5 Tips to Make a Successful WordPress Site

If your website is on WordPress, it looks like today is your lucky day because you’ve landed on this site. Nowadays, it is highly popular and user-friendly, but it is also considered to be the best content management system (CMS) platform.

WordPress has certainly gained a major popularity in terms of the most widely used CMS and has come a long way before it was first launched in 2003. At present, WordPress now powers 37.6% of all websites on the internet, 14.7% on the world’s top websites, and is also searched more than 37 million times on Google every month.

Launching a new website can be a bit overwhelming especially when it’s your first time but you can quickly learn some tips and tricks on WordPress that can help you become an expert. You’ll never know, you’ll be teaching somebody in no time.

Regardless of your situation, these tips will help you succeed in your business venture.

Alright, let’s immediately hop into it and get your website off to a great start!

Getting an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate

Increase the legitimacy of your WordPress site by getting an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate.

The green lock and green “https” (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) displayed in front of a page URL gives a sense of security for people when visiting your WordPress site. With identity theft running rampant, information security is more observed than ever. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a layer of coding that encrypts the connection between browsers and web pages, thereby protecting the user’s credentials and sensitive personal information. If you have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate for your site, this will also change its URL from http.yoursite.com to https.yoursite.com. 

Having an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate means that your site has a secure connection. In the same way, it can increase the trust and amount of pages visited, and minimize bounce rates which is beneficial to your site.

Install Google Analytics Plugin

It is difficult to determine how well your site is working without examining your performance metrics. However, WordPress alone won’t give you enough of this information. That’s why by adding a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress admin dashboard, you’ll be able to get an extra insight into how users behave on your website.

Understanding where the traffic comes from will help you improve the campaigns to attract more traffic from each source. Google Analytics provides you the information on where your traffic is coming from, may it be through social media, or through organic search terms.

It’s important to know who is accessing your website. To help you understand what you need to do and how to attract more of the right people to your site, Google Analytics provides you with detailed interest. When looking at the demographics and evaluating the data to the attributes of your target audience, you’ll be able to see where you need to concentrate your efforts.

The best part of using the Google Analytics plugin is that you can view all your data directly on your WordPress admin dashboard. It’s better than trying to bounce back and forth between various sites and platforms to access this information.

Building Strong and High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks is one of the best proven and tested SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices. It is highly valuable for SEO because they establish a strong relationship from one site to another.

Thus, backlinks build up your page authority. Basically, backlinks to your website are simply a clear indication to search engines that others validate the content of your website. If a well-ranking and authoritative site links to you, search engines can discern that your website is worth linking to, and therefore also worth showing on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). So, earning these backlinks can have a huge and drastic impact on your website’s ranking popularity or search visibility.

Building strong and high-quality backlinks require time and commitment. However, through SEO techniques such as guest posting, blog commenting, infographics, forum posting, web directory listing, and article submission, you can successfully acquire high-quality backlinks over time.

Clean Up WordPress Title Permalinks

The content URLs that you publish on your WordPress site are known as permalinks. Permalinks are permanent links that people type in their search bar to access one of the contents of your website. Permalinks inform search engines what the posts and sites are all about and thereby boost your indexing and ranking, thus, URLs that contain relevant keywords will help you get a better ranking in search engines. This is also what search engines and other websites use to connect to your webpage. They are really important because of this.

It’s important to make them clean and simple when creating these links. Permalinks help users determine what your blogs or posts will be about, and that encourages people to more likely visit them. Structured URLs will make it easy for them to navigate your site. A clean, descriptive, and easy-to-understand permalink is much more convenient than a lengthy, oddly sequenced one that is discouraging to look at. 

For example, “https://yoursite.com/clean-wordpress-permalinks“ is highly recommended compared to “https://yoursite.com/ehocode233472/f57ksss” which is much less user-friendly.

Besides, being clean, descriptive and easy-to-understand permalinks are also much more efficient. Strange, long and random-looking permalinks frequently appear suspicious to internet users. A website that has a complex, odd sequence of numbers, letters, and symbols as its link could make you wonder whether you’re landing on a fraudulent site or a malicious URL.

Optimize Your Page Speed to Load Faster

Simply put, page speed refers to the length of time it takes for the browser to process the first batch of information from the server. Every page element including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), various JavaScript files, images, videos, and other multimedia factors affects the page speed of your WordPress site. Moreover, (delete extra space) the speed of the desktop and mobile devices page is measured separately due to technological differences. As a result, there is a in different and distinct experience for desktop and smartphone users. 

The reason that page speed is a key ranking factor is because it is a strong indicator of user quality experience. Faster page load speed will result in a better user experience, while slow page load speed will lead to poor user experience. Generally speaking, your users will stay longer if the speed of your WordPress site is faster and it also converts leads efficiently, thus, bounce less.

According to the industry’s standard, a good page load time is around three to four seconds or less. This varies slightly depending on the type of site and the industry. Once you exceed this page load time, you’ll start seeing less optimal search engine rankings as well as a poorer user experience.

Closing Thoughts

WordPress is considered to be one of the best CMS on the market today. It’s simple, convenient, accessible, and incredibly versatile for almost any type of website. In fact, there are so many different features, functions, and add-ons to take advantage of, that it can be a little bit confusing. If you follow these simple WordPress tips that I’ve mentioned above, your site performance will definitely improve.

We hope these tips will help get your website off to a great start!

If you need help in designing your website and managing your business, send us a message.

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