5 Essential WordPress Hacks Every Serious Blogger Must Know
Have you ever wondered why some people succeed more than others in using WordPress for running their blog or website?
The answer is simple…
- They’re applying tricks you don’t know about.
It’s not just enough to use WordPress, you need to know some hacks that make all the difference.
In this post, I will teach you 5 critical WordPress hacks that you need to start using right away.
5 WordPress hacks To Make Your Blog More Visible
1. Make your permalinks cleaner
Having great content on your site is not enough to fetch you lots of traffic.
Sometimes all you need to do is make your permalinks cleaner and more readable to humans and search engines.
Major search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo Search, Ask, Baidu, AOL Search, etc.) need to be directed to your site through the use of short “road signs” that guide them to your post.
How do you create these short road signs?
After creating a new post, before you publish it, look at the editing page and you will see the “Edit” button in the area where the post permalink (URL) is.
Usually, it’s just a copy of your headline.
But don’t just go ahead and publish it, because SEO-wise, it is too long and may also contain “stop words”.
Click on the link and change it to a friendlier and easier-to-read permalink that humans can understand.
For instance, if the permalink of the post you are about to publish reads:
- yoursite.com/how-to-create-a-better-permalink-and-make-it-more-readable
You can change it to:
- yoursite.com/create-readable-permalink
Note that long permalinks with stop words hardly rank well, but the shortened, keywords-specific ones will easily let search engines know what your post is all about in a single glance, and also enable the post to rank better for those keywords.
2. Avoid freebies (Free is not always good)
The beauty and overall function of your WordPress site lies with the theme you use. This is a good reason why you should carefully select your theme as this acts as the foundation for your site.
Thousands of free themes are available in the WordPress themes directory. But that doesn’t mean you should immediately go that route. Free themes are limited in functionality and a lot of them are prone to security threats.
When you go for a premium theme, you save yourself a lot of headaches and make things much easier. Some of those premium themes even come with special plugins that help to make your work truly effortless.
The good thing is that high-quality premium WordPress themes are very affordable.
Check out:
3. Use the best hosting for your blog
Hosting plays a significant role in making your site stand out.
You need to go for a reliable, well-tested, and results-oriented web hosting service. There are many web hosting companies out there which claim to give you results but don’t.
To get the right web hosting company for your blog, there are a few things to look out for:
- Server type: There are shared, cloud, dedicated, virtual private servers, and others. While some packages are suitable for small-to-medium businesses, bigger businesses may require something different (like a dedicated server).
- Disk Space: Just like the hard drive space on your computer, this is where your data is stored. Before choosing a hosting company, be sure they provide enough disk space or that the disk space can be upgraded when the need arises.
- Bandwidth: This is important because websites are all about getting traffic. Bandwidth deals with the level of traffic that can be safely handled by the hosting site. Go for something you can trust to handle your traffic.
- SSL Certificate: Having green lock along with your site address in Browser URL field is essential for trust factor. Apart from adding trust it’s also one of the search engine ranking factor. Use only those web-hosting that let you configure SSL. Many shared hosting like SiteGround, Bluehost offers free SSL. At the same time, many others like HostGator doesn’t offer free SSL certificate. If you are starting out, make sure to buy hosting that offers free SSL certificate.
Never settle for free hosting that bombards you with ads and are hardly able to provide customer support. With as little as $3 to $15 per month, you can comfortably host your site on a trusted server.
One trick here is to buy your hosting package during festive periods like Christmas, Cyber Monday, Halloween, etc. because there are always a lot of promos during those periods.
You can also buy hosting for a longer term and save more money.
Some of the advantages of using tested and trusted web hosting companies include:
- Server security: A very good hosting company should be able to take care of the security of your blog, including having regular site scans to detect and remove malware and viruses, preventing hackers’ attacks, alerting you of suspicious activities on your blog, and providing a solid firewall against access to your important data and files.
- Guaranteed uptime: Uptime and server speed are very important as far as hosting is concerned. The best hosting providers will always ensure you have server uptimes of at least 99.99%.
- Better customer service: Having caring and professional customer service is non-negotiable. There must be a way of reaching your provider when you need to. E-mail, phone, chat, and other forms of communication have to be in place.
- Regular backups: In this era of continual cyber attacks and hacking, regular file backups are mandatory. When choosing a host, be sure they can provide this service for you even if it has be at an extra cost. You don’t want to lose your important files or allow your hard work to go down the drain.
- Also read: Why New WordPress Blog Should Host On Shared Hosting
- How to buy web-hosting for your WordPress blog
4. Detect mobile visitors to your site (Optional step)
It is no longer news that a high percentage of internet users are on mobile and tablet devices. You may be interested in knowing how many of these users actually visit your site using these devices so you can cater to their experiences.
How do you do that?
Here’s a little trick to detect such visitors:
The first thing to do is to go and get the code from detectmobilebrowsers.mobi and then upload the code to the theme directory of your site. After uploading, open your header.php file and paste the code into it (at the top of the file).
Remember to replace “your-website.com” with the actual URL of your site where you want the mobile visitors to be redirected to.
include(‘mobile_device_detect.php’);$mobile = mobile_device_detect(); if ($mobile==true) { header( ‘Location: http://your-website.com/?theme=Your_Mobile_Theme’ ) ;}
5. Dare to explore
A lot of the best WordPress hacks are discovered by exploring.
You should never be afraid to play around with your dashboard to see how things work.
A word of caution:
If you are not sure what to do, go online and find some tutorials.
With these tutorials, you can handle things like permalinks settings, customization of plugins, customization of themes, scheduling backups, etc.
By doing this, you’ll become not just an expert in your niche, but also in how to manage a WordPress website. One thing that I recommend you to keep trying new tools & apps that make you get more of your WordPress site.
For example, if you are a blogger you can use
- Open live writer for Windows, Desk/Blogo for Apple OS for publishing. This one will improve your productivity & publishing flow by a great extent.
- You can use Cloudflare to filter out most common web attacks for free.
- You can use MaxCDN or KeyCDN for adding CDN to your WordPress site. This will improve your Site load by a great extent.
Here at WPSutra I along with my team keep sharing many such cool WordPress hacks & tricks. There is always so much to learn & you would definitely read about it here on WPSutra. For now, you should also check out this post on coolest WordPress tricks.
Hacks To Make WordPress Website Better
WordPress is a great platform for your blog.
But to make it a better place for you and your readers, you must be familiar with the tips and tricks mentioned in this post.
Always remember that there’s no harm in adding knowledge!
Now I want to hear from you: What are the tips you are applying to make things work better for you? Share your tips and tricks with us in the comments below!
enjoyed these cool WordPress hacks? Don’t forget to share it!
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Source: https://wpsutra.com/wordpress-hacks/
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