can also explore the SMUSH plugin, which automatically compresses both existing and newly uploaded images. Just remember to double-check that the file size is within the limit you need.

7. Keep Your Content Clean

Having a clean and organized design is super important in 2023. Nobody likes reading long and boring stuff that just repeats the same thing over and over. So, make sure your content is neat and structured. Add some cool pictures and videos that fit the topic, but be careful to keep them relevant. Oh, and don’t forget to double-check for grammar mistakes. You can use Grammarly or other tools to catch any sneaky errors hiding in your writing.

If you want to beat your competitors in search rankings, try looking at what the best ones are doing. Check out their content structure and get some ideas. Then, do your best to outshine them and come out on top.

8. Focus on Security

WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, powering 43% of all websites on the web. Given its widespread usage, it’s inevitable that hackers will attempt to compromise your website. To prevent such incidents, it is crucial to regularly update your WordPress version, themes, and plugins.

Additionally, enabling SSL encryption is highly recommended to secure data transmitted between your server and visitors’ browsers. Strengthening passwords, implementing login attempt limits, and enabling two-step authentication will further enhance your website’s security and minimize the risk of hacking.

9. Tutorials and Walkthroughs

While building a WordPress website, it’s common to get stuck and confused figuring out what to do next. This is where tutorials and walkthroughs come into play. There are hundreds of free online resources that will help you in guiding if you are ever stuck. From some of the complex problems to the very basic how-to’s, there is a tutorial for everything online. You just need to research and boom you have found your answer.

When building a WordPress website, it’s common to get stuck and confused about the next steps. This is where tutorials and walkthroughs come into play. There are hundreds of free online resources available that can guide you through any issue. From a very complex problem to a simple how-to question. You just need to do some research, and voila, you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.

10. Staying Up to date

WordPress regularly updates itself to protect its users from hackers and bugs. While small updates occur frequently, it’s crucial to pay attention to major updates that WordPress releases. Regularly updating your WordPress installation is important because failing to do so can leave you vulnerable to hackers and bugs.

To check for updates, you can easily navigate to the WordPress dashboard. If an update is available, you will find an “Update Now” button conveniently displayed. Don’t forget to keep a backup of your website before and after updating.

So, those are all the essential tips you need to know before starting a WordPress website. We hope this article about WordPress tips and tricks has been helpful. If you have any questions or are confused about getting started on WordPress, please feel free to ask in the comments below.

We will be happy to answer your questions or even create a separate blog post addressing them. If you enjoyed this blog, we would greatly appreciate it if you could follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook. We’ll be bringing you more fantastic tips and tricks for WordPress in the future. Stay tuned for the latest updates!