Take Your WordPress Website to the Next Level
If you use a WordPress website for your business, you want to make sure you are getting the most out of the service. WordPress offers incredible options for businesses, but few people are aware of the many benefits WordPress offers and therefore, do not use the service to its fullest capability.
In this post, we will outline a few of the ways in which a WordPress website development company can help you unlock the true potential of your business site.
Improve Your Website Speed
If you find that your site is running a little bit slower than you would like, there are a few ways to speed up WordPress.
1. Pare Down Your Plugins
If you’re not using certain plugins, it’s time to give them the boot. By deleting scarcely or never-used plugins, you’ll experience notably improved website speed.
2. Add New, Better Plugins
Besides just deleting old plugins which you no longer need, you may also consider adding in some new ones that your site will benefit from. For example, a plugin that automatically catches and deletes spam comments can keep your site from being overrun by these unwanted solicitations.
Other plugins which bear consideration include those designed specifically to improve site speed, and those that automatically compress and optimize images as you upload them to your site.
3. Test Your Site Speed Regularly
Running frequent speed tests will help you keep on top of any developing issues on your WordPress website. In this way, you’ll be able to identify potential problems before they start slowing down your site.
4. Check Your Tags
Over the life of your business, you’ve probably tried out many different strategies with mixed success. Therefore, there may have been tags which were, at one point, relevant to your business, but are no longer so. Clearing these tags from your site is a small step, but one that can have profound consequences for your site speed.
Ensure You Have a Secure WordPress Website
Beyond fast site speed, you’ll also want to be sure that your website is secure and impervious to those with malicious intent. Therefore, the following tips will help improve the security of your WordPress website.
1. Create Strong Passwords
Creating strong passwords has become somewhat of an interesting issue: our passwords are now so hard to guess, that even we can’t remember them! While this improves the security of our logins, it also puts us in a tough spot if we’ve misplaced our password books, written down the password incorrectly, or made some other password error.
Regardless, it’s a good idea to have strong, hard-to-guess passwords for your WordPress website. This limits the chances of a breach or other issue that will set you back.
2. Perform Updates as Soon as They Are Available
When new WordPress updates are released, you should strive to implement them as quickly as possible. The reason for this is twofold: 1) your website will perform better with the new updates; 2) some hackers deliberately search for older, outdated versions of WordPress to target.
For this reason, keeping on top of updates is essential for both the performance and the security of your WordPress website.
3. Backup Your Website
There are a few ways to back up your site, some more complex than others. Whichever method you choose, ensure that your data is protected, should your site be compromised in some way. No matter how strong your WordPress security is, things can and do go wrong. If this happens to you, make sure you don’t have to start from scratch.
4. Consider a Security Plugin
As you’re probably well-aware, there are tons of plugins available to WordPress users. Security plugins make up a big chunk of the available plugins and help to decrease the chances of your site being hacked.
Use the Space on Your Site Effectively
Between headers, footers, and all other available space on your site, there are plenty of options for effective content placement throughout your WordPress site.
1. Headers
Headers are a great way to display your company logo, menu options, and other key features of your website. This is likely the first thing a site visitor will see when they enter your website, so you want to make sure it doesn’t turn them away and that it encourages them to continue viewing your content.
2. Footers
In your website footer, you have the perfect opportunity to list contact information and to present a call to action. Savvy website users will often scroll down to this part of the website immediately in order to find what they are looking for. If you don’t adhere to the accepted internet standard of placing this information in the footer, you may turn frustrated potential customers away, never to return.
3. Primary Content Space
Your main content should contain all of the important information which a potential customer would need to know. Blog posts, about us pages, etc. all need to have a pleasing design and layout. Visually off-putting content such as bland color schemes, massive paragraphs, and other inappropriate uses of this space will waste a huge opportunity to hook your audience and convert them into lifelong customers.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO can sometimes feel like an overwhelming concept. Fortunately, there are services that can check your SEO status for you, highlighting areas which can be improved. Common SEO issues include the following:
- Links that no longer work;
- Duplicate and revised posts;
- Error-laden content.
Any or all of the above issues can diminish your site’s rankings and can prevent you from reaching tons of potential customers.
Conclusion
After reading the above tips for improving your WordPress website, how are you feeling? If you have a sense of dread and feel overwhelmed by the thought of making all of these changes and improvements, let us do the work for you.
We at Ancell Marketing are available for all of your website design needs. We’ll take your WordPress website to the next level, enabling you to reach a much wider audience. Contact us today!