Do More With Your WordPress Website
YOU’LL NEED THIS WORDPRESS SERVER Any reputable web host will do, or you can host it yourself on your own server.
YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE is up, running, secure, backed up and looking exactly as you wanted. But you’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do with a WordPress site. To finish off this four-part series we’ll look at several ways in which you can make better use of it, from setting up contributors to help you fashion content, to finding ways to tweak your site’s settings to maximize performance and make things better for your site’s visitors.
There’s also time to explore how to set up a commenting system, plus benchmark—and improve—the visibility of your website with search engines, helping you drive more traffic to your pages. We’ll even take a look at three types of plugin to add money-making capabilities to your site, from an online store to a subscription-based paywall to lock certain content away.
Once you’ve explored all these avenues, what next? It goes without saying that you should bookmark WordPress’s own support pages ( https://wordpress.org/support)— a mixture of online documentation and community support through forums—but also take a look at CreativeBloq’s curated list of 40 brilliant WordPress tutorials ( http://bit.ly/MPCcreativebloq) to give you more ideas, tips, and tricks to follow. –NICK PEERS
1
MULTI-USER WEBSITES
Keeping a website regularly updated with fresh content on your own can be hard, but WordPress makes it easy to collaborate with others thanks to its support for multiuser setups. Roll your mouse over “Users” in the WordPress dashboard’s left-hand menu and choose “Add New.” Fill in the details as requested to create a new user—the only option you need to think carefully about is their role: Avoid making anyone other than yourself “Administrator.”
>> Give trusted users “Editor” access, which allows them to publish and manage posts across your site, including those written by others. Choose “Author” to allow a user to publish and manage their own posts only, or “Contributor” to allow them to write and edit their own posts while you retain control over publishing them.
>> WordPress automatically generates a strong password for the new user—be sure to record this and share it securely with your new site contributor so that they can log in.
2
SHARE AUTHOR CREDITS
By default, whoever creates a new post is deemed its author. You can change this via a post’s “Quick Edit” menu or via the “Status & visibility” section of a post’s “Document” properties, but this limits you to one author. If you want to credit two or more users within a post, you will need to use a plugin—our recommendation is PublishPress Authors ( http://bit.ly/MPCwordpressauthors), which is very simple to use and set up.
>> Once activated, configure it via its own “Authors” icon in the WordPress dashboard. Select “Authors” to verify that all your users are listed; if not, type their name into the “Mapped User” dropdown list and the plugin should pick them up. Once done, choose “Authors > Settings > Display tab” to tweak how the authors are displayed within posts. When you next edit a post, you’ll find a new, dedicated “Authors” section in the “Documents” properties [ Image A], where you can type the name of your chosen co-author (or co-authors) to add their credit.
3
MANAGE COMMENTS
User feedback is a valuable part of any blog, but simply allowing anonymous comments across all your site is a recipe for trouble, with spammers and trolls ruining the experience for everyone else.
>> Visit “Settings > Discussion” and you’ll see that WordPress offers various settings for controlling feedback, with some minimal protections already in place: Commentators must fill out their name and email before posting, while all comments posted by new posters are held for moderation via the “Comments” section of the dashboard.
>> To tighten things further, you can manually specify banned keywords (including URLs, email addresses, and IP addresses) that automatically prevent a comment from being published. You can also remove the ability to comment on individual posts and pages via their own properties page.
>> You can limit comments to registered users of your site by ticking “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” If you go down this route, visit “Settings > General” and tick “Anyone can register,” leaving the new user default role set to “Subscriber.” Be sure to also add the Meta widget via “Appearance > Widgets” to make the “Register” option more visible.
>> If you want to explore different ways of registering users, try the Easy Registration Forms ( http://bit.ly/MPCwordpresseasy) plugin. Another plugin worth adding is the Comments Like/ Dislike ( http://bit.ly/MPCwordpresscomments) to encourage quickfire thumbs-up and thumbs-down reactions to feedback from site visitors—once activated, set it up via “Comments > Comments Like Dislike” on the WP dashboard [ Image B].
4
MAKE PAGES MORE VISIBLE
The key to increasing footfall to your website lies in getting it noticed on search engines, and that involves a combination of Google Analytics for measuring your site’s popularity, and a good SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) keyword strategy, which reveals the words and phrases that are likely to make your site more visible.
>> Install the free versions of the MonsterInsights plugin ( www.monsterinsights.com) to connect your site to Google Analytics, and the Yoast SEO plugin ( http://bit.ly/MPCyoastSEO) to help score some quick and easy improvements. Upgrade to paid-for plans if you need additional refinements.
5
TWEAK PERMALINK SETTINGS
Another quick way to increase the visibility of your site is to improve the readability of your permalinks—these are the links created to allow you to share reader-friendly URLs of specific posts and pages. You can manually edit a post’s permalink via the URL slug field under “Quick Edit” or under “Permalink” on your document’s properties during editing, but you can also choose the permalink format for all posts to add additional information.
>> To do this, navigate your way to “Settings > Permalinks.” Choose “Custom Structure” and type /%category%/%postname%/ into the box to not only make your permalink more readable, but render the page more SEOfriendly too.
6
IMPROVE SITE PERFORMANCE
If your site seems slow to load, or responds sluggishly despite performing well at first installation, there are a couple of things you can do to improve matters instantly. First, deactivate and remove any unused plugins, and consider rationing how many you have installed at any one time. Also, check your theme—is it similarly bloated? If so, try switching to a lightweight alternative.
>> You’ll find plenty of plugins offering to turbocharge various aspects of your site—if you’re looking for maximum return on minimum effort, then invest $49 per year in the WP Rocket ( https://wp-rocket.me) plugin. But before doing that, try the free WP-Optimize ( http://bit.ly/MPCwordpressoptimize) plugin instead.
>> WP-Optimize focuses on three areas. First, it ensures that your underlying databases are tidied up and streamlined—this will have the biggest effect on more established WP sites for obvious reasons. Second, the plugin can compress all your site’s images quickly, with an option to restore the originals at any point if you don’t like the result. You can bulk-compress files up to 5MB in size (64MB for one-off files), plus have files automatically compressed when they’re uploaded. And third, it utilizes several page-caching tricks to help reduce loading times further.
>> Finally, if you’re worried that your host may not have enough oomph to power your website, install the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool ( http://bit. ly/MPCwordpressbenchmark) to perform a series of tests to see whether or not an upgrade may be required [ Image C ].