WordPress Website

9 Ways to Improve Your WordPress Website

When you have a WordPress website, it is essential to optimize it for search engines and users. You need to ensure that it loads fast to improve ranking and user experience. In this article, we look at some ways you can use to improve your website.

1. Safeguard It

Hackers are constaunsplash.com/photos/hGV2TfOh0nsntly looking for sites that lack strong security to access essential and confidential information. Therefore, it is always necessary to keep your website secure. You can do this by:

  • Install plugins to back up your content automatically. It will help you recover your content in case someone hacks into your site.
  • Reduce the number of users by deleting non-contributors.
  • Change passwords constantly
  • Check for malware regularly using plugins.
  • Remove any old WordPress installations.

The best WordPress hosting providers offer you WordPress management tools that include a virus scanner and backup utilities.

2. Ensure it’s Always Clean

Clean up the dashboard, menus, sidebar, and widgets. When your dashboard is cluttered, someone can easily hack it using exploits compared to a clean one.

You need to ensure that you constantly update links and widgets on your site. Remove any spam comments, links, and old and irrelevant information and themes.

Also, update the core of your website constantly. You can do this manually or using the auto-update menu. Ensure your plugins are up-to-date. Updates come out regularly, so you have to keep checking.

On top of that, you should constantly purge old cages. While the cages make the site load faster, they hold up extra space on the server and could pose a vulnerability on the site. Let your site only run on the latest cage to improve performance.

3. Create Useful Content Constantly

Create well-written content that is useful to the reader. Your content needs to answer their questions. Also, ensure that the content is detailed with relevant data and statistics.

Search robots hunt for content that provides the searcher with relevant and valuable information. Such content keeps your visitors on your site longer. The longer the time a user spends on your site, the higher you rank.

Include relevant images of high quality when writing your articles.

Constantly update your content. You can do this by making tweaks to your old content. You can also add new links or rewrite the old content. Doing this helps your content to remain relevant.

4. Optimize for SEO

Ensure that your website is SEO-optimized because that is what determines your ranking on the search engines. If your SEO ratings are poor, you might not rank at all.

First, it would be best to run an SEO audit to identify 404 errors, spam links, and duplicate content. You can use Google Search Console.

Then ensure you have your keyword or article title in the permalink. Choose relevant keywords to use in your content. They should be searchable keywords. It is essential to install an excellent SEO plugin such as the Yoast plugin. It will help you identify the areas you need to improve.

5. Consider the Themes Wisely

The theme you use determines the type of website design you have. Also, it may affect the speed of the site. Therefore, you should carefully choose which one to use while considering speed optimization.

There are many free themes available on WordPress and other hosting sites you can use. Go for a simple one that has the features that you only need. You can add additional features like animations using plugins.

6. Speed It Up

When your website takes time to load, the number of organic traffic to your site reduces. It results in a drop in ranking.

Ensure you run a speed test to see how fast your site loads on search engines. There are excellent online tools that can help you, such as Pingdom and Google Page Speed Insights.

Do not upload large images, as this lowers the site’s speed. Install a caching plugin and a CDN. These tools will help increase your speed.

7. Optimizing Background Processes

These tasks include backup, publishing scheduled posts, update checks, and crawlers that search for content.

Some of these tasks can slow down your website speed. Therefore, you need to ensure you optimize these tasks or schedule them when there is low traffic on your site. Google search console can help you adjust the crawl rate of your site.

8. Add Features for Readers

Improving reader engagement is another excellent way of improving your site. You should improve how your readers leave comments on your posts. The JetPack plugin allows them to use social media to leave comments and also get email notifications. It makes it easy as they don’t have to go to the website to comment on an article.

If you have a newsletter, encourage your readers to sign-up for it. Some plugins enable you to optimize your sign-up forms.

9. Evaluate Your Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

Ensure that your CTAs serve their purpose. You can use Google Analytics to set up your goals and measure the conversion rates.

Add the CTA in the footer, header, or sidebar to enable visitors to find it easily. You can place promotions on the top bar where they are easily visible.

Conclusion

If you run WordPress for your website, you need to ensure that it runs and functions as expected. To improve the website, you need to enhance its performance, UX, SEO, and security. A fast WordPress blog with engaging content will retain more readers. With top WordPress protection, you keep your site and users’ information safe on the server and minimize compromise.