Is there a quick way to speed my site up?

Site speed ups can be very complicated and involve a lot of tweaking, but if your site is loading really slowly have a look at the filesizes of the images on your pages. A large filesize will slow your site down considerably, particularly on mobiles which have restricted bandwidth. You should be aiming for images…

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Do I really need a firewall and anti-virus on my WordPress website?

Yes, you do, particularly if you’re using cloud hosting (which most of us do) rather than your own servers or virtual private servers (VPS). Most hosts provide some sort of firewall protection, but on cloud hosting the firewall runs around the cloud space, rather than around your individual website. That means that if any one…

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What is a meta description?

Page meta descriptions are the little snippets you see underneath your site name in Google search results, and are invaluable for improving your Google ranking. You only get about 160 characters but if you can keep them informative and imaginative whilst getting your main keyword phrase in there it’ll do your search engine ranking no…

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Can I change the URL of my page to make it more SEO-friendly?

Yes, you can. One of the things you get SEO points for is for having your keyword phrase in the page’s (or post’s) URL. That URL (or ‘slug’ or ‘permalink’) is created by WordPress from the page’s title – so if you have a page called ‘About’ the url will be something like ‘mydomain.com/about/’. But…

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Is it a good idea to publish the same blog post twice?

Publishing the same post twice could lose you Google points as you would have duplicate content within your site, but if you have a post that’s worked really well for you in the past, go back to it, maybe edit it if it needs updating and publish it again. That way you avoid the duplicate…

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What does the ‘discourage search engines’ box mean?

The ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ box can be found in your WordPress dashboard under Settings>Reading. If it’s ticked it means that the search engines won’t list your site. Why is it there? Typically, you would tick it while you’re building your site so that the search engines don’t see your work in…

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How do I know which bits of my WordPress site to test after an update?

The importance of testing your WordPress website If you’ve updated your WP version recently you’ll be familiar with the success screen – “Welcome to WordPress vx.x.x”. Of course, that only means that the new version has been installed correctly on your site – it doesn’t actually mean that your site is still working as it…

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