10 WordPress Tips Every Blogger Should Know

Key Takeaways

please please watch this video this is it for you it's for us so we've done eye consultations and worked with a lot of WordPress site owners and it's it is so sad when I see somebody who's put a ton of work into their project and then it's held back by just the technology that's things that are pretty easy to set up so we're gonna go through a list of some of the important easy things you can change in WordPress that can make a big difference some are more ninja things that you more advanced people would like and others are more basic that you just have to make sure it's done just make a checkmark make sure you've done it as you go along so let's get started the first one is properly setting up permalinks from the very beginning huge if you have to tweak this later you're gonna break all of the links to your website yeah so the permalink is whatever your site comm slash and then what is it gonna say right to put them to site it could be the category the post is in and then the post name or a weird number and then the post name etc we prefer just your site comm slash site tied the title right exactly if you don't do this right off the bat and you change it later it's gonna change all your URLs for every post on your website so we'll do it right with your SEO and you just go to your website and you just go to settings and permalinks and then you just select which one you want it's very straightforward but do it now before you write a whole bunch of content number two pick a theme that actually works for you now we have our own theme at income school calm slash a kobato that we are quite partial to but there are a lot of really great themes out there and so we just want to make sure you end up with the right theme for you and a couple parameters in doing that this is probably the most common waste mistake we see in WordPress is somebody who has picked a theme that just does not work for their application they work really hard to customize it tweak it make it work for what's da moneh 20 plugins and it causes all kinds of errors we've seen sites just ruined by doing this so what I would recommend is pick ëthey that has the functionality that you actually need if you really do need to customize the heck out of your site go pick Divi go choose element or as your page builder and so that you can actually do that don't pick al kobato our own theme don't pick it if you really need to customize the crud out of it it's the wrong theme like that however if you really have you want a fast simple clean design that is content first then pick a theme that doesn't have a bunch of things that are gonna drive you crazy and likely won't be set up correctly this is my problem with X theme as people are choosing it to be quick and easy and beautiful right out of the gate and it's not it's a great theme but it takes a ton of customization to get there right even if you go through the effort and just like install the demo content and settings that'll get you like 80% of the way there yeah then there's that 20% that you're like how come I still don't have this slider oh well if you want that slider you have to go install the revolution slider plug-in and you have to man I spent hours learning how to just do the slider on X theme when it's like seems like that should have just been like built-in anyway and so the the point here is if you're looking for something just like simple that's just gonna look awesome and be super fast then pick a theme that doesn't have a ton of crazy customization something that you can break and mess up if you need the customization then pick a theme that's designed for that number three test your PageSpeed I think the reason that a lot of people don't pay attention to the PageSpeed is because it feels really fast yeah when you go to your own website and you're navigating it it's fast it feels great and I see this all the time as we're looking through people's site is I go there and you see this big old banner image that's like as its loading that banner image and I'm like dude your site is slow yeah and they'll say like no I mean watch I click through and it's like yeah because you've been to the to the site of times it's cached for you it feels rash to you it's not fair to a new visitor we're getting like a 6 8 10 second page load time so PageSpeed insights Google has their own tool and Google is the one sending us the traffic and so I want to know how they are measuring this so I could go to page just google it PageSpeed insight Google PageSpeed insights like here looks like the developers.google.com slide just Google PageSpeed insights they have ranked their test number one for that search oh but really go and please check your website if you're having problems get rid of plugins keep going through until you get that right speed if if you've if you've deactivated plugins and it's still not fast we need to start looking at the theme we have a theme that can get you fast but there are others as well who can get you a fast page PageSpeed time so get a theme that speed will not impact your SEO the next one is to clean up your sidebar by default WordPress is putting things like meta tags and recent posts and all sorts of other things in the sidebar I don't know why they're still doing all that the fact of the matter is like first of all most people aren't even looking at that and using that it just like detracts for the rest of your content the next thing is like when you get to a point where you want to show some ads having less stuff in your sidebar actually dramatically increases the amount you can earn from ads because think about this if you put a sticky ad in the sidebar and it appears near the top and as people scroll down it just stays with them the whole time because you don't have a bunch of other stuff in the sidebar you can show ads much more by you have less ads on the page but that are showing more and so you can be less invasive with ads but make a lot more money on your website plus it's just outdated clutter that serves no purpose I'm gonna slip in a little tip here that's not in our list of ten well understand how users are using your