2020 Vision For Your WordPress Website

Key Takeaways

this video is brought to you by seed prod in this video I want to share with you some of our best tutorials news and resources about WordPress to help you grow your website even more and I'm dubbing it get 20/20 vision on your website because next year's 20/20 anyway let's dive in so in creating your site a lot of times we're seeing an uptick right now in people searching for how to create a website how to grow your website and things like that so we have several tutorials on how to do this we even have a playlist on how to get started with your website but you also have some on how getting your site in things like Google search console it's really important to see how Google sees your site they also will share with you some of the keywords that are popular on your website how your pages are doing the click-through rate and things like that so make sure you check out that tutorial on business aspects we've created several tutorials on things like five best WordPress plugins for business directories or 21 best WordPress themes for car dealerships if you're looking to set up a restaurant we've got 24 best restaurant themes so you can take a look at those and if growing your business with a phone number is important for you next year we even rounded up seven ways to get an 800 toll-free number for your business now if you're a freelancer or an agency we've created a tutorial on how to prevent clients from deactivating WordPress plugins on their site this is a huge problem if you've created a website for them then you hand it over they have administrative access and then they've probably read somewhere that they need to remove all their plugins for speed they've removed them all and then they call you or emailing you and say my sites no longer working so check out the tutorial on how to prevent that from happening so that you don't get those types of calls another roundup that we did was how to get the most out of WP beginners free resources we've put together several free resources for people and so a lot of times people don't know all the things that we offer so we've set up a free resource to you and I won't go into all of them you can check out that resource on your own but I do want to highlight two that I think are really great the first one is get yourself involved with the videos in other words go to wpbeginner and up at the top we the videos section click on that go ahead and create an account here and then go through all of the videos that are in there these videos are great bite-sized chunks for people who have never dealt with WordPress whatsoever this gets you up and running real quickly each of these videos is only maybe 3 to 4 minutes some maybe 5 but overall they're not very long at all you could knock all 34 of these out in an afternoon and then from there you'll have a super clear understanding of everything to do with WordPress so that then you can move on to building your website but a lot of times people they'll come and they'll ask what are my categories how to add an image these are very basic things that if you go through this it'll teach you all about that the second resource I think is really critical is once you've done all the videos then go ahead and join our Facebook group WP engage this group was recently created just this year and it's already over 20 thousand members who are helping each other grow their website so you can get questions answered in here and just have camaraderie with others who are building up their website as well and then look at this resource article on other ways that you can get the most out of WP beginners free resources the last quarter of the year is huge for advertisers or publishers who have advertising on their website and so we've created a how to detect adblock users on in WordPress so that you can find people who are using the adblock when they come to your website and maybe even asking them to turn it off so that you don't lose that revenue now let's take a quick look at some of the features that just came out with the latest WordPress 5.3 it's been out for about a month and you've probably seen some of these features and maybe you've wondered what was this the first one you'll probably notice when you first log into your website after it's been updated is you'll see as soon as you log in you get something like this where administration email verification that simply means eight this is the email address that is associated with your website and all of the important emails that we send out with WordPress or if you have a contact form on your website those emails are likely going to this admin email so make sure that it is up-to-date and one that you use and if it's and click update and it will take you to the settings area where you can go in and scroll down and update the administration email here if it is fine then you can simply say the email is correct and it'll just log you into the dashboard if you're not really sure then you can ask them to remind you later as well but this is really important feature that they've added to make sure that you're getting the emails you need for your website some of the other features are more design related for instance on our page you'll see that there's a little bit of a difference between the current version and previous versions you see that there are more outlines and this is just to do a better job of making things a little bit more readable and improves accessibility in the admin areas so you'll probably notice that but it's not super huge difference there the next one is if you go into your appearance themes area you now have a new 2020 theme that you can use and it's just to really showcase how to use the block editor better and it's one that you can choose if you want to but you'll definitely see that if you first initially install WordPress this is the one that will ship with it let's go into posts I can show you some of the other new features so I'm going to create a new block or I'm going to create a new post and from here there are some new features here the first one is a new block and you can start doing it either by clicking on the plus sign here to add a block and just look for a group and you see the layout element it's a new layout element what you can do is you can add multiple items like a paragraph a heading maybe an image and you keep all of those together for instance you see I have a heading and I'm going to type something in here you see that there's a grouping of these there's a new grouping and you see it when I hover over these things you see that it's group paragraphs up here it's a group heading and I even click on the three dots here and insert something after the paragraph and you see it's all still staying grouped and say I want to add an image here now all of these three things are grouped together and I can