5 WordPress Tips Every Webmaster Needs to Know
More than 500 websites are being built on WordPress every day. This platform powers 14.7% of the top 100 websites across the globe. On average, 17 new posts get published on WordPress every second. In a month, WordPress is searched on Google more than 37 million times.
Choosing a nice template, choosing a WordPress host, and hitting publish isn't enough if you want to build the right site. Although web content management systems (WMCS), such as WordPress, offer resources that work to make setting up your site easier, pre-planning still plays a crucial role in the creation process.
I wrote the guide primarily to help WordPress beginners, but some of these tips are often overlooked by experienced users.
1. Need a best web hosting plan
WordPress is an open-source CMS (content management system). Simply put, it’s a tool for creating and managing websites. You can use WordPress to build a personal blog, business website, eCommerce store, or anything in between.
This is a common misconception I see among prospective website owners. The platform itself does not host websites.
you can use any web hosting provider that meets the WordPress minimum hosting requirements. Basically, your host needs to have a PHP version of 7.3 or higher. It needs a MySQL version of 5.6 or higher or MariaDB version 10.1 or higher. Your host also needs HTTPS support.
When it comes to web hosting, there are lots of different options to choose from. After you find the best web hosting provider, you’ll also have to determine the type of hosting you need. Shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting are the most popular options.
Choosing the right plan and host from the beginning is crucial. It’s important that you find a plan that gives you enough resources to meet your traffic needs.
Picking the wrong hosting plan can end up causing slow loading times, crashes, and downtimes. Plus, changing hosts down the road can be a pain.
2. Use a Custom Homepage
By default, WordPress shows your latest posts on the homepage of your website. You can change that and use any page as your site’s homepage.
First, you need to create a new page in WordPress, and you can name this page home. Next, you will need to create another page, and let’s call this page blog as you will use it to display your blog posts.
Now go to Settings » Reading page in your WordPress admin and under ‘Front page displays’ option and switch to ‘A static page’. After that, you will be able to select the pages you just created as your home and blog pages.
You can also create a custom homepage template to use for your home page. Simply create a new file on your computer using a plain text editor and add this code at the top of it.
Save this file as custom-homepage.php on your desktop.
Next, you need to connect to your website using an FTP client and go to /wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/ folder. Now upload the file you created earlier to your theme folder.
Return back to the WordPress admin area and edit your homepage. You will be able to select your custom homepage template under the page attributes metabox.
For more details see our guide on how to create a custom page template in WordPress.
Now this page will be completely empty and it will not show anything at all. You can use custom HTML/CSS and WordPress template tags to build your own page layout. You can also use a page builder plugin to easily create one using drag and drop tools.
3. Compress Images for Faster Load Times
Images are one of the heaviest components of a webpage and if you’re not optimizing them, you’re hurting both your site’s performance AND your SEO.
Besides the fact that slow websites create a negative user experience.
To optimize your images, one of the most effective ways is to compress them. You can also make them smaller by using specific formats while also removing EXIF data.
There are many tools to compress your images without losing quality (or at worst, very little loss that's not even noticeable).
You can use online services, or else use specific programs that you'll need to install on your own machine.
For example, you can use one of the following programs:
Adobe Photoshop (Paid)
GIMP (Free)
Both of these programs have an option to save your image for the web or settings that will make images optimized for the web so that they have a smaller size and therefore, load faster.
You can also do similar image compression using online tools such as:
TinyPNG
JPEGMini
Optimole
EWWW Image Optimizer
These are either a WordPress plugin or an online service that you can use to compress your images before or as you upload them to WordPress.
While some might argue about the various features of each of these services or programs, it's always better to have any image compression tool or plugin rather than nothing.
We go into the merits of how to choose the best image compression plugin for WordPress or how to use Photoshop/GIMP to optimize your images for the web as these have been written countless times.
What’s important to know here is that you must optimize your images to improve your site’s performance and SEO.
4. Change WordPress Media Upload Directory
If you want to change your media upload directory, you can easily do that by adding a line of code to your wp-config.php file.
For example, let’s say you want to change your upload directory to a folder called “media” located in the WordPress’s root installation directory, we’ll add this code right after require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php' ); in the wp-config.php file:
define('UPLOADS', 'media');
From now on, all media files you upload will now go to the “media” folder.
NOTE: It’s advisable to do this on a freshly installed WordPress site. However, you can still do this on an already existing one, provided you know what you’re doing. This is because your old media files won’t magically move to the new folder.
As a result, when you do this on an existing WordPress installation, while your old images will still work properly in your posts/pages, they won’t appear properly in the media library. To fix this, you will have to move your old media files to the new directory and then update your database to reflect these changes, but that’s a topic for another article.
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