WordPress has gone from a relatively obscure content management system (CMS) platform to one of the most popular ones in the past decade. WordPress (WP) has powered more than 30% of the internet since 2018 and is forecasted to hit 40% by the end of 2021. This phenomenal growth is due to the innovative features of WordPress that attract more new users. If you are using WP to operate your website, you will be facing stiff competition as more and more sites in the same category or industry as yours will emerge.
To keep your edge against the competition, you should utilize WordPress to the fullest and know some useful hacks, and we will share some of them here.
Perform Regular Updates
Updating your site regularly may seem like an added burden to your website management tasks. However, updating your website is one of the essential WordPress maintenance tasks you need to perform to ensure the continued functionality and safety of your site. WordPress updates help you safeguard your website from vulnerabilities of running on outdated software. At least 50% of hacked WordPress sites in 2016 ran on outdated software. WP has impressive security features, but vulnerabilities can occasionally surface. However, these vulnerabilities are easily fixed if you update your website regularly.
It’s not just the website that needs regular updating, but you also need to update your themes and plugins. Again, outdated plugins have a higher risk of vulnerability to hacking compared to regularly updated and maintained websites. Updating isn’t that hard. You only need to keep an eye out on your Updates tab and look for notifications or reminders to update. Simply clicking on the Update tab and Update button can keep your website running securely until the subsequent updates are released.
Take Advantage of the Excerpt Feature
Not many website owners realize the benefits of using the excerpt (summary) feature on their homepage and archives. Excerpts increase the interest and intent of site visitors and customers in examining your content further. Excerpts are also like teasers of the full content you are sharing with the viewers. When you make your excerpt or teaser interesting and engaging, you are increasing the engagement time of visitors to your website, which can positively affect your website ranking.
Declutter Your Website
While this hack comes as fundamental knowledge for website owners, it often gets forgotten or taken aside along the way. Many website owners take website organization and cleanliness for granted and pay dearly with slow webpage loads and low responsiveness. One simple hack is to reduce image size by compressing pictures can help speed up your site by making it load faster.
You are also saving precious storage space, which you can utilize for other important content. Displaying images in a grid layout gives your website an organized and compact look, which is pleasing to many site visitors. It is an excellent way of improving the user experience as users are often not patient enough to scroll down or sideways for too long.
Using caching plugins is another easy and excellent way of speeding up your website. Caching creates static copies of your page, post, or content and serves these copies to your visitors. Static pages are easier to fetch and help avoid back and forth queries from being sent to your database, thereby reducing the server load and improving your website’s performance.
We have only some of the most useful hacks you can apply to your WordPress website. The online community is growing. The competition among websites is stiffer, so you need to be on top of things about your website. WP has an incredible array of features that you can discover and use to your advantage. Don’t stop with posting content and occasional maintenance. Take time to explore and be aware of the notifications and updates that are needed. It is often the basic things that make the most impact on your website.