Are you getting the most out of your WordPress website?

Whether you’re managing WordPress for your business or your personal site, there are some basic tips that can help you make your work much easier! We have asked our WordPress experts, and put together a list of our best WordPress tips to help make your content management experience wonderful and save you some time and effort!

#1 – Use a word processor

Don’t write original copy in the WordPress dashboard. This is true of any in-browser platform. If your internet connection drops, your work could be lost. Write in a word processing app, copy and paste, and format it later. It’s easier to hit ‘command + save’ repeatedly in an app than to have to rewrite original thoughts. The spell-checking, grammar, and other tools are also much more accurate and accessible outside the dashboard.

#2 – Paste as text

Don’t paste directly into the WYSIWYG in “Visual” editor from Microsoft Word, or any source you’ve created copy. It can add lots of extra tags and code, which can interfere with styling or really mess with your formatting. Examples? You know when you go to delete a line of text and everything suddenly changes to H4, or you have a paragraph that always starts one line below the top of the field, no matter how many times you delete that space and save? That’s the kind of issue that you can expect from the extra code that pasting into the WYSIWYG “Visual” editor.

Always use the “Paste as text” option in your editor.

#3 – Open external links in a new tab

External links should always open in a new tab. This is important because you want customers to stay on your site. If you make all links open in a new window, your site will remain open in a separate window, and they will have to return after viewing the link you shared.

This toggle can be found under the “Insert/edit link” option. External links are destination URLs that lead to any other site that isn’t yours and should have this checked. Links to other pages within your website should not have this selected.

#4 – Your Image dimensions

Be careful when uploading images. Large, high-quality images can be easy to upload, but can cause extremely slow load times (especially on mobile devices) and will hurt your performance and potentially your Google rankings. They’re rarely needed on websites, which use lower resolutions than print media.

There are many plugins out there that can help you out, such as WP Smush or Imsanity. Or ask your NDESIGN designer to help out.

#5 – Name your files

Name your image files before uploading them into the WordPress media gallery. Instead of leaving photos as their default “DSC0273”, you should rename them for what they are. For example, “ndesign-homepage-banner” is a good title.

This will allow the photos to be indexed properly by Google, and will also make it easier for you to search images and find them later.

#6 – Screen options

In the WordPress dashboard, “Screen Options” (at the top) contains a lot of panel options that are hidden by default. If you can’t find a tool you have used previously, check there first!

#7 – Secure your site

We commonly use and recommend a free plug-in; All In One WP Security & Firewall, to provide FREE comprehensive WordPress security and a firewall for websites. We also endorse Sucuri as tops if you are wanting to purchase paid protection and firewall services. These plugins are a must for businesses that forget to keep their stuff updated. There’s nothing worse than trying to fix a hacked website! Sucuri handles the cleaning and restoration of your site for you, and is extremely affordable.

Have any WordPress tips that you’d like to add? Let us know below in the comments! Hope these tips help you!