Messing Around with WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide
If you’re new to WordPress, it can seem overwhelming to do anything other than write and post. But with a little guidance, you can easily control parts of this massive piece of software. A problem that often comes along with being new to something is a fear of failing or messing something up. But paradoxically, for a lot of things, WordPress included, when you’re starting out is the best possible time to mess something up.
To side-step the worry, adopt an attitude of messing around. When you’re not urgently trying to fix security holes or reinstate a working site, there’s really nothing to fear, especially in the beginning. Start with the parts that seem naturally interesting to you, even if they are all design related and you know nothing about design.
WordPress Post Scheduling
This is one of the big reasons why having a CMS is so useful. If you finish a post early, or you have to leave on vacation, or you’re taking an internet sabbatical, you can write posts/articles ahead of time and schedule them to go live when your posts/articles usually do. Or you can mess around with post times and try to find which seems to work best for reaching your audience.
Better WordPress Security
While it’s easy to think that WordPress out of the box is secure enough, this is wishful thinking. In fact, just last month I had my blog hacked because I had been lazy about implementing some security best practices. Important note: Back up your site before you attempt anything, and be careful with whitelisting and other IP related solutions for login restrictions, you might end up locking yourself out of your own admin area.
Improving WordPress SEO
SEO can help you get consistent visitors over long periods of time and drive more traffic to your WordPress site. Like I mentioned in my beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO series, if you don’t start with keyword research, all your efforts will be in vain. Proper usage of headers in your content, making sure that there’s only one h1 on each page and other factors. Use headings logically and always in order. Following a heading hierarchy is much better for search engine indexing.
Increase WordPress Site Speed
Site speed is getting more and more important. The more ‘spoiled’ the average user gets, the faster load times a user expects from any website, and the faster the user ‘bounces’ from a slow loading one. Improving your site speed is one of those things that seem a lot more complicated and difficult than they are, because there’s a lot of confusing lingo being used by ‘the professionals’.
WordPress Website & Theme Design
Giving you a basic, clean design is something that a LOT of WordPress themes do well these days. The problem from there is how to make your website stand out a little bit, to grab the attention of your visitors. Lucky for you, many themes like our own Total come with built-in page builders, live customizers and more.
Start Building A List
If a mailing list or email marketing is something that intimidates you, relax. It’s no longer anywhere near as complicated and user-unfriendly as it used to be 8+ or so years ago. Plus, most of the big providers now let you get a free taste.
Create Advanced Pages Easily With Page Builders
If you’re worried about tackling the actual visuals of your website, don’t worry. Page builders let you have a lot of creative control over the layout of a page without having to know a single line of code.
Conclusion
While there are a lot of things you can do with WordPress without knowing (or ever learning) a single line of code, if you’re interested, a lot more messing around is possible if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. The first step should be to install a local copy of WordPress. Then use big brother Google and code specific sites like StackExchange to find out how to do what you want to do.
