Best WordPress tips and practices to improve your website in 2019

by

Indeed, content-management-systems are dominating website development, with the easy website building, powerful and functional plugins. Among them, WordPress stands as the most recognizable one, with a plethora of themes and plugins.

Being the most developed CMS, WordPress plugins enable users to do some amazing things effortlessly. To some degree, this has translated to with user complacency and lack of focus on the finer aspects of their WordPress website. In this tips and tricks guide, we will help you take note of some valuable and concerning aspects of a WordPress website.

Does your WordPress website have a landing page?

As an industry standard and a positive feature for your SEO, your website needs a landing page, with additional landing pages provided for highlighted products or services. Ensure your website has one or more landing pages.

The landing page will enable your website to look smart,  authoritative and credible. Considering SEO benefits, this will ensure that visitors searching for that specific item will arrive at the perfect destination instead of the item directory or a generic website page.

Cluttered Sidebar

Adding plugins to further your website functionality can easily result in a website sidebar that looks like a mingled mass of things packed together without order. Dominated by social media icons, advertising banners, and backlinks, important parts of your sidebar might get hidden.

Important items of the sidebar should be located at the top, while your sidebar should look precise and offer valuable information, while still keeping it relatively brief. Additional sidebar items can be added with a mouse-over item to make it look clean but still remain functional.

WordPress plugins overhaul

I know, it is hard to resist setting up every possible WordPress plugin that may look useful at one moment, but the fact is that you have to be conservative with plugins number and use to keep your website running smoothly.  Too many plugins or too much script and your website will halt to a crawl.

Every now and then you should take the time to check your if plugins are recent, updated or have they become outdated and need replacement. Your plugins are there to work for you, not make you work harder just to keep your website maintained.

Plugins that have not received any update by their developers in six months are most likely stopped being developed. As such you need to react timely with a replacement plugin to ensure that your visitors have a comfortable browsing experience with your website.

Is your website making use of the footer?

Yes, the footer of the page is most likely the last place your visitors use, but still, from a functional perspective, it is very important as it can provide links to additional content and keep the visitor interested with your website.

Make your website look smart by adding facts or specific information about it, add trademark information or company biography, or any other relevant information that may be of interest to the customer.

Backlink implementation

Interconnecting your content with back-links to major website segments, as well as important off-page links,  can be done through website footer. Commonly websites provide contact links, copyright information, and hyperlinks to other websites within this space.

Bear in mind that back-links essentially work both ways, with a small portion of domain authority from the linked website spilling over to yours. This works because you are who you keep company with, and so this relevant.

Is your website keyword rich and SEO optimized?

Content and content optimization is the key to good SEO. While creating your content take SEO into consideration. Repeating one keyword over and over actually provides no benefit, but using synonyms and words that have similar meaning will improve keyword SEO.

Content formatting and SEO optimization can be improved with free plugins such as Yoast SEO which inspects your page and gives insight. Put the focus on opinions or inquiries by highlighting to make them more apparent.

Let’s wrap things up, and conclude

All kinds of website owners have invested time and effort and turned their WordPress website into a useful resource and an ideal website for their product, service or company.

Yes, WordPress functionality enables it to provide much more than a bleak online presentation. Take this opportunity to improve your website in an optimal way and increase its value as an integral part of your business.