WordPress is the most widely used website building platforms on the internet (Source: W3Techs.com). A big reason for that is its flexibility. Without too much effort you can use themes, plugins and a little WP Learning Lab (shame-less plug) help to build the website of your dreams.
With all of the things you can do with WordPress it becomes hard to decide what you should do. That’s where resources like this come in handy. Below you find 21 of the most common and most requested WordPress tips and tricks for improving your site. Let’s rock and roll.
1. Make Your URL SEO Friendly
This tip is essential for SEO. The URL is one of the most important pieces of data Google (an other search engines) analyze to try to figure out what your page is about.
The default installation of WordPress creates URLs that look like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=356. “p=356” tells search engines nothing about that pages content, so you need to make a change. In WordPress you can change the URL by changing the permalink structure. To get to the Permalinks page log into the back end of your WordPress site and hover over “Settings” in the left side menu. In the menu that opens click on “Permalinks” (see screenshot below).
It’s best to change the permalink structure to something like this “%postname%” (without quotation marks). The latest version of WordPress allows you to select from a short list.
Once changed you will see the post name automatically entered into the URL in the post and page editor.
2. Add Favicon to Your Site
You can add a custom favicon to your WordPress site. To do that, just follow the steps in this video tutorial (link goes to YouTube)
3. Revert to a Previous Version of a Post or Page
In WordPress, you can revert a page to an earlier version. To do that, navigate to the page or post editor and click on “browse” next to “Revisions” near the Update/Publish/Schedule button. After that, select the time and date of the previous version you want to revert to.
In the revision browser you can compare older versions of the post to the current version to see what has changed. Use the bar at the top center to choose the revision you want to compare to.
Below is what you see when there are differences in the versions:
When you’ve found a version that you want to revert you simply need to click the “Restore this Revision” button in the top right (you may need to scroll up to see it).
4. Change The Language Of Your WordPress Site
If you or your clients prefer to work in a language other than English you can install WordPress in whatever language you wish. Check out this page in the WordPress codex for information on how to do that: WordPress in your Language.
5. Stop Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks can quickly become annoying. Luckily, you can easily stop them from appearing on your pages. First, you need to install the plugin Hide Trackbacks. Then activate the plugin. This will remove old pingbacks and trackbacks from the blog posts and prevent new ones, but you can still view them in the dashboard.
Remember to backup your site before you install any new plugins!
6. Easily Build Data Tables
If you need to have tables on your site, then this plugin is what you need. With the plugin TablePress, you will be able to do everything you need to do with tables on your site quickly and easily.
7. Secure Your Config File
The wp-config.php file contains some important data that shouldn’t be accessed by anyone but you. So move your wp-config.php file one directory up from the WordPress root. The system will automatically detect the config file. If you do this, nobody will be able to read the file except a user with FTP access.
8. Stop Image Compression
Images you upload to your WordPress site are automatically compressed. This reduces the quality of your images. This is better for page load speeds, but you may want to have the highest quality images possible while not caring about page load. To make sure that the images you upload say at 100% quality, simply copy/paste the code below into the functions.php file of your theme.
add_filter( 'jpg_quality', 'high_jpg_quality' );
function high_jpg_quality() {
return 100;
}
Source: WP MU Dev
9. Enable Shortcodes in Widgets
You can enable shortcodes in widgets. Just use the filter given below.
add_filter( 'widget_text', 'do_shortcode' );
Source: WP MU Dev
10. Remove Invalid Characters from URLs
Always try to make sure that your URLs contain no invalid characters. You can have WordPress do this for you with the esc_url() function.
$my_url = 'http://myawesomesite.com/?awesome=true'; $url = esc_url( $my_url );
Source: WP MU Dev
11. Increase Visitors with Twitter Cards
Twitter cards allow you to greatly enhance your tweets and send your click through rates through the roof. Check out this tutorial and video on how to integrate Twitter cards with your WordPress site.
Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or need any help with any of the tips above.