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ips For Best Practices in WordPres
Don't you want to make the most of your WordPress blog or website? Today we share top ten tips for best practices in Wordpress that top WordPress developers religiously follow.
Wordpress offers lots of functionality and scalability to users. Online community like Sourcelysis does indeed connect you with the best Wordpress development companies or top WordPress developers. However, following these top ten tips for best practices in WordPress, you too can make your Wordpress even more powerful.
Although Wordpress is very well optimized system, a little effort goes a long way in boosting its performance and success. Following these ten tips of Wordpress best practices will ensure that you manage your Wordpress like a pro.
1) Know your audience
A fundamental part of the best practices in WordPress management is knowing your audience. Think of your user as the pivotal point. As you will continuously be creating content for your consumer, knowing your audience helps in delivering the experience effectively. Another significant step is to add the ' About Us'. This helps in SEO and for assuring the audience of the relevance of the Wordpress blog or website.
2) Less is more with Plug-ins, so choose wisely
Wordpress has a pluggable architecture and offers a vast pool of plug-ins. These deliver the extensive functionality of the powerful platform and help incorporate custom features. However, in case of plugins, the lesser the better.
Every new plugin added to the list consumes host server resources and contributes to making the blog sluggish. Therefore, rather than cluttering your blogs with plugin bloat, it is best to select only vital ones, which affect the conversions positively. In search for the relevant plugins, it is advisable to check version compatibility, user base and reviews.
3) Optimize Images
Optimizing images significantly boost your SEO efforts and helps load Wordpress site faster. It is better to use .JPG, works best for images with as they use more colors and use compression to reduce the file size. While people do also use .PNG, but they are well suited for screen shots and web design images. The other popular format of .GIF files, that is suitable for low quality images with few colors.
Consider putting every image through a Photoshop optimization process. It is preferred to choose the resolution to 72 and even compressing the image. It is also a good practice to name and tag image with a descriptive file name, to help you in search rankings. For this, you will need to optimize the title, Alt Tags, Description fields when uploading the image.
Wordpress also allows a powerful plug-in WP Smush.it. This helps to reduce image file size and improve performance. This plugin works by stripping meta data from JPEG files, optimizing JPEG compression, convertingcertain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the unused colors from indexed images. Other popular image optimization plugins include, EWWW image optimizer, CW Image Optimizer.
4) Faster load time = Quick success
With only few seconds to grab, it is important to have a faster loading time. Optimizing your website's performance and loading is critical to its success and no longer an option. Begin by taking a free evaluation of the loading time of your blog or website through Google pagespeed, gtmetrix. These will highlight the core metrics and offer suggestions to rev up your Wordpress blog.
Other tips include showing just excerpts instead of the full posts and keeping a clean and focussed homepage design. You should also cut down on excessive HTML/CSS elements on your blog or website. This adds to site bloat and reduced page speed.
5) Consider using a (Content Delivery Network) CDN
By using CDN, you utilize the various data centers across the globe to host images, CSS and Javascript files. They then serve them to your website's visitors closest to them. This helps in faster loading time, which is very critical to a website's success.
CDN will significantly reduce the server lag by storing static resources on network of fast loading servers. Among the other benefits, it also helps improving the backend site speed. No wonder that, almost all major Wordpress blogs and websites are making use of CDN. Popular CDN service providers include Amazon's Cloudfront, MaxCDN, CloudFlare, Rackspace cloud files.
6) Be responsive to responsive themes
In these times of multi-screen world, choosing a responsive theme helps better connect and engage with audience across all channels. A responsive theme helps engage with the smartphones and tablets users as they offer a more device optimized web- experience. Moreover, search engines too prefer responsive designs as they use one URL and one set of pages and files. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index content.
7) Install a cache plugin
Installing a cache plugin is one of the fastest ways to improve website performance as it significantly improves your site's load time. Cache plugins can be easily installed and will host your Wordpress images, posts and pages as static files. Popular cache plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache allow you to publish static HTML files from dynamic Wordpress blog. This offers maximum performance possible from your servers helps to greatly reduce the time a page takes to load. This helps in further improving the performance of the website by reducing the processing load on the server.
8) Optimise your content on SERP
Even as your content is engaging and relevant to your core audience, it is important to optimize the content for SERPs. Add breadcrumbs as they add another dimension to your site's appearance on SERPs. They also assist in giving the users more information about your site. Another popular route is to interlink your posts to boost engagement. This will lead them to explore the blog and website deeper.
9) Mark your Favicon
Often overlooked, but a favicon makes for an essential part of the online brand identity. Identical to being, a logo of the website, the favorite icon is the small icon that sits on the left hand corner of the web browser tab. You can make your own favicon through PhotoShop or use online favicon generators to generate one. Some online tools are dynamic drive Favicon generator, HTMLkit Favcon generator. Although they seem peripheral, they are highly relevant from branding point of view.
10) Boost SEO
According to Matt Cutts, wordpress is a great choice as a platform and takes care of 80-90% of SEO issues. However, these are powerful plug-ins as a WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast that make life easier. Also optimize the permalink structure by including two or three keywords that relate to your core content category. Further, it also helps to make your URL sound more user friendly and memorable.
The implementation of the above ten actionable tips on best practices in WordPress will immediately begin to reap you benefits. You can also search proven WordPress developers or Wordpress development companies atSourcelysis to boost your website's online presence.
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