4 Things About WordPress All Beginners Should Know

• March 20, 2015
• Leave a comment

WordPress’s simple, functional and “intuitive” layout is a wonderful addition to the CMS market, to be sure. Unfortunately, this perceived simplicity can often be deceiving, fooling beginners into the false idea that no research or tutorials are needed in order to master it.

This, in turn, leads to rookie mistakes that reflect poorly on your site, company and brand.

Here are four things about WordPress that all beginner should absolutely know.

1. Installing three plugins for the same function; we’ve all done it. Now, you don’t have to.

The wild world of WordPress plugins is competitive, over saturated and confusing. It’s easy to fall into the rhetoric and marketing ploys that each company spews because they all claim they’re somehow different than or superior to the rest. Consult sources on the matter prior to installing multiple plugins; it’ll help you keep track of what’s running on your site from the beginning, which will make the overall maintenance process much more simple in the long-run.

2. Permalinks: they’re complicated beasts.

Optimizing URLS is important; keywords run the digital world, and you want yours to be just as (if not more) visually appealing as the competitor’s. Stick to clean URLs for the best overall results.

3. Yes, it is necessary to go through that pesky updating process whenever one is available.

This also applies to plugins and any theme you might have installed on your site. The reason for this is twofold: you want your site to run as smoothly as possible, and some new products simply won’t run on older versions, and secondly there is a solid reason for each update, which most often will include a more sophisticated set of safeguards against hackers and spam.

4. You don’t need to publish a page (AKA make it view able to your audience) until it’s completely ready.

This may seem incredibly basic, but you’d be shocked how easy it is to release a page for the world to see prior to it actually being at a live stage. WP hack: you do not need to show people the stages of your site’s growth. Wait until it is fully optimized, beautiful and ready to go. Then, “publish.”