52 Wordpress Tips and Tricks You Should Know

Since its release in 2003, WordPress has been the most admired website development platform.Its highly flexible and customizing tools allow the users to develop a website of their preference. WordPress gives the opportunity to change the content ofthe site in the most convenient manner. But, despite of the presence of so many tools, it requires certain skills to make a great WordPress website.

Here are 52 tips and tricks to help you cover every aspect of a WordPress site :

1. Use strong password and username while installing WordPress. By default, WordPress suggests “admin” as a username, but one should change it, as that would be more secure.

2. Never edit the WordPress core file. It may result in permanent loss of themes in next updation.

3. A frequent user of WordPress should check the “remember me” box while logging in to avoid the need of typing username and password every time they log in.

4. While working on the website, one should use “coming soon” or “Under Maintenance” plugin that allows smooth maintenance without any hassle to the users.

5. Don’t use username as author display name. It increases the security risk of your WordPress site.

6. Understand the distinction between “permalink” and “pretty permalink”. Permalinks are what wordpress generates by default, while pretty permalinks are generated according to user’s choice and can be selected in the “settings” section.

7. Delete the excessive themes and plugins. Their presence may affect the processing speed of the website.

8. Change the tagline of website after installing WordPress. It provides a professional touch and can be done in general settings section.

9. Only upload the actual theme file on wordpress, not the master zip file. Many of these files contain extra programs, that may be used to modify them, resulting in rejection from WordPress while uploading.

10. Avoid using theme functions that change the website content structure. They may complicate the theme, changing process for later.

11. Know the difference between install and activate. Install means the data have been uploaded to the server, activate means the respective theme or plugin is now functioning on the website.

12. Saving an old widget that contains content or special settings, might be beneficial for later.

13. Change the themes that do not support WordPress menus, or else it’ll make the designing process a lot harder.

14. If a sub-item is not available on the menu of the theme, then one can add it by editing the navigation label with addition of some symbols like +, >, ? etc.

15. If the dashboard doesn’t show other content, one can add more choices on the menu items by visiting the screen options tab on menu section and selecting the relative content.

16. Edit the wordpress theme by Custom CSS plugin to enhance the look of the website.

17. Don’t use the auto add feature for the menus. It might expose the site pages that are not intended for general visitors.

18. To increase the loading speed of the website, optimize the images before uploading them on the website.

19. Use the WordPress command line interface to ease the process of updating plugins, generating backup and setting up multi-site.

20. To permanently delete the audio/video file, one should delete it from the media library, not from the page. Deleting from the page only omits the particular instance of the file.

21. For successful auto embedding of a video/audio file, one should make sure that the code is present in single line in the text editor.

22. To increase the embedded video size, one should use the embed shortcode.

23. Choose the name of the category or tag wisely. Changing them later will require lot of updating of internal links and the search crawlers would not be able to update the details.

24. While editing the website, open one tab of WordPress and one tab of the website to simultaneously see the live changes on the website.

25. One can control the length of the excerpt by checking the box in screen options.

26. Use the tags suggested by the WordPress to avoid cluttering of multiple tags.

27. Use “All in one SEO pack” to improve the SEO of your WordPress website.

28. Install the latest version of WordPress to improve the performance of the website.

29. Be selective while choosing your plugins. Make sure they are coded correctly.

30. Remove the WordPress meta information from the header.

31. Use full screen mode to de-clutter the writing screen.

32. Move WordPress configuration php file outside the root directory to add extra layer of security.

33. Install a cache plugin to prevent the website from crashing during heavy loads.

34. After installation, change the website address in WordPress to allow the users to access it.

35. Activate Akismet to eliminate and trackback spams.

36. Use complex security keys for website security.

37. Use social media widgets to increase the fan base and show off followers.

38. Schedule posts to maintain the continuity and periodicity of content.

39. Don’t login to a self-hosted WordPress site by going to wordpress.com. Self-hosted.

40. Websites have their own domain, wordpress.com login is only for hosted blogging sites.

41. Prevent directory listings as it can exploit a vulnerability in plugin, theme or web server.

42. Use a fast WordPress theme for better working of the website.

43. Find the right balance between speed and revenue while adding advertisements on your wordpress site.

44. Enable gzip compression to decrease the loading time of the website.

45. Minify and combine CSS and javascript files and reduce the number of HTTP requests.

46. Use a WordPress formatting bar to create attractive content.

47. Install responsive themes to make a mobile ready website.

48. Limit the number of failed login attempts to protect the website from the hackers.

49. Add breadcrumbs to the website, to add a supplementary navigation system.

50. Use a content delivery network for fast loading of static content of the website.

51. Schedule backups through plugins to make sure that all the data is protected from technical failures.

52. WordPress plugins and attractive themes, make it easy to make a compelling website and with the correct knowledge of useful tips, one can make the best use of them. 