use them as one grouping and once I set this up I can even add as a reusable block this is great if you're doing something like a review or you create these items over and over again you can simply save them and then reuse them later instead of having to create each new one over and over again going on a new line item there's another new one out there and it is a column so if I click on the columns they've improved the column structure so you see all of these that you can choose from as a visual layout of what to expect so for instance if I click on that one now I have these and then over on the right I can pick each one and choose how I want them to look or if I just need to reset it then I can do that here so it's a much easier way to handle working with columns in your block editor as well with five-point-three they also did some improvements with the button so the button has been a great new feature with Gutenberg as well but with five-point-three they've really made some updates here for instance over on the right you can just simply change the colors here you can do a custom color if you want you can even add in the hex value right there you didn't also choose the different styles if you just want it to be outlined or filled and then you can also choose how you want the border radius to be just by sliding it over here and then one of the great features is the link settings so you can make it open in a new tab and then you can give the link rel no open or no or for type things down here as well and that's simply for telling Google if it's a follower or nofollow type link so you can do that here so going through a lot of times when you click on the little block and you see all these and you just wonder well what does that do exactly and before it wasn't so easy to look at but if you ever come up here and you have to come up here to add the block you can hover over these and then you see a preview of what each one of these does so that's a really good feature to show you what do these look like and what are you getting into if you use it another feature if I click on the headings now we have color settings so you can choose specific colors for each heading if you want you can also choose to change which heading style you want it to be over here as well next say I want to create a gallery so I can type in gallery click on that and I'm going to add some media they've been doing a really good job of improving the galleries and they've taken it even further here so I've created a gallery we're going to insert that gallery and now you can even reorder items straight up within here you don't have to open or edit the gallery you can do it straight from within your block editor here sticking with images I'm going to add another image here and I'll show you another really cool feature that they've done so if you click on the image you can go under styles you can either choose to have the default style of the image or you can do a circle mask which means that you can have a circle this is really great if you're doing about me or an author image things like that so you can set that default or set that style here moving on we have table some table structure changes so you can change the column and row count here and we'll create the table and then from here over on the right you can choose what type of style you want so if you have stripes that means it'll be every other it's a little bit better for readability you can do fixed or header section so if you need to have a header up here and then you can go through and then you can also choose to have a footer section down at the bottom so they've really brought in the table structure and you can even choose your color scheme over here if you want so trying to get better at having tables looking better and functioning better in your editor one other feature a lot of times people at the end of their article they want to show read more or recent posts latest posts and it would only show the last three posts that you had and it would be in a list view now if you create your latest post area then you can choose how to showcase it so you can do some post content you can choose to make it as much or as little or do an excerpt or do just the full thing you can also choose to show the post date you can also scroll down and choose the sorting and filtering so if you want to do oldest to newest or newest to oldest you can do that if you want to just choose certain categories and then down here you can choose how many posts do you want to show if I had more posts and they would show up here in a grid style but since I only have one you're only seeing it like that so a really great way to showcase some of the latest posts and you could put that anywhere on your site one other area that they made some improvements on that I don't know if too many people saw but it was initially released in 5.1 they created something for a site health I would just let you give it an overall view of how your speed and performance of your website is doing so you can go to tools site health and this is what you're getting you're just getting an overall good or needs improvement so the site health gives just a little idea of how your site is doing under the status and then maybe some recommended improvements that you can do and then you can even see all of the tests that they perform and then if you wanted to you can expand these just to see what they're saying as well as what it's affecting security or performance things like that this is a really good way to just take a quick bird's-eye view of how is your site performing one last little area is in the logon screen they have a little area that if you are typing in your password and you've forgotten where you were you can simply click on the eye to see what you've typed in to fix it if you need to so that was another feature that they've recently added in addition with all that they have a lot of under the hood stuff that's just improved these being performance as well as some things like ability to upload images a little bit easier so if I point through was a pretty robust change and that should help you moving into the new year in creating more for your website and if you are starting a brand new website this year make sure you check out seed prod seed prod is the easiest to use coming soon page and maintenance plug-in on the market with the coming soon page you can also set it up so you can capture people's emails so they can be notified when your website goes live you also have great growth tools first growing your social media following such as Facebook Instagram and things like that so make sure you head over to see prot calm and use promo code WP be VIP to get the best deal off of see prod so now it's over to you let me know in the comments below which aspect of your website are you working on the most for 20/20 and thanks for tuning in