How to Get Started with WordPress: A Guide to Messing Around
If you’re new to WordPress, it can be overwhelming to do anything other than write and post. However, with a little guidance, you can easily control parts of this massive software. The best part about starting out is that it’s the best time to mess something up without consequences. Here are some areas where you can get more familiar with WordPress.
WordPress Post Scheduling
One of the big reasons why having a CMS is so useful is post scheduling. You can write posts ahead of time and schedule them to go live when your posts usually do. You can also mess around with post times and find which works best for reaching your audience.
Better WordPress Security
While it’s easy to think that WordPress out of the box is secure enough, it’s wishful thinking. You need to implement some security best practices to protect your website from hackers. Some areas to take a look at include changing login URL, adding basic firewall restrictions, and changing your database prefix.
WordPress Plugins for Better Security & Maintenance:
Improving WordPress SEO
SEO can help you get consistent visitors over long periods of time and drive more traffic to your WordPress site. Start with keyword research and spend time making sure that you use the same language as people looking to learn about the subject of your article or post. Use headings logically and always in order, and follow a heading hierarchy for search engine indexing. Ensure that your code is clean and semantic.
Plugins for Improving Your WordPress SEO:
Increase WordPress Site Speed
Site speed is getting more and more important. Improving your site speed is one of those things that seem a lot more complicated and difficult than they are. Some areas you might want to look at include CDN, caching, image optimization, homepage optimization, and lazy loading.
Plugins to Help Speed Up Your WordPress Installation:
WordPress Website & Theme Design
Giving you a basic, clean design is something that a lot of WordPress themes do well these days. However, you need to make your website stand out a little bit to grab the attention of your visitors. Use page builders and customizable themes to create a unique design.
Plugins to Redesign Your WordPress Site:
Start Building a List
Email marketing is no longer as complicated and user-unfriendly as it used to be. Most of the big providers now let you get a free taste. While writing copy for emails is something that can put a bad taste in the mouth of someone who is sales-averse, channel the same voice of the blog they subscribed from.
Create Advanced Pages Easily With Page Builders
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. This is very low pressure as the only thing that could possibly go wrong is that you publish a page that doesn’t look good.
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 Google and code-specific sites like StackExchange to find out how to do what you want to do.