How to Set up Instant Articles to Your Blog Using the WordPress Plugin?

WordPress is the default option for many bloggers due to the platform’s ease of use and reliability, and while the company doesn’t publish any official user stats, the tool’s considered the most widely used blog platform, with some estimates suggesting the WordPress CMS powers around 25% of all websites.

Facebook announced in February that its robust, interactive Instant Articles will be opened to all publishers April 12, in time for its F8 global developers conference, and the social network upped the ante Monday, announcing a plugin for WordPress. This plugin enables anyone with a WordPress blog to seamlessly share their content as Facebook Instant Articles.

If you’re looking to increase engagement and reach of your content, Instant Articles could be the way to go as early analysis suggests that people engage more deeply with the immersive experience and share Instant Articles with their friends more often than standard web articles.

So how to set up Instant Articles to your blog using the WordPress plugin?

How does it work?

Facebook has worked with a small group of publishers on WordPress to beta test the plugin as a way to quickly and seamlessly adapt web content for the Instant Articles format. Instant Articles load content in Facebook’s News Feed up to ten times faster than standard web articles, and are optimized for the mobile reading experience.

The native Facebook format includes a built-in suite of interactive tools that help stories come to life on mobile, including auto-play video and tap-to-zoom image galleries.

In a blog post, Facebook noted how the plugin formatted this Foreign Policy story for Instant Articles:

Below you can see the Instant Article that was optimized from WordPress using the plugin:

In their blog post, Facebook note that the plugin recognizes the image found in this Foreign Policy article and specifies the correct markup, so the photo renders correctly in the Instant Article. The photo expands to fill the screen when tapped and allows exploration by simply tilting the phone.

Another example is the below Zap2it article from Tribune Broadcasting:

In this example, the third-party video player embedded in this is beautifully adapted for the Instant Articles experience. The plugin also supports native autoplay video as well as social and interactive graphic embeds.

Once the WordPress plugin has been installed, Instant Articles are generated through an RSS created by the plugin and connected to your Facebook page.

How you can get up and running

The plugin can be installed now via Github and will soon be added to the WordPress plugin directory. To get started, download the ZIP file from Github:

Once you’ve downloaded the ZIP file from Github, you’ll then need to install it to WordPress. To do this, hover over the Plugins option in your WordPress sidebar and click ‘Add New’: 

You’ll now be taken to the ‘Add Plugins’ page and as the ZIP file needs to be manually uploaded, select ‘Upload Plugin’ and choose to upload the ZIP file you downloaded from Github:

After installing the plugin, a new type of feed will be added to your site, with an address in the form /?feed=instant-articles or /feed/instant-articles, depending on your WordPress permalink settings. This new feed is similar to a traditional RSS feed but includes the extra data and markup required by Facebook’s specification.

You can check the feed is working by visiting [your blog domain]/?feed=instant-articles or [your blog domain]/feed/instant-articles. 

Connecting the RSS feed to your Facebook Page

Next up, you’ll need to connect your new feed to your Facebook page.

To connect your RSS feed to your Facebook page you need to visit the Admin settings for your Facebook Page. From the top of your Page, click Settings:

Then select Instant Articles from the menu on the left of the screen. (This setting is not currently available to everyone and will be rolled out to all Facebook page owners during the global release before April 12, 2016.)

From the Instant Articles page, you’ll be able to add your RSS feed – this will be the feed created by the WordPress plugin:

After you’ve submitted your feed, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook to verify that all Instant Articles generated from your website are properly formatted and adhere to their community standards and content policies before you’ll be able to start pushing content to the platform.

Once your RSS feed has been approved, all new articles received from your RSS feed will be automatically provided to readers on Instant Articles-enabled devices (iPhone and Android phones) with the content in Instant Article form.

To turn off automatic publishing, check the ‘Import all articles as drafts’ checkbox, which will ensure that all new articles received from your RSS feed are stored as unpublished drafts until you manually publish them through your Page admin dashboard.

Your Instant Articles library

All of your drafts and published Instant Articles will be available to you in a library.

To view your library, from the top of your Page, click Publishing Tools and then select Instant Articles from the menu on the left of the screen.

The Instant Articles library looks like this:

From here you can edit articles and choose which of your drafts to publish.

