Monday, November 30, 2015

9 Basic Wordpress Tips that Every Webmaster Must Know!


Are you a -
  • Wordpress website owner with limited knowledge about managing your website?
  • A busy webmaster who creates atleast 5 to 6 new Wordpress websites each month or week?
  • A newbie blogger who created his / her new Wordpress website but not sure how to make it secure and SEO friendly?

No worries, I am sharing few simple and important quick tips that you can just follow to make sure that you are on correct path while managing your Wordpress website. There are few very basic but critically important steps/ actions that every webmaster must take in order to make sure that the Wordpress site is properly optimised and secure. Ignoring these actions may cost you a dear!


I have outlined these bare basic tasks here. All you need to do is to bookmark and keep it for your reference.

Here we go –

1. Change Password

As soon as you install Wordpress on your server and log into the admin dashboard the first thing you MUST do is to check if the password is strong enough. If somebody else has set this Wordpress for you and has kept any easy password (like admin, admin123, your name, etc.), change it immediately! Create some super strong password that is a sound mix of alphanumeric characters with upper and lower case alphabets.

Passwords like admin, admin123 serve as an open invitation to hackers to take control of your site. Majority of the hackers who attack your website with brute force tend to try ‘admin’ as a password at first instance!

2. Change the Permalink Structure

Well, permalinks form the urls of your posts and pages. If you don’t change the permalinks to readable ones and continue with the ugly urls, you are going to miss that valuable ranking opportunity in SERPs.

3. Set Pinging URLs

Pinging is a must to do setting if you want your website/ posts to get indexed quickly. If you want to know what is Pinging and how to do it, then please read this article about pinging urls in wordpress.

4. Install Useful Plugins

Plugins extend the Wordpress functionality beyond the limits. There are numerous plugins - both free and paid that make life easy for a webmaster. Since we are talking about basic stuff so we will look only into quality free plugins that a Wordpress site MUST have. Here is a list of basic plugins that every Wordpress site webmaster must install first thing!

5. Connect your website to Social Media Channels

Well this step should not be called a must have for all websites but I am assuming that you are interested in posting your content to Social media to gain that bonus social media traffic. I assume you have installed Jetpack plugin. Jetpack is an all-in-one powerful plugin that offers you plethora of options like contact form, image gallery, responsive layout, social media sharing integration, etc. Jetpack gives you power to connect to social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+ and Path.

6. Install Security Plugin

This is the most important step. Security plugin safeguard your site from external attacks. There are three best free security plugins -
  1. Bulletproof Security Plugin
  2. Wordfence Security Plugin
  3. Sukuri Security Plugin
I have used all these three plugins on many of my websites and have found them very useful. Once you have them installed and you can choose to receive email every time anyone logs into your site and/or any activity happens on your website.

7. Link With Google Analytics

As discussed in Point Number 4, you can integrate Google Analytics with your Wordpress site with the help of Google Analytics Plugin by Yoast. This useful plugin offers many advance features to connect the maximum and accurate data with Google Analytics.

8. Create Robots.txt

In point number 4, we have discussed the installation of some useful plugins. I assume that you have got Yoast SEO plugin installed. You can create Robots.txt with the help of this plugin.

Yoast also offers you the facility to edit your .htaccess file. This is important because it will give you complete control over the optimizing your site for speed, compression and prevent image theft, etc. More about managing .htaccess file for Wordpress is discussed here in this article.

9. Verify you site with Search Engines

Submit your site to various search Engines and create a Google Webmasters account for your site.

Conclusion

So these are the basic MUST TO DO action points that every Wordpress webmaster must know and implement with his new Wordpress site. Hope you enjoyed this article. If you find it useful, please bookmark it, share it and don’t forget to give your valuable comments. Stay Tuned!

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