2016-05-13

The post WordPress Guide: How to Make Full Use of WordPress appeared first on Lunartheme - Wordpress Theme, Free HTML | PSD templates.

If you don’t know this yet, let me bring this fact to you that WordPress can perform so much better and give you so much more than just a blogging platform. It can be utilized to establish various types of websites, ranging from personal sites to online magazines, company’s or agency’s websites and portfolios. Since my very first step in this niche, I’ve rarely seen any website that is not powered by WordPress. Throughout my time working for Lunartheme, I’ve learned pretty much about WordPress and its ability to satisfy the most demanding customer. What we really need to know is how to bring out the best in it. So, are you fully aware of what WordPress could do for you? Do you know what sources to get plugins from? Should you worry about the security system? Do you realize how imporant it is to make sure that people want to visit your website again? To find out the answers, keep reading this WordPress Guide to know how to make full use of WordPress and get the best out of it.

In this article of “WordPress Guide: How to Make Full Use of WordPress”, I will provide you with these 07 essential tips you could make use of when constructing and launching your WordPress website, and they are:

Pay Attention to Its Appearance

Improve Permanent Links

Don’t Neglect Security

Use Google Analytics

Choose the Most Recently Updated Version

Utilize Maintenance Mode

Know the Difference between Tags and Categories

Now, let’s dig deeper!

1. Pay Attention to Its Appearance

Remember that it is your website, so it should represent your own personality. That’s why instead of choosing a design that is popular, known and used by everyone, you should choose a design that you specifically like. Maybe choosing an ordinary template would save your time, but it won’t give the customers the images and the message they expect from you.

Moreover, please ensure that your sidebars are not crowded and cluttered  together. As I’ve been observing, the sidebars on many WordPress websites are totally a mess, with too many media channels icons and advertisements and links. It is really annoying, especially to demanding customers. Therefore, you should choose the content of your sidebars very carefully basing on the development plan of your website and be sure that customers won’t have to search the whole website for the piece of information while we can help.

Give your website the possibility of having many types of avatar at once. By this way, your customers will have more fun with the website, encouraging them to come back next time.

2. Improve Permanent Links



WordPress getting more popular overtime also means your traffic will decline overtime. To avoid this and to improve your website, you could try changing the URLs of your WordPress articles and target higher quality keywords. You can minimize the number of keywords as long as their value increases. Completing this may open your eyes to a big boost of the traffic to your WordPress website.

3. Don’t Neglect Security

Firstly, be serious about backing up your website. The wisest way would be choosing a trustworthy hosting service and have them back it up for you. However, if the hosting service you’re using don’t offer this kind of service, you can totally back it up yourself with the help of plugins you can download straight from the Internet. And remember to do the backup as frequently as possible, at least once a day.

Secondly, don’t forget to take extra measures to protect your wp-admin folder. Why is it so important to do that? Because the wp-admin contains all of the files involved with administration. If the security of these files is not guaranteed, I’m 100% sure that really bad things can occur to both your WordPress installation and other stuff. But how can you secure this folder? One very common way is limiting the IP addresses that can access it via an .htaccess file.

Some other methods of security worth memorizing is not to display the number of your WordPress version publicly while keeping it up to date. A strong password and the abolition of the default “admin” username is also a reminder.

4. Use Google Analytics



I’ve mentioned Google Analytics in many of my articles, but it is totally worth it. Using Google Analytics to keep an eye on who is visiting your site and where they come from is actually a very successful measure favored by many companies in the niche. Google Analytics will provide you with information about where you are getting visitors from, what they prefer doing on your website, how long they stay for a session, what pages they visit often, etc., so that you can develop more throughout strategies to bring in more readers. In short, remember that “The more you pay attention to your statistics, the bigger your site will become”.

5. Choose the Most Recently Updated Version



Friendly reminder: Only use the most recent updated version of WordPress available at the time. Why is that? Because these updates give you patches that will help strengthen the security of your website. If a new version is already released but you keep on using older versions of WordPress, you will be more vulnerable to attacks by malware. Thus, make sure that you always install new WordPress updates in order to guarantee your website against any attacks.

6. Utilize Maintenance Mode

There are chances that you are working on your website when visitors are there, especially when you website has finally gained grounds and become popular. If you ever need to work on your site in this case, make sure to turn on a maintenance mode so that your visitors won’t be surprised with the current state of your website. What is a maintenance mode and how to switch it on? Well, there are lots of maintenance mode plugins out there on the market. What is great about them is most of them are free. After installing one of these plugins, everything comes down to the matter of pressing a button between the on and off mode.

7. Know the Difference between Tags and Categories

First, I’ll let you in on the difference, and then we will discuss why it is essential to know the difference. So, now, what is the difference between tags and categories? While categories are broader and encompass many posts which fall into the same genre, such as “WordPress Guide”, tags are more specified, targeted, detailed words which give you a better view at what is in the content of a post, for example “how to make full use of WordPress” or “get the most out of WordPress”. Knowing the difference between the two concepts will help you make better decisions when writing headlines that focus on a typical group of targeted audience.

Wrapping Up

So, these are the basic highlights you should take notice of when it comes to using WordPress in order to make the most of it. Of course, there are many more to do with your WordPress website besides these points, but we should always start from the basic! Thank you for reading this WordPress Guide and I hope to see you all again in our next release.

The post WordPress Guide: How to Make Full Use of WordPress appeared first on Lunartheme - Wordpress Theme, Free HTML | PSD templates.

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