5 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress to Boost Your Rankings in 2016

As we know, it’s so easy to use WordPress to build a wonderful website since there are hundreds of free WordPress themes available. However, it’s more important to make your site get good ranking in the search results. I think most people didn’t know those fussy spiders and crawlers that search engines use in the ranking process, so you need tools to do SEO work for your site. And to a WordPress site, SEO plugins are necessary when you finish your website. Luckily, WordPress has a plethora of most important and popular SEO plugins to help you get higher search traffic.

1) WORDPRESS SEO BY YOAST

It is the best WordPress SEO plugin till date. WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is used by almost every blogger and webmaster for the power it provides for on-page analysis, off page SEO and even proper social optimization for better ranking. I use it and many others like WPbeginner also use it. It’s like an all in one SEO coupon that unlocks great rankings. Let’s see what makes it so popular:

l  Makes your website social media friendly by integrating the most recent Facebook open-graph and Twitter meta-data.

l  Ensures that your content includes Meta descriptions tags for keywords.

l  Analyzes the inbound links and outbound links and rates your website content.

l  Its Flesch Reading Ease scale can check how easy your content is in terms of reading.

l  Prevents duplicate content by rel=canonical tags

l  Prevents scrappers by verifying Google authorship and optimizing RSS feed.

2) SEO PRESSOR

It is a very powerful tool that can manage your complete website by taking care of the pages, posts and the format of your custom posts. One of the best SEO plugins for SEO to get higher rankings. It has the following features:

l  It’s intrinsic keyword research tool which allows you to drag and drop the keywords into the content.

l  Get the SEO statistics related to your content with the help of its very efficient algorithm which keeps track of the posts and page.

l  Get the effectiveness of the content on rated on 100 basis points.

l  Allows you to assign a word or phrase to a desired link.

l  WordPress tags SEO.

l  Facebook open-graphs and Twitter Metadata tags can be added.

l  Makes your reviews schema.org supporting.

3) ALL IN ONE SEO PACK

This is the most famous SEO Plugin for blogs and websites for magazines and online-shopping, etc. It has more than 14 million downloads and has a good rating of 3.8/5. Users can avail a free version and a pro version of this Plugin depending on their requirement. Here are the features of this all in one SEO software:

l  Suitable for those with little or no knowledge of WordPress SEO or rarely do any on page optimization

l  Can create meta descriptions, meta tags and keywords for the content of your blog.

l  Can optimize titles and create alternate tags to pictures within any post.

l  Extended features for e-commerce websites, traces duplicate pages in your blog or website.

4) WP SOCIAL SEO PRO

Built to make your blog or website social media friendly, the Plugin is a must as Google is planning to use the social signals as the factor to rank the pages on Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It is a much better plugin of increasing your social presence and referral traffic. This plugin can add a call to action button on your socially shared images. I think this is not to be missed if you want higher conversions and search engine ranks in 2016:

l  Integrates with other useful and popular SEO Plugins like Yoast.

l  Adding rich snippets to your content is easy.

l  Facebook open-graph, Twitter meta-data optimization.

l  Adds itemprop tags to make your content Google Plus friendly.

l  Allows adding button for sharing on social media with just few clicks.

5) ULTIMATE VIDEO SEO PLUGIN

To make your Video Blog successful, this SEO Plugin is a must that makes your videos schema.org compatible and makes your video appear in search engine results. Some of its features are:

lNo special settings changes necessary, one can start uploading videos straightaway.

l Provides option to add details to your uploaded videos and thumbnails.

l Helps get the SEO details of the videos you use from the sites that host these videos.

l Creates the sitemap for video enabling the search engines to find out your pages and new posts.

l Allows you to get high rankings on search engines.

l Supports sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and other major popular video sites.

COSMONE WORDPRESS THEME

COSMONE WORDPRESS THEME - A Powerful Theme for Creating Complicated and Professional-look WordPress Sites Easily.

Overview

Cosmone is a single page wordpress themes, also known as a one-page portfolio WordPress theme suitable for business website. It’s a combination of diverse trendy web design elements, such as responsive layout, one-page, Portfolio, shortcode, etc. Its layout adapts to the screen size of a wide range of devices and has well compatibility with all popular browsers. The one-page Home page makes it easy for the users to get all information within a single page. The Portfolio section, with either lightbox effect or popup-box effect, enables you to showcase products with gallery in different categories. The large collection of shortcode (eg: columns, buttons, price tables, progress bars, timeline, portfolio, etc.) can greatly improve the functionality and variety of your website.

In addition to all these robust functions, customizable styles are promised. You are welcomed to create endless possibilities by changing navigation background, logo, favicon, and backgrounds for each section, with diverse images and patterns. CosmOne, single page wordpress themes, allows you to shift among four different colors schemes through simply one-click.