website yes so you can actually get some heat map software to run on your website to see where people are looking and moving their Mouse and stuff I find a maybe more accurate or effective way of just understanding how people are using your site is just for a day go through your website and put pretty links so it pretty link is a plug-in you can used to and it will track the clicks to whatever link it is so if they're going you know in your menu you have a link to different categories just make a custom pretty link to point to that category page everything in your sidebar all your main navigation and stuff and just switch it to a pretty link for a couple days and get some data back you will be shocked things that you think people are using on your website that they're just not you'll be shocked how few users actually click the navigation on your website or click that little thing that you've chucked into the sidebar do it for a couple days and you will have your eyes wide open as to how people are really using this yep the next one is using images to your benefit now the what we're gonna talk about here doesn't really apply to everyone okay yes using images in every blog post is good it from an SEO standpoint and from a user experience standpoint using relevant images adds to the value but another way that people are using images is to actually rank the image right in Google Image Search this only makes sense if you have an image that is maybe unique that may especially like product images where it's an image of your specific product you were talking about this to say the day you did you were looking for a product where it's like Eames chair there you go yeah Eames chair but there are a lot of knockoffs like that and so I searched Eames chair and I went to Google Images because I didn't want to click through a whole bunch of e-commerce websites just to see what their chair looked like I went to images to see all the different Eames chairs knock-offs and then when I found one then I went to the way exactly so you clicked on the image and then ended up on the website if you're going to try to do that then it makes sense on your image to you know use alt tags and stuff just to make it really clear to Google what this image is for the rest of us yeah if your people are looking immersed or you took the picture yourself yes take the time to enter the meta tags your alt tags for the image because that can actually drive some traffic to your website if it's just a stock photo that 10 others web have it - I don't know what the real purpose and and and we just don't we just don't take the time to even add in alt text and all that kind of stuff just doesn't really add anybody okay optimized for mobile now duh you should have a theme that is that will auto resize for mobile obviously right but what about a theme that's actually mobile first because most of your users are probably on mobile and I want to include kind of tablet in there often you'll see you know eight to ten percent of traffic coming from tablets depending on your site topic a lot of themes will look great on the desktop okayish on mobile and terrible on on nobody's looking at it right so check on all three formats and different screen sizes but on the mobile specifically what we often see in themes is they want to include everything from desktop and so it just gets so much crud in the top that you have to scroll down fully before you even get to content yeah and so look at your theme on your phone right now and see how far the content is down from the top and see what changes you can make to the design to get that content up above the fold that was like a huge factor when we were designing our own theme mm-hmm it was how can we get the content as close to the top as possible while still having the branding the logo the menu and all that kind of stuff exactly okay the next one is improving old content there's about yes you don't debate like do I just write a new post or do I improve an old blog post and honestly it really does vary from what the post is so okay so if I have a post that is doing really well in SEO it ranks very well gets me a lot of traffic but it does need updates let's say it was like a best product I'd lightly my friend best products for 2017-2018 whatever and you're like I want to change that to 2019 okay first of all in the URL the permalink I'm gonna take the year out of the permalink I shouldn't don't put it in originally don't regionally that's already there right once it's already there don't change it but that way if I just change those four letters or even one letter right goes from 2018 to 2019 in the headline like it's not gonna really trigger Google to necessarily reindex the whole page if I go in there and I just make slight tweaks very slight it Google's not going to necessarily reindex the whole page and so I can maintain my ranking but what we often see is somebody says this is an important page I need this to be the best as possible so it stays up so they go in and they just overall the post and it's better but it triggers re-index and sometimes we've seen our best post just fell off a cliff yeah because it was reindex they were like whoa this is not the resource that we had that we had tested before and so if the retest it yeah out all over you can fall off the cliff for months yeah so tread lightly if it's ranking really well you know change two or three sentences and leave it for a month and you tweak a little bit more on the other end of the spectrum is there's a topic that's really good for your website and you just feel like you didn't do it justice in the beginning it's not ranking well is it better to fix up the old post or write a new one honestly I'm kind of indifferent as to which I lean toward if the post is dead and you've given it a full year and it's just dead I would lean toward creating a brand new post on a brand new page sure if you want to copy and paste the old content and then totally rehaul overhaul it and then redirect the old one to the new one so any any existing links to the old one or whatever just will point people to the new resource yeah I don't know how much of a difference it really makes if you had