1. Take measures to avoid getting hacked
The WordPress Login Screen: it is useful to use a good cryptic password (can save it with password software like LastPass)
No one likes getting hacked or expects it to happen to them. When it does happen and you lose content or your design or blog completely, it can mean a lot of time and money to get it back the way it was. To make restoring your blog easier:
- Have a secure password.
- If you have your own hosting and domain name, use a reputable company that has measures in place to help with security.
- Regularly backup your posts either through your website, FTP/SFTP, or in a Word document.
If the worst does happen, it’s worth looking into Sucuri, a company that fixes hacked websites.
2. Set up your front page
Setting the front page of the blog to show latest posts
Within WordPress, you can set your blog to either have a front page — such as a homepage with a selection of content on it (depending on what your theme allows) — or you can set it to show your latest posts. Decide what will suit your audience best. Often this may be ‘latest posts’ for a blog, so that your audience can immediately see what you’ve been posting rather than clicking through pages or navigation to find posts.
Setting the front page of the blog to show a page (homepage-like)
3. Use menus appropriately
Appearance > Menus – this allows you to choose what pages appear in your blog navigation
Menus in WordPress act as your navigation. Imagine yourself as a user and what pages you would want to see on your blog. Keep it light and easy to navigate without too many pages or sub pages.
4. Use heading tags properly
A great way to keep your readers interested and make it easy for search engines to crawl your site is to use the heading tags — H1, H2, H3, etc. — properly. Ideally, these tags should signal priority in your headings throughout your blog posts. You can select different levels of headings in the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. You can only use H1 once, whereas you might use H2s a few times and then H3s for less-important sub headings.
The wysiwyg editor, complete with ‘H’ tags under the ‘Paragraph’ dropdown. The ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ tabs for pasting text and styling content
5. Paste text into the Text tab
If you’re writing content in a Word document and paste it into the WordPress WYSIWYG editor, you may find your styling comes through incorrectly or some strange code appears. The best way to avoid this is to paste the text into the Text tab on the editor and then add formatting on the Visual tab.
6. Use widgets
An example of using widgets in the sidebar on http://kiwifootprints.com
Widgets are little pieces of content that can appear in areas like the sidebar on your website . Depending on your theme, they may appear on every page so use them where it makes sense to. You might want contact details or archives to be easily accessed, or have a search box on every page. Widgets can be a good way to include those elements in a conspicuous place on your blog.
7. Set the correct timezone
Setting the timezone to the correct country so posts are published at the correct time
Having the correct timezone within your blog will allow you to schedule posts at the correct time and allow you to manage comments, etc. in a timely manner.
8. Schedule posts
Scheduling posts to be released at a later time/date from when you create them
This is one of my favourite aspects of WordPress Posts. You can write your blog post and schedule posts to be published on your blog at a specific time of a specific day. This is great if you like to sit down and pump out several posts at once, but want to spread out the dates on which they’re published. Doing this allows you to post regular content for your audience and will help your SEO rankings.
9. Have a responsive theme design for your blog
An example of http://designack.com – a custom designed website with a desktop and smartphone view. This makes it easier to browser through the site.
These days, people surf blogs often on their smartphone and tablets not just with their desktop and laptop computers. Therefore, you should make your blog easy to use on these devices. Many free and paid themes also include responsive or mobile friendly themes. If you have a custom-designed theme, be sure to check that it is responsive across smartphones and tablets.
10. Have a blog that is cross-browser friendly
Being cross-browser friendly means that your blog looks the same (or very similar) in multiple web browsers such as Internet Explorer 8+, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc. If you can, check you blog using multiple past versions of each browser (in particular Internet Explorer) because some users may not have the latest version installed on their devices.
BrowserStack is an excellent tool (and offers a free trial) to test what your website or blog looks like across other browsers and devices — from early versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari to the latest browsers and devices.
Note: All images used in this blog post are from my own personal travel and photography blog Kiwi Footprints.
