WordPress tips
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…
Read MoreCan I change the way a single image looks on my site without affecting all the others?
Yes you can. The ‘Additional CSS’ functionality in the customizer is great if you want to change how an element, like an image, looks on the whole site. But what if you only want to change the look of a single occurrence of that element? To do this you need to know a little bit…
Read MoreDo 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…
Read MoreIf you put a post on your website as a blog page can you alter it at a later date to turn it into an actual page?
Yes, you can. You can either copy all of the content from the Post and paste it into a new Page, or you can use a plugin. Try something like ‘Convert post types’, though I have to admit to never having used that myself so do let me know if it works.
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreCan I schedule a WordPress post for publication at a later date?
Yes, you can. This can be very handy if you want to postpone the announcement of a new product, or if you want to spend a couple of hours writing all your blog posts for the next month. Simply go the post or page, click on the Edit button next to Publish on the right…
Read MoreCan 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…
Read MoreIs 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…
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreHow 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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