Key Features

·         Fully Responsive design on laptop, tablet PC, iPhones, Androids etc.

·         One page (single page) Homepage

·         Various Social Icons

·         Powerful Shortcodes

·         Font Awesome Icons

·         Bootstrap Framework

·         Robust Built-in Slider Plugin

·         Fantastic Portfolio

·         Multiple Color Schemes

·         600+ Google Fonts

·         Smooth Scrolling Effect

·         Flexibility

·         Animated Timeline

·         Progress Bar Effect

·         Price Table Template

·         Google Map Widget

·         Custom Testimonials

·         Built with HTML5/CSS3

·         Boxed or wide theme layout style

·         Custom post options

·         Custom header and footer

·         Unlimited color options with backend color picker

·         Custom background color or image

·         Update your own logo and favicon

·         Unlimited accordions/testimonials/buttons

·         Best for Business

Fully Responsive Design

Cosmone is 100% responsive to give website visitors amazing look and feel on desktop, mobile phones and tablets alike. The layout adapts to the screen size of a wide range of devices and has well compatibility with all popular browsers. The intellective navigation menu can adapt to the screen size in either horizontal style or pull-down style automatically.

One page Homepage

Keeping up with the latest web design trend, CosmOne applies the layout of one-page, which showcases all the essential features of your website on the home page. It makes easy for the users to get all the required information within a single page. CosmOne allows multiple sections in the one-pageHome page, encouraging you to DIY your own template.

Various Social Icons

Cosmone supports wide range of widgets and multiple social icons, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and many more. You can add SNS links of your company, and moreover in the “About” section, each team member has their separate SNS icons.

Powerful Shortcodes

With our large collection of shortcodes like columns, buttons, price tables, progress bars, timeline, portfolio, etc, you can create beautiful and complex layouts without having to delve into a sea of complex code. Shortcodes will greatly improve the functionality and variety of your website. To check the full list of shortcodes, click here: Shortcodes in Cosmone

Font Awesome Icons

Font awesome icons are available in Cosmone, you can easily find various font icons and use them anywhere in your site without making, uploading yourself. Furthermore, you can customize the size, color of the icons. For details, visit: Cosmone Font Awesome Icons

Bootstrap Framework

Built-in bootstrap framework, the Cosmone theme is well-coded with standard CSS3 and HTML5 languages, more powerful and flexible, supports various plug-ins, works stably, beautiful but very easy to use.

Fantastic Portfolio

We’ve designed a Portfolio section for you to display your products and works with not only pictures but also words descriptions. The attached lightbox effect allows your customers to take a quick look of the product details without redirecting the page.

Multiple Color Schemes

Cosmone includes 5 theme colors in the panel to change color of all elements in your website, such as header, footer, navigation menu, and every section. Besides the default orange color scheme, four more color schemes are available, i.e. StreetBlue, YellowGreen,Succinite and PeachBlossom which enable you to shift between different colors and styles through one-click.

600+ Google Fonts

Cosmone includes 600+ Google fonts to help you to change the font properties of every section. You don’t need to worry about your website looks the same as others any more.

Smooth Scrolling Effect

With scrollview effect, moving slider, navigation menu, and “back-to-top” widget, a smooth one-page experience is guaranteed. Besides, the full section scrolling function also allows you to express your own style by changing the font, colors and background for each section.

Flexibility

Thanks to the advanced styling customization features, you are encouraged to create endless possibilities by changing navigation background, logo, favicon, and backgrounds for each section, with diverse images and patterns. We promise the most flexibility of all our themes.

Animated Timeline

The animated timeline can be connected to your Blog posts and Portfolio, showing a clear track of what you have done in a chronological order. It’s a good method to describe the history of your business as well as the enterprise culture.

Progress Bar Effect

Progress bar is a popular effect controlled by shortcode, providing an animated impression by showing the percentage of completion. It can be applied in any section according to your preference.

Price Table Template

Two different styles of price table template are provided. Customers are encouraged to buy or download your products online by simply one click on the button.

Google Map Widget

The inserted Google Map plugin makes it easier for you to describe your location and for your customers to find you.

Custom Testimonials

CosmOne allows you to create multiple testimonials and sort them into different categories. It can be inserted anywhere and allows you to choose different displaying mode, either automatically slide or manually click to change.

Best for Business

Cosmone is a one-page responsive portfolio WordPress theme, also known as single page wordpress themes, ideal for simple, responsive landing page portfolios, business websites, or small design studio that wants to showcase their work in style. It suits anyone who wants to show their portfolios or introduce their company services. Free Download from Mageewp.com.