WordPress Tips

 

WordPress is an excellent tool for newbie bloggers. It's simple to install and straight out of the box offers an easy path to publishing content. The most popular blogging platform in the world became the most popular Content Management System (CMS) through more than 10 years of development.

The benefits of WordPress for beginners are many. The ability to create properly formatted-for-web content and publish it with a single click is empowering. This functionality is available to beginners and experts. The lower barrier to entry means that beginners, armed with this comprehensive web publishing platform, make common WordPress beginner errors on their blog.

Not understanding how to customize and optimize WordPress can lead to a poorly performing, and low ranking site. Hackers target WordPress because they know that many have been set up by inexperienced WordPress users.

Here are some of the best WordPress tips for beginners that will help improve your search engine ranking, increase conversions, and give a better overall user experience.

Buy a Premium WordPress Theme

This is one of the most important WordPress tips I can give you. Free themes often look great and many of them function perfectly well. But what exactly are you getting when you put a free theme on your WordPress blog? You're getting a theme that might not have the proper security standards implemented. The developers have no incentive to maintain the theme so you might be left with a broken website the next time WordPress gets an update.

Of course, no theme is optimized straight out the box. Expect to spend a few hours or even days (weeks on a bigger site) to get your website looking the way you want it. Themes (or templates as non-techies call them) are merely starting points for getting online faster. Building a theme from scratch can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The best themes have teams of people working full-time on the code. Most business owners don't have the funds to splash out on a bespoke WordPress theme.

One of the most important things to check with a theme is how it looks on mobile devices. Most of the traffic to your website will likely come from users on mobile. Many people prefer to browse the internet on their phone or tablet. You need to make sure that your site works well on the small screen.

WordPress Themes For Beginners

There are literally thousands of themes for WordPress available across hundreds of developer sites, theme resellers, and marketplaces.

Looks aren't everything, and many beautiful looking themes are slow to load and cumbersome to use. Some have security flaws, such as certain themes on ThemeForest, as reported by WPtavern. In many cases, the issues are with plugins and are not caused by negligence on the part of the web marketplace. Not all WordPress templates are created equal. And many people believe that it's easy to just use a plugin that optimizes their site in order to fix problems with themes. This is definitely not the case.

Developers of a theme are sometimes too busy, distracted, or uninterested in maintaining a one-off theme, to fix potential flaws.

Two of the best WordPress Theme Frameworks are the Astra themes and StudioPress Genesis themes.

I’ve seen hundreds of themes that Look amazing in the demo but perform really badly. Themes that depend on hundreds of javascript scripts, external style sheets, image sliders, and other fancy stuff will always struggle to load on slow connections. Even users with fast connections will experience long loading times with these themes. If you don’t think this is important then read this (internal link 40% of sites slow, etc). Site speed is a ranking factor for Google. A slow site corresponds to lower rankings. If you don’t mind being on page 400 of Google’s search results then, by all means, use a ‘beast' of a theme.