For those of you unfamiliar with WordPress; it is a powerful content management system that allows you to update your website without any coding knowledge. It has come a long way in the past 10 years or so, in terms of its ease of use and its improved security (especially now that you can apply the latest security patches and updates with just a few clicks).
It is also a very popular choice with our clients – over 25% of the websites and blogs we host are powered by WordPress.
For those of you who update your website using WordPress on a regular basis, we’ve put together our top 5 features, tips and tricks that will save you time and help improve your blog or website for your readers.
If, on the other hand, you currently don’t or aren’t able to update your own website, why not get in touch to talk to us about the many benefits of adding relevant and unique content to your site on a regular basis.
1) WordPress keyboard shortcuts
When writing for the web, it’s good practise to break up your content with plenty of sub-headings. This makes your posts much easier to read and also helps them to rank better in the search engines.
I just created the above heading by typing the following and hitting the enter key:
## 1) Quick keyboard shortcut for sub-headings
The number of hashes that precedes the text corresponds to the heading number, so if you need a Heading 3, you should use 3 hashes (###) and so on…
Similarly, if you need to start a bulleted list, simply type an asterisk (*) followed by a space and WordPress will automatically turn it into a bulleted list.
Finally, when creating a link to another website or page on your site, try Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on Mac) to quickly open the ‘insert link’ dialogue box.
2) Schedule your WordPress blog posts
If you’re trying to boost your traffic and credibility through posting regularly to your own blog, it’s a good idea to adopt a schedule and stick to it – for example, we update the Lumous blog every fortnight.
If you’re not around to publish your post at a specific date and time, you can schedule your posts in advance by changing the publish date in the top right of your screen when writing a WordPress post (click ‘Edit’ next to Publish immediately). This allows you to have WordPress automatically post the article to your blog at any time you choose.
3) Paste text into WordPress without formatting
When you need to copy and paste text from another web page or document, you probably don’t want any of the formatting (fonts, size, colours etc.) used on the original source and want to paste it into your WordPress editor as plain text so that it uses the default styles for your website.
In order to do this, simply click the Toolbar Toggle button (highlighted in red below) and then the Paste as text button (highlighted in yellow) to make sure any formatting from your source documents is discarded.
4) Split your WordPress blog post over multiple pages
If you are writing a particularly lengthy article or perhaps you want to make the most of your content through banner advertising revenue, it may be a good idea to break up your posts across multiple pages.
To do this, simply click on the ‘Text’ tab at the top of your WordPress editor (as opposed to the default ‘Visual’ tab) and then insert the following code wherever you require a page break:
<!--nextpage-->
5) Get rid of the ‘Uncategorised’ WordPress category
Out of the box, WordPress has an ‘Uncategorised’ category that is used as the default category for all new blog posts. This isn’t particularly useful for your readers and can look quite unprofessional if you forget to assign a category to one of your posts…
To avoid this, we recommend that you rename the ‘Uncategorised’ category to something more friendly such as ‘General’ or ‘Miscellaneous’. You can do this in the Posts > Categories section on your WordPress Dashboard.
Alternatively, you can also change the default category for new blog posts in Settings > Writing.
So that’s it! We hope you found our tips useful. If you know any other tips & tricks for WordPress, please feel free to share them in the comments below!
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