Essential Guidelines Every WordPress User Should

Follow

Introduction• WordPress is one of the most used CMSs of the world.

• In last decade, it became so famous among technical as well as non-technical people.

• Lots of people prefer WordPress to create websites and blogs.

• In this presentation, we have listed some basic guidelines for WordPress users.

• By using these guidelines, one can improve performance of his/her WordPress site.

• These guidelines can be useful to WordPress beginners as well as developers, website owners and bloggers who own WordPress site.

Create Backups• Most of the WordPress beginners as well as experienced developers ignore of

creating a WordPress backup.• It is advisable to have backup of your WordPress site because when site/blog

face any major issues, it could come to your rescue.• We suggest our clients to create automatic backups in their WordPress sites,

there are many plugins available to create auto backups. We suggest, following plugins:

1) BackupBuddy (Paid) 2) VaultPress (Paid, used by major WordPress sites)3) BackWPup (Free)

So, what are you waiting for? Start creating backups for your website!

Don’t Ignore WordPress Updates

• There are many reasons why people ignore updates.• Some WordPress users might be afraid of updates. They are not sure, what

latest update would do to their site.• Some users simply forget to update WordPress site.• Such things could be harmful in future as your site gets hacked because of a

security vulnerability in old WordPress version.• It is not a rocket science to update from one version to next version.• If your site’s theme and plugins are coded properly, it simply take one click to

upgrade site.• Again, If you still afraid to update your WordPress site, backup your site (Read

previous slide).

Don’t Create So Many Categories and Tags

• You can create as many categories and tags as you want very easily in WordPress Blog.

• That does not mean you create new category for each post and assign so many irrelevant tags in single blog post.

• We do find out that, some users also create multiple categories for one blog post.

• We suggest to create proper site structure so you can assign proper category & tags to each blog post.

• And yes, there is a difference between Categories and Tags. They both can not be used as an alternative of each other.

Set Permalinks• Many WordPress users from long time have used default URL structure: /?

p=1.

• Now, such URL structure is not SEO & User-friendly.

• You can always set structure of permalinks using Settings >> Permalinks after login into admin panel of your website.

Don’t Ignore SEO of Your Blog/WordPress

• There are many good WordPress SEO plugins available. Here is an article for some of the best SEO Plugins for WordPress site.

• You can install any good SEO plugin according to your requirements but don’t think that your work is over once you install best SEO plugin for your website.

• Your actual work will start from here. You can’t afford to ignore SEO settings of your favorite plugin.

• You can make your WordPress website’s pages as well as posts SEO friendly using a good plugin also you can able to do some important on-site SEO changes.

• If you still not sure how to use such SEO plugins most efficiently then it is better to hire SEO expert from reputed organization.

Remove Unnecessary Installed Themes

• Sometimes, It becomes very tough to select perfect theme for your website so what you do in this case, try one and then try another and then another.

• In such scenario, you install multiple themes and use only one theme. We suggest to delete all other unnecessary themes once you find best theme and you are ready to go ahead with that theme.

• There are many good reasons to delete them like to free some space on server, save some time which could be used to update them etc..

• When you backup your website, files related to such extra themes will also get back up which are no longer require to restore.

• Go to Appearance ->Themes from site’s admin panel and delete them.

Deactivate/Delete Unused Plugins

• Again, as you know WordPress CMS come up with lots of good plugins to achieve some functionalities without coding.

(Also Read: 4 Best WordPress FREE Plugin for Social Media Sharing)

• Because of so many great plugins, WordPress become famous among non-technical people.

• Like themes, you should also delete or deactivate unused plugins to light-up your server and to improve website’s performance.

• Just go to Plugins -> Installed Plugins from your site’s admin panel and deactivate/delete any plugins you don’t require any more.

Install Caching Plugin• Caching is actually technical term. Most of the WordPress users don’t know

what actually caching is so it is obvious that they ignore to install any caching plugin.

• In simple words, caching can improve site’s speed and prevent downtime if you get a lot of traffic at once.

• W3 Total Cache is most famous caching plugin. It is recommended by industry experts. We strongly recommend to install and use it to speed up your site’s performance.

Don’t Install WordPress Theme from a Bad Source

• Because of WordPress’s popularity, you may find many third-party theme providers on the internet who sell as well as provide WordPress themes for free.

• Not all theme providers are trustworthy. Your free WordPress theme may contain malicious and spammy links.

• So, it is recommended to download and install themes from trusted providers.• Here are some things, you may follow:

1) Download free WordPress themes from WordPress.org only.

2) Use one of these trusted providers.

Remove Unused Images from the Media library

• We have already described in previous slides that don’t make your server a home of unnecessary and unused things like themes & plugins.

• Same thing applies to images.• We all have more or less same way of uploading images. We upload one

image, if we don’t like it, we will upload another.• All these images are stored in media library so, next time provide some time

to delete the particular image which you didn’t choose to display on web-page.

• If you want to use same image for another image then there’s no need to upload it again from your system. You can always upload it from media library.

Delete Sample Page• WordPress sites come up with a default sample page.

• It’s recommended to delete this sample page as it don’t serve any purpose to users as well as search engines.

• Many users don’t have idea about it so they don’t delete it.

• Now, this is very amazing. Do you want to know, how many WordPress sites still consist of this page? Try this search query into Google: This is an example page. It's different from a blog post.

Delete Sample Page (Continued...)

We tried this query in Google and find out that approx 200 million websites

still have this sample page. This number is likely to increase as time grows.

Do you like to add anything else in this presentation?

Thanks for providing your valuable time! Let us know, If you have any suggestions for us.

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