Are you looking for WordPress tips for beginners? If so then this will be right up your street.
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
WordPress is an amazing platform for all websites but in particular for small businesses. There’s pretty much nothing you can’t do with a WordPress website, which is what makes it so popular. It’s also very easy to use which makes it a great platform for beginners.
But I also think it can be overwhelming if you’re not familiar with it which is why I’ve put this post together full of WordPress tips and tricks for beginners.
Don’t be scared of it
My first tip would be don’t be scared of it. There is very little real damage you can do via the WordPress dashboard especially if you take regular backups.
If this is your first site and you’re not working on a site that’s getting visitors you don’t have to worry about people landing on a dodgy looking site. So you can try out different themes and layouts without worrying about messing it up.
Some hosts offer staging sites as part of their hosting packages. These are sites that are a copy of your existing site but aren’t live so you can make as many changes as you like without impacting your main site. Then once you’re happy you can copy the staging site across to be your new site. This is usually done with a few clicks of a button.
Hosting
Hosting is where the files for your website lives. A good host can take away so much stress if you have a problem, but also can impact how quickly your website loads. Better hosts have better equipment and infrastructure which in turn helps your site to load quicker.
Not everyone can afford to buy top quality hosting from the start, so I recommend that you buy the best hosting you can afford right now. You can switch to a better host when you have a bigger budget.
Check out my recommendation for the best WordPress hosting for beginners.
Try plugins before you install them
I recently found a really cool new platform called Taste WP. You can try any plugin in the WordPress repository and it will create a new WordPress site with that plugin pre-installed.
All you need to do is replace wordpress in the URL with tastewp.
Example: To try the Elementor plugin Change https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor (URL of the plugin) to https://tastewp.org/plugins/elementor
You can also install other WordPress plugins on this site to play with. The site will remain active for up to 7 days if the user stays logged in, or 48 hours if the user logs off.
If you’re not sure where to start with WordPress plugins read about my recommended WordPress plugins for business.
The Winning Website Starter Kit
The beginner’s guide to building a website you love for your business.
If you’ve been thinking about DIY-ing your own website but don’t know where to start, this could be for you. In this 17 page guide you’ll find:
- 17 page pdf download – This guide takes you step by step through the process of creating a WordPress website from what to call it to what goes on it.
- Content Tips – This isn’t a guide where I explain the tech and then leave you twiddling your thumbs wondering what exactly to add to it.
- Tricks of the Trade – This guide includes info on the plugins I use on all my client sites, where I buy my themes, hosting and more!
- Resources – You’ll find my go-to resources for email marketing, legal info and graphic design here too.
Usernames and passwords
One of the most important WordPress tips for beginners is around usernames and passwords. When you first set up WordPress, make sure that there is no username ‘admin’, there shouldn’t be but if there is get rid of it ASAP. Back in the day, all WordPress installations came with a default ‘admin’ username, which makes it a security risk if a hacker ever sets their sights on your blog.
When you set up a new user, make sure that the username you use to log in is different to the display name. So many people do this (even me when I started), so it’s usually a hacker’s next guess at a username.
Make sure you use complex passwords, ideally they should be at least 12 characters long with upper and lowercase characters, numbers and special characters.
If you’re worried about not being able to remember passwords, use something like LastPass to remember your usernames and passwords. All you’ll need to remember is the master password (which should also be secure) but it’s much easier than a random password for ALL your online accounts.
Find out more about WordPress security here
Keep plugins to a minimum
It’s easy to get carried away installing plugins on your site. There are so many and they all do different things. They are what makes WordPress the brilliant platform it is.
But not all plugins are created equal. Some are more efficient than others, some use up more space on your host, some take up more resources than others. One thing also to note is that because there are so many WordPress plugins, I think there’s at least 50,000 not every single plugin has been tested with every other plugin. So it’s impossible to know how they will all work together.
But you could make use of TasteWP as mentioned earlier to try a few plugins together and see what they do.
Having a lot of plugins installed on your site will likely make it load slowly. There’s no magic number as to how many is optimal as I’ve just described, it depends on the plugins. So use as few as you possibly can.
Image optimisation
99% of the time when I’m asked to help with sites that load slowly it’s due to un-optimised images.
Often when you get your photos from your photographer or you download them from stock photo sites they are much bigger than they need to be. I’ve seen people having used images that are 4000px by 2000px on their websites in a place where it only displays as 600px by 400px. As you can imagine a file this size takes some time to load and if there is more than one on the page the page will take longer and longer to load.
Check out this blog post on how to get WordPress image sizes under control.
Themes
Choose a popular theme such as OceanWP or Astra. Such commonly used themes are kept updated by the teams who produce theme and there is a lot of content around with helpful tips for problem solving.
You will also find that they work well with well known page builder plugins such as Elementor, Beaver Builder and WP Bakery.
I like to use OceanWP and Elementor, personally.
Security
Install a security plugin such as WordFence or All in One WP Security and Firewall to add an extra layer of protection to your WordPress website.
Accessibility
I have a couple of WordPress tips and tricks for beginners around accessibility.
When choosing colours for text and backgrounds always check that there is enough contrast for visually impaired visitors to read. Use the WebAim contrast checker if you’re not sure.
Always make sure your images have alt text. This is a description of the image for visitors who use screen readers.
It’s important to make your website inclusive and accessible to everyone because it’s the law, and just to be a decent person.
Search engine optimisation
If you’re setting up your site for the first time, remove dates from your permalinks. Google prefers shorter URLS and adding dates will date your content, even if it’s still relevant.
If your site has already been published do not change your permalink structure without putting redirects in place. If you do change them without redirects set up any links to your content on social media or anywhere else will no longer work.
Do keyword research and make sure your website includes them so that it will be found in search engine results by your ideal clients.
If you’d like to learn more about search engine optimisation (SEO) you can buy my SEO Simplified Workshop here for £15.
Keep your site up to date
WordPress theme and plugin developers will often issue updates to them. You’ll find that these updates will include new features, improvements to plugin efficiency but more importantly security updates. This is right up there as one of the more important WordPress tips and tricks for beginners listed in this post.
It’s important that you update them when they are released to make sure you always have the most recent security updates. This will help prevent your site from being hacked and that your visitors data is kept as safe as possible.
WordPress tips for beginners – verdict
There’s quite a variety of tips in this post which shows how different bloggers, with different experiences have different problems.
If you take nothing else from this post today, make sure you set up regular backups of your website. There is virtually nothing you can do to your website that a backup can’t fix. As far as I’m concerned of all the WordPress tips and tricks for beginners in this post, this is that stand out one.
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