WordPress Tips

Your business website is critical to remaining competitive in the marketplace. WordPress is the most popular choice for creating professional websites. In fact, its design comes with so many helpful features that even a novice can have a straightforward website up in a few hours.To get you started, learn some powerful, time-saving WordPress tips from NOYO Web Development.

Change the Permalink Structure for Better SEO

By default, WordPress assigns a permalink structure that includes the date. However, SEO pros agree that this is not the best permalink structure for search engine optimization. We suggest you change the permalink structure to eliminate the date feature. Go to your dashboard and select Settings from the left menu. Then choose Permalinks from the next menu. Select the post name radio button and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page. This will optimize your URLs for SEO and give a cleaner look to your site.

Create your online shop

If you intend to sell products or services online, you will need a virtual store that provides the best buying experience. WordPress has a solution for you. The WooCommerce plugin is free and comes with a storefront option that makes selling online a breeze. It also offers expanded features for better customization so you can design your shop to go beyond selling physical products, such as affiliate sales and even a multi-vendor marketplace.

Make Your Website Design Industry-specific

Seek out themes or plugins designed for your specific industry. This is a worthwhile investment. If you are in real estate, look for a design made for real property sales. Free themes for other industries save you on upfront costs, but your site won’t look right. The same goes with plug-ins. Also attend a WordPress meetup group in your area. The developers there are friendly and want to see the WordPress universe expand.

Monitor Your Website’s Accessibility Compliance

If your company is involved with government contracts, your digital documents must be compliant with with visual- and hearing-impaired requirements. If your website is built in WordPress, you can install a plugin to assist in the process. The plug-in is called WP ADA Compliance Check Basic, and you can download and activate it for free. The paid version will fix many of the issues automatically. It will check your content for any issues that may cause sub-optimum user experience with visually-impaired users and prompt you if a language attribute is not added to the code to help the text-to-speech software know what language it will be reading, among others.

Keep Up with Updates

Your dashboard will keep you informed of updates as they occur. Updates for plug-ins are released regularly and are often to patch new security vulnerabilities. Hackers can and do attack sites that haven’t been updated. Thankfully, the process of installing the updates is almost effortless—just make sure you have backups and that you check your site functions properly afterwards.

Add Title Tags to Your Images

This can be a game changer if you are posting pictures on a regular basis, such as to a blog.. Not only do they show what you are posting about in a brilliant image, but you can also give them title tags that are your keywords or that assist in search engine optimization. This means your content and your picture are working for you. Regardless of where you get your pictures, you can upload the image to your website, and add a keyword in your image title and alternate text fields. Now, for it to work in your favor, it needs to relate to your content and your permalink or meta description.