Since the inception of WordPress in 2003, it has been utilized to power millions of online presence. It will be very strange if we imagine our online content without the presence of WordPress. Approximately WordPress powers 30% of the internet. It will all be gone if WordPress is ceased to exist.

It has now more than 1.2 billion downloads to date and has shown how powerful its system is and can be. The farthest thing we can assume is that it isn’t a blogging tool anymore.

If you are looking forward to joining the WordPress family, then you must be worried that how you are going to start and how are you going to use it.

WHAT IS WORDPRESS?

WordPress is a powerful platform that allows users to create their website. A user can design his website exactly the ways he envisions and can incorporate numerous features as per his preference.

WordPress is an open-source site-building online tool based on PHP and MySQL. In more advanced terms, WordPress is a content management system (CMS). Back in the day when WordPress was launched- it had several users but over time its base grew larger and now WordPress is the biggest and most popular CMS in the world.

No matter which domain you work in- blogging, different scales in business, online sellers; you are welcomed at WordPress. Currently, WordPress is powering over 75 million websites. Additionally, research of April 2016 shows that the CMS was used by more than 26% of the 10 million best-ranking websites.

What makes WordPress so popular?

Several factors make WordPress so popular that it has a massive number of users all across the world. The generic reason point of view is that WordPress is a simple blogging tool, however, it is a lot more than that. The main reason for what we believe is that WordPress is free and is an open-source project.

It grants permission to edit and improve its code according to the preference of the user. It also comes up with thousands of free plugins, themes, widgets, and other tools.

These in-built tools and features let users create any kind of website from simple blogs, personal websites, portfolios, e-shops, or job boards. WordPress is constantly updating with new features to bring up the latest versions with improved security.

Moreover, WordPress in itself is a huge community with dedicated forums all over the internet so a large amount of data including thousands of WordPress tutorials make it one of the easiest to use content management systems.

Difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

WordPress.com and WordPress.org are the two ways of hosting a WordPress site. What varies between the two is the actual host i.e. by using WordPress.org, you may download a script, free of charge, and host it yourself on a local machine or with some hosting provider.

While on the other hand, WordPress.com takes care of everything such as hosting, web server, software, and more.

Both the WordPress.org and WordPress.com have their pros and cons.

The WordPress family welcomes everyone but first, you must build and publish your site. Thrown into the world of hosting, Search Engine Optimization, coding, plugins, and more. You might need some WordPress tips and tricks2020 to get yourself started.

Here, we come up with few WordPress tips for beginners to learn step by step.

Choose your hosting

It is necessary to find the right hosting provider for your WordPress site essential for your success as your website can’t go live on the internet without the hosting.

Moreover, your hosting provider must give you enough resources to handle your site traffic, and avoid crashes and downtime as much as possible while delivering fast site speeds. You can also hire WordPress developer to get things done fast.

Selection of a theme

Whenever you’re selecting them, make sure to make good use of available theme demos. By this, you can view a theme and can try it out before finalizing it. The theme you select will form the basis of your website design so, try to start with a suitable theme unless you’re skilled in coding or have a developer beside. Try to choose the theme that you like and that you will enjoy using it.

Install an SEO plugin

Search engine optimization is very essential for the success of any site on the internet. If your website is published and is not optimized then, it is likely not going to be ranked in the SERP’s and hence no visibility leads to no traffic to, no conversions to sales funnel. But installing a website plugin can make your website live longer and much easier for you. These plugins can easily analyze the content and take in accountability of keywords and manage all the technical stuff like sitemaps and robots.txt for you.

Install Google analytics

A very well-known and preferred tool for tracking performance, recording data, and giving insights about how are users interacting with the site. You can install a plugin i.e. a free version as they too work fine with Google analytics. A tracking code will be generated after creating an analytics account and the plugin will help you through the installation process.

Compress the images

For a website to run faster, it needs to have less loading time. Always compress the image and reduce the file size as it will help your site run faster and will save you precious storage space. Fast loading site is not only important for visitors but equally for search engines. Remember to always compress images and videos before adding them to the website as it hits the list of WordPress Tips 2020

 Don’t go for unnecessary plugins

Plugins are great tools that add functionality to your website but an excess of everything is bad. Having too many plugins can make the site speed slower and can even put your site’s security at risk. There are many plugins like contact forms, newsletters, or live chats and many more, so try to incorporate only those that add benefits to your users and website.

Create you Gravatar

It might sound ridiculous but is highly efficient. So, what is a gravatar? In general language, Gravatar is Globally recognized avatar. A service that provides a user picture to your account after integrating with WordPress. A personalized and unique picture helps people to recognize you across different websites.

Always stay updated

As already told, WordPress is a platform that is continuously updating to keep its platform secure. Minor upgrades occur around every 15 days while a major update happens regularly once a month. You should always check for updates either minor or major as if not considered rightly then your site might become outdated and vulnerable to all those nasty bugs.

Manage your comments

Comments on your content increase the reader’s interest to interact with you or your content. It makes a real community on your website and the best thing is that you can easily manage these comments through your WordPress admin. It may be possible that you want to add a comment section for a specific page while it’s not essential for other pages, so you skip or moderate it. It is always suggested for every website owner to remove the spam comments as Google crawls comments as well as your comments and might affect your ranking.

Take care of your permalinks

Permanent links such as website address or a specific address to any of your posts should be simple and all difficult clunky address should be modified to a simpler form as the WordPress default settings create permalinks that are clunky and are not friendly for SEO as they might involve the current date and also some extra difficult to read symbols. You can choose a new permalink structure from the available number of options but it is recommended to always add the post name as it helps crawlers to understand and thus making it more eco-friendly.

There are many things that you can keep track of such as keeping your content clutter-free i.e. fewer ads and easily readable to users, using title and tags and also featuring images make the website more enhancing and better for you, your viewers and search engine crawlers.

 CONCLUSION: 

WordPress is a huge platform to showcase your skills or run a business and much more. The above mentioned 10 WordPress tips 2020 are just for beginners to get a real-time scenario about what WordPress is all about. Installing plugins might seem to be an easy task but it should be performed cautiously. So, get on with it and build an interactive, intuitive website for your business. You can also hire a WordPress developer that will help you out if you encounter any issue.