At WPMU we are all unashamed WordPress geeks. It comes with the territory. And as such, we know handy little tips and tricks that can save you time, boost your WordPress efficiency and increase your blog’s potential for success.
I have been harassing my WPMU colleagues for the past few days and have come up with a list of 11 WordPress tips for your benefit. I threw in a few of my own for good measure.
I offered no restrictions on the types of tips that were to be offered, and I received a wide variety that share just one common factor – they are all extremely handy for any WordPress user! Consider it a pick’n'mix of handy tips (that almost rhymes rather delightfully).
The Tips
1. Educate Yourself
Read the Codex! It’s amazing how much you can teach yourself. Every time I hit a snag with WordPress I turn to the community-run documentation. It’s super helpful, and the coolest thing is that it’s mostly written by volunteers. (Tim)
2. Go Incognito
Whenever you view your WordPress blog, you are probably logged in. Use the Incognito feature in Google Chrome to view your blog as a first time visitor would, without having to actually log out. (Ronnie)
3. Housekeeping
Keep your plugins directory clean. If you’re not using a plugin, make sure to see if it offers a full uninstall. Delete any plugins you’re not using. This will help you when troubleshooting conflicts on your site. You’ll have fewer factors to test when trying to track down the cause of a problem. (Sarah)
4. Frustrate Hackers
Always delete unused themes. Compromised code inside of inactive themes can leave your website open to attack. (Tom)
5. Embrace Captions
Put captions in your images – people always read captions! (James)
6. Access Your Image Gallery In Double-Quick Time
If you are uploading a bunch of images, once they are all done, click ‘Save All Changes’ to have the gallery tab appear! (James)
7. Go Tag-Crazy
Prevent duplicate content and boost your onsite SEO by using loads of tags and selecting them to be indexed (and conversely, your categories not to be indexed). (Tom)
8. Avoid The Visual Editor’s Wrath
Never copy and paste from Microsoft Word straight into the Visual Editor. Always use the “Paste from Word” button, or paste into the HTML Editor. (Siobhan)
9. Always Preview Posts
Always Preview posts before you hit Publish, as you’ll always see mistakes in a ‘fake live’ version that you’d miss in the editor. (James)
10. Put A Stop To Messy Permalinks
Always check a post’s permalink before you publish it. Apostrophes and other such symbols can make a mess of your URL without you knowing it. (Tom)
11. Don’t Neglect Your Design
Design and presentation matter, so unless you’re a talented designer, don’t be afraid to spend a few bucks on good theme and customizations. Design isn’t a substitute for good content, but it can be a helpful compliment, and studies have shown that first impressions (i.e. how visitors take to your overall design) matter a lot. (Joe)
Creative commons images courtesy of Rachael Voorhees, funnyjunk, whiteandrust, cryptome and York University.
“Sexist”. Really? My wife works at home, and that makes us sexist. You’re probably trying to be funny but that’s offensive. Shame on you.
Hello Sexist_American,
I have absolutely no idea how I have offended you (in fact, I can’t actually make sense of your comment), but nonetheless, I apologize.
Have a great day :-)
Tom
Hahaha!
Priceless :D
Great tips, thanks.
No problem Tom! :-)
He’s referring to the picture you put in section #3, Housekeeping. It shows a woman in the kitchen and the man outside with his car, and your caption says that people who do this are “sexist.” And you don’t know what his comment means? Surely you know what’s in your own content…
Hello Really?? :-)
Actually, my caption says “Three cheers for 1950s sexist America!”. It doesn’t say “women who do housework and men who work on their cars are sexist”. If you managed to draw that conclusion from my comment, I applaud you for your awesome powers of bizarre inference.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and make it perfectly clear what I meant from that (harmless, throwaway) caption.
If we go back two or three generations, it was a commonly held belief amongst many men that women should be housewives and nothing more. Over the last half-century or so, women have fought to change that perception, with a great deal of success.
We now live in a world where women have far more opportunities than they used to (unfortunately, equality still does not reign).
Women can still do the housework if they want to, and men can still work on their cars. That does not make them sexist (what a bizarre assertion). But it is a blessing that we now live in a world where women have so many more options.
Thanks for your comment – can we go back to talking about WordPress now please?
Tom
Re: Go Incognito; It’s just as easy to use another browser (chrome vs opera vs safari vs IE vs firefox). You should be testing in multiple browsers anyway, so this will likely save you time in the long run.
Two good points there Shawn! My only comment then would be that you should use Incognito when testing Chrome.
I didn’t know that going “tag crazy” was a good thing. I thought that was bad!!! Do you have any articles I can reference on that topic?
Hey Alex,
I’m afraid I don’t have any links to hand, but perhaps I should clarify what I meant by going “tag crazy” ;-)
You *shouldn’t* be stuffing loads of irrelevant tags into your posts. You *should* be creating as many relevant tags as possible. And once in a while, you should sift through your tags, combine duplications (e.g. “car” and “cars”), and delete superfluous tags (i.e. ones you have barely used).
Google loves you using plenty of tags – it provides it with another opportunity to understand what kind of content your site is made up of.
Cheers!
Tom
All in One SEO Pack plugin suggests users not indexing tags to prevent duplicated content. I’ve read an article that suggests WP users indexing blog entries only, and not indexing tags and categories: http://www.fayazmiraz.com/should-we-index-wordpress-blog-category-and-tag-pages-for-search-engine-optimization-seo/
However, I’ve seens someone let Google index all of their tags and most of them rank very high on the search engine. How strange :D
Well, I’m going to release the ‘no-index’ of my tags and see how that all goes.
Ulp!
Hi guys,
We can obviously go round and round in circles about what to do regarding SEO.
One thing is certain though – most people completely over think it. Google may be a pain in the ass at times, but it’s not out to destroy your blog’s rankings because you index your tags!
As far as I am concerned, it’s this simple:
Index your posts (obviously!). Index your tags. De-index categories, date archives, user archives, and all other archival sections on your blog.
That’s it!
Tom
#4 — delete unused themes. Good advice but I’ve never been able to suss out how to determine whether a theme is unused.
#3 — great graphic! Lighten up folks!
Hey Mark,
I’m not sure what you mean about themes. You must know which theme you are using for your blog – any other themes that are present in the “Appearance > Themes” screen are unused. Ideally, they should all be deleted.
Cheers,
Tom
What Tom said, but before doing this, make sure that the active theme is not a “child” theme, as that will require *at least* one other theme to exist – the parent theme. I’ve seen implementations where the parent/child theme relationship went several layers deep, too, so if you don’t know what themes are actually in use, you probably ought to talk to someone that better understands wordpress. And of course, it’s always good practice to make a complete backup before you delete ANYTHING.
Good call Shawn!
“Prevent duplicate content and boost your onsite SEO by using loads of tags and selecting them to be indexed (and conversely, your categories not to be indexed).”
So categories should not be indexed, but tags should be? Is it because we can do alot more tags than categories?
Tags are generating a lot of interest. I’m going to produce an article dedicated to tags – it should be published tomorrow. It should answer any questions you may have :-)