30 Nov How To Be a Master Of WordPress: 10 Useful Tips For Beginners

WordPress is by far the largest and most popular content management system (CMS) in the world for both beginners and experts. It offers a plethora of valuable features, including over 55 thousand plugins. As a matter of fact, you are probably reading this article because you’ve heard of WordPress and now want to build a website on it.

While this CMS is indeed simple and user-friendly, don’t think that launching a WordPress website is such an easy task after all – at least not if you expect a reliable and professionally-looking product. For this reason, it is crucial to understand the basic principles of website building and learn how to make the first steps in the process.

In this post, we will show you how to be a master of WordPress following our 10 tips for beginners. Let’s take a look!

1. Choose the Right Platform

Did you know that WordPress comes in two different options: WordPress.com and WordPress.org? This is the first obstacle on the website building path for beginners, so make sure to make the right choice here. What seems to be the difference between the two solutions?

WordPress.com doesn’t require you to buy separate web hosting or install its software. You can buy a premium package for as low as $99 a year and build a decent website for personal purposes such as blogging. All premium subscriptions include essential features from Jetpack, which improves a website’s performance by helping pages load faster. But if you are looking to design a more serious business website and gain full control over it, we recommend you stick to WordPress.org.

2. Choose a Great Domain Name

A domain name should clearly reveal the purpose of your website and the business you are dealing with. The goal is to find a domain name that contains keywords in order to maximize the branding potential. For instance, leathershoes.com sounds perfect if you are, well, selling leather shoes. You can buy the domain name directly from a hosting provider like HostGator to simplify the procedure. Check out our blogging for beginners article here to learn how to start the registration process.

3. Don’t Save Money on Themes and Plugins

As a beginner webmaster, chances are you’d like to get the most of WordPress free of charge. We understand and encourage this way of thinking, but we don’t recommend you choose free features only.

Some themes and plugins have excellent free versions, but most of them offer much more benefits in the premium version. It takes only a minor investment to buy a beautiful theme and enrich your website with a lot of customization opportunities, so don’t be afraid of spending a few dollars on this. You can navigate through our database of articles to choose the best theme for your target niche.

4. WordPress Backup

The worst thing a webmaster could do is to begin creating content while neglecting backup. In such circumstances, losing the entire website content becomes a scary but very real possibility. While hosting providers offer partial backup, it’s not enough and you need to activate a WordPress plugin. Fortunately, there are many interesting backup solutions out there, so you can test them and find the one that suits your needs the most.

5. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one of the most important factors of online performance, which means you have to optimize the website and boost its ranking right from the beginning. While it greatly depends on your content creation capabilities, WordPress also offers you a bunch of useful plugins to drive your SEO efforts.

For example, All in One SEO Pack is the state of the art optimization tool with over 50 million downloads. Launching it, you’ll get a full set of features that can improve the search engine ranking of your posts in the long run.

6. Tailor URLs

Permalink structure may seem like a trivial detail, but it actually represents a major component both in the eyes of users and search engines. Webpage links should be meaningful and keyword-rich. Compare these two URLs:

• www.example.com/khvg23hj7%/sdkyu
• www.example.com/wordpress-tips-beginners

Of course, the latter option seems much better and more attractive. You must enable URL customization in WordPress by entering Settings → Permalinks and changing the Plain mode to Post name.

7. Never Forget Security

Security is another major aspect of website management. According to a report, over 70% of the most popular WordPress installations are vulnerable to exploits which can be detected using free automated tools.

First of all, don’t forget to change the default username and password (Admin) that comes with WordPress installation. Replace it immediately or you will become a victim of malware attacks very soon.

Secondly, you definitely want to install a security plugin to protect the website. WordPress is filled with hundreds of reliable options in this field, so use it to automate most of the protection processes.

8. Add Contact Form

The purpose of your website is to raise awareness, drive traffic, and inspire visitors to engage. The last feature is not possible if you don’t add a contact form to your WordPress website. As always, the platform offers you contact form plugins, but we also encourage you to write your online profile to improve professional authority. If you don’t know how to create one, services such as assignment writers can help you deal with it quickly.

9. Design a Favicon

A favicon is a small icon displayed in the address bar. It represents your website and constitutes another branding element that can help you increase the discoverability. You can find favicon stocks online, but we recommend you design your own unique icon to make the WordPress site recognizable among the crowd of competitors.

10. Use Website Analytics

The last tip on our list is not strictly WordPress-related, but it is mandatory for every webmaster who really wants to understand website performance. You should activate a free Google Analytics account in order to track the results and see where your audience comes from, which type of content they consume, and how they behave online.

It will give you valuable feedback so that you can enhance the content creation strategy and publish posts that inspire visitors to engage by sharing, commenting, or responding to your calls to action.

Conclusion

As the world’s largest CMS, WordPress attracts thousands of new users every day. While it is true that the platform is simple and highly functional, it still requires a lot of work and knowledge to build a good-looking website.

This article showed you how to become a WordPress master following the 10 basic tips for beginners. Keep our suggestions in mind and you won’t have a problem launching a high-quality WordPress website. Good luck!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Mathews is a professional content writer at SMM, SEO and freelancing. Scott`s biggest passion is blogging and travelling. He regularly takes part in different conferences and contributes his posts to different websites. Contact him on Facebook and Twitter.