5 Easy Ways to Improve Your WordPress Site
Written by Tommy McPhail • Published on January 10, 2017
To help, here are 5 quick and easy ways to improve your WordPress site year-round. Knock these out while coffee brews, or instead of your 2nd mid-morning accidental YouTube break (c’mon – what’s more important? Your website’s future, or being Charlie’s 29 millionth view?)
Upgrade!
Upgrade to WordPress 4.7, which now includes support for video headers in blog posts (if your theme supports it, that is), improved back-end shortcuts, and plenty of opportunities to improve your site all year long. WordPress has never been more user-friendly or intuitive!
Jump to Hyperspace
It’s 2017. Sites taking more than 3 seconds to load lose traffic. Quick tweaks like removing outdated plug-ins, embracing new ones like Better WP Minify, and compressing images will all help speed up your site’s average load-time.
Back, back, back it up
This is WordPress 101. Routine backups help keep your site secure from spam attacks and hosting outages. If needed, switching hosting providers becomes seamless. Many hosting companies offer automatic backups for your server, but you may need to enable them first. We recommend you go one step further and back your site up on an external server, too. That way if your hosting company goes down, you still have a backup elsewhere. If yours isn’t already backed-up, GET. ON. IT. (Fret not – if you don’t know where to start, we can help.)
Tie Things Up
One loose end many don’t tie up? How site links appear on social media. For example, check out Facebook’s Object Debugger to see how posts from your site appear on Facebook. You can tweak these previews through trusted backend plugins like All in One SEO. Cleaner links = higher clickthrough rates! Speaking of SEO…
Hello, SEO
What’s your digital first impression? A sleek, informative one-two punch of awesome, or a boring auto-generated summary parsed by Google’s almighty algorithm? Consider adding some fresh copy and tags in your site’s backend. If you have no idea where to get started, plenty of plugins can help; we prefer Yoast SEO, for our site and our clients, too.
Need more than a quick fix? We’re here to help! At Antimatter, we build WordPress sites you can manage yourself all year long. Take a peek at our Support Subscriptions and see how we can best serve you.
About Tommy McPhail
Tommy was Antimatter's Digital Producer and Communications Strategist from Summer 2015 until Summer 2017. Now, Tommy helps companies in and out of Richmond, VA as a social media specialist and web developer. Before joining us, Tommy managed accounts at Big Spoon and Padilla, producing award-winning digital content for food & hospitality clients. When he’s not delivering killer client work, Tommy enjoys playing guitar in Dollar Signs and making tacos with his partner Emily.