really just overhauled the old one just I've had too many experiences where I did just overhaul one that was dead and it just never popped the new version either and I just felt like it really should have and so that's that's my process now something you said there brings up sort of a third group which are the people who made a resource they don't feel like it's as good as it should be and so a month later they overhaul it leave them alone they overhaul it again you are not giving Google time to adequately test this if it's not a hundred percent perfect it's okay just let it right the post and leave it alone for a and then you can decide how it performed all right the next one is a backup oh you got a man I have lost entire website yet before in fact we're at a point now where we there's a redundant backup and that's because our host is doing a backup and that's not good enough no we used to just kind of rely on that but yeah something can happen with the host and you can lose it and so we will use a separate tool that does a backup and no manage WP and it does a lot of things yeah it costs a buck a month and the full backup a lot of plugins if you just get a backup plug-in they're not backing up everything right they may backup text but not images etc we want somebody to skim back up everything and so I just use it's a dollar a month man WP it's owned by Go Daddy now awesome and it's it's a thorough enough backup that I can just take the backup and like install it on a new if our hosts ever went down for an extended time and we've seen hosts that just got attacked whatever and they're down for a week yeah like if that happened it would really hurt us and so we just take our separate third-party backup chuck it on a new host point the domain over there done yeah no yeah yeah you'll have a day of downtime because it just takes that long for the domain DNS to point any way to propagate fully know your formatting features a lot of times when we see people who have kind of cruft it up their website with a ton of plugins or cuz they're really trying to do something unique in the formatting kind of going above and beyond and no Gutenberg really really well that so George burger burger awesome Gutenberg is WordPress is just built in its I mean it's fairly new but it's their built-in page and post builder as a lot of chairs tables your everything it's it's there now yeah so really get to know those tools in the editor right built in there rather than resorting to page builders which will slow things down and make you not as future-proof yeah absolutely and the last one is consider turning off comments oh there are some blog topics or maybe even some specific posts where you you really do want that interruption back is helpful um and and if that's your case then fine but maybe consider just turning on comments for those specific posts now the easy way to turn off comments from here on out on your website is just go to your site and go to settings and go to discussion and there's a check box near the top it's like the third one down as of right now at least that if you uncheck the box to allow comments on new posts it just won't even have that option enabled if you want to remove the option for people to add comments on all of your past posts you have two options one is to go through post by post and the way to do that is you go to posts and you just click quick edit on each one and there's just a little checkbox allow comments and you just uncheck it if you wanted to specifically enable comments on one post or another you can do the same if posts are if comments are disabled you can go to the quick edit and just check the box and it will override the general setting the other option that's just awesome is I mean if you need this is to go get a plug-in there's a disabled comments plug-in that will allow you to enable or disable comments globally by by category and so you have a little bit more flexibility and it will like retro actively go back and disable comments on posts you've already written so the reason we don't like play like comments are one you just stopping the spam is so hard yeah you'll get a plug-in that'll work great for a few months and then all sudden you have us 100 spam comments in a day somebody got through it also is very time consuming for you to go through and commenters are negative and it will drag you down like it's rare that somebody is like legitimately just wants to thank you if there's not a spam comment and so anyway those are the reasons that generally on our sites we just don't have comments you know on YouTube and stuff we want comments but on on blogs where there's just so much spam I'd prefer just to not deal with it could it technically impact SEO yeah I mean it is adding some content it is user generated and usually low-quality but if you're getting any spam stuff going through it's gonna hurt your eyes to have those spam links on there so whenever somebody says yeah but it hurts your SEO it's like maybe it's probably gonna help to keep the spam out though if you are going to have comments on your post I would suggest having a pretty thorough blacklist of words those are gonna help cut out a lot of spam comments but even so you're gonna get a fair amount of spam where the kind of words are just gonna say hey nice post thanks but there's a link embedded right you know like that's what they're doing and like most people that write a nice post they don't mean it it's just spam so I'm gonna have comments in your block hosting wordpress has this feature to blacklist certain words in there my favorite word to blacklist is informations native English speaker won't say informations like but I have just noticed in so many spam comments it says thank you for the informations it's just I've seen that hundreds and hundreds of times and so I always add that one in there so they write informations is it all the way out of legitimate content thanks everybody for joining us in this video we have an SEO newsletter for you where when there are algorithm updates important things that you need to know about SEO some tips we want to share you can go and grab it you are a two-income school comm /s e of tricky