Priya Shah is an enthusiastic blogger from last 10 years....
read more Priya Shah
I’ve been blogging for the last ten years now. During this period, I experimented with all kinds of Content Management System (CMS) for my various blogs and websites.
However, I wasn’t able to find even one good CMS that could match the prowess of WordPress. All the other CMSs failed to give features and flexibility that was given by WordPress.
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WordPress could easily take care of all your blogging needs from Content management to SEO single-handedly. From my long experience, I’ve been able to jot 10 simple but yet effective wordpress blogging tips to make your blog a success.
So whether you are a novice blogger or a pro, you must read following 10 easy tips to implement.
1. Design: Add Custom CSS to a WordPress Theme
My blog, where I teach bloggers how to start a blog, gets over a million views every month, so I can’t afford to depend upon free themes that are given by WordPress. Stakes are too high! Although you can buy themes for $49 - $100 but still they don’t cater to my specific needs.
My website is geared towards a particular kind of audience hence I need to customize it in that way. So to customize color, fonts, margins I add custom CSS to the WordPress theme by going to Appearance >> Customize page in my dashboard.
WordPress allows you to easily incorporate a CSS file into their existing theme and get the desired results. You really don’t have to spend any money doing this.
2. Design: Enhance Your Blog Post’s Content with Shortcodes
A blog that gets over a million views every month needs a lot of customization. Just a great theme is not enough. So with the help, you can easily add functions and features into your posts and pages making it more dynamic.
For creating customized dynamic content Shortcode is a very important tool. Other themes really can’t replace the power of shortcodes. To run shortcodes, you need to add code to your theme’s functions.php file. That’s it.
3. SEO: Creating New Image Size
Images are very important for SEO purposes. My blog contains a lot of images. You can easily create new image sizes in WordPress by adding codes to your WordPress functions.php theme file.
You can resize the images in three different modes Hard Crop Modes, Soft Crop Mode and Unlimited Height Mode. Customizing image size and adding labels to it can optimize your blog post for SEO. It is a handy tool to stay ahead of your competitors.
4. SEO: Easily Incorporate Google Analytics for Traffic Analysis
SEO is incomplete unless you install Google Analytics on your blog. MonsterInsights is the plugin that allows you to incorporate Google Analytics into your blog seamlessly. It comes in both free as well as paid version.
For a beginner free version is more than enough however if your site receives huge traffic then you can go for the paid version. You have to install and activate the plug-in first and then configure by visiting Insights > Settings. Now monitor your site’s traffic easily! For beginners, I recommend using the free version.
5. Readability: Split Long Posts into Pages
This is one of the trivial features that bloggers usually don’t find in other CMS easily. You can split your lengthy posts into 3 to 4 separate pages so that your readers can navigate the entire post without scrolling too much.
You can do this by just adding a simple piece of code <!—next page--> where you want to split the page. WordPress will automatically add the page break, and the rest of the post will appear on the next page.
You add the code again where you want to the next page to appear. A simple yet effective feature that can enhance the readability of your blog!
6. Change Username Reflecting Your Blog’s Niche
Username must reflect your blog’s niche. If your blog is about Music, then username must be about it. This is really important when it comes to branding.
As a matter of fact, big companies are ready to pay millions of dollars to acquire domain names that reflect their businesses. So it is important for a blogger to change their WordPress username to build a brand name.
You can do it in 2 easy ways.
- Creating a New User and Deleting the Old One – Create a new user with your desired username with a different email address. You can log in with the user account, go to the Users section and click on the Delete link in your old username. Click on the “Attribute all Content to” and then click “Confirm Deletion” button.
- Using a Plugin – Use Username Changer plugin to change the username and create a new
7. Best Mobile Friendly Plugins
Mobile is the future! Readers are migrating from desktop to handheld device now. In coming years, most of the traffic on your blog is going to come from handheld devices.
Hence, your blog must be optimized for Smartphone’s irrespective of their platform, iPhone or Android. WordPress offers some of the best plugins to make your blog website more mobile friendly.
Following 2 plugins are my favorites.
1. WPTouch Mobile Plugin
WPTouch is perhaps the most mobile-friendly plugin because of its simplicity and elegance. The plugin doesn’t affect your search engine rankings making it great for SEO. Its feature called “infinity cache” makes your blog fast using the mobile caching. It is free, but the Pro version has some cool features costing around $70.
2. Touchy and Superfly
One of the major issues that mobile users face is navigation. The touchy plugin allows your blog to fit on a small screen so that users can navigate through your blog flawlessly. Moreover, you don’t lose any features of the desktop.
There is another plugin for navigation that I like the most is Superfly because it gives loads of customization options. Although there are many other mobile-friendly plugins for WordPress but above 3 are the must-haves.
8. Engagement: Let Users Contribute to Your Blog
Every blogger must allow other bloggers to contribute to their site. However, it is also very important to allow ordinary users to submit posts to your blog. Readers of your blog can submit posts without creating an account. You can install WPForms plugin into your WordPress theme.
However, you will need Pro version to access the post submission add-on. Just activate the plugin and then go to WPForms > Add New and select “Blog Post Submission Form” as your template.
After editing click on the embed button to copy the code and then paste it in any of your WordPress posts to display a blog submission form.
That’s it!
Although there are many other features that WordPress as a CMS can offer however for the sake of brevity I only mentioned 8 most practical wordpress blogging tips that can improvise your blog to a great extent and make it a real success. You should keep looking out for other ways that can help your WordPress blog to stand out from the rest.
