WordPress might seem somewhat complicated. But I want to reveal some of its mysteries today. You probably watched a lot of videos and read tutorials about how to create a website in just 20 minutes, how to choose a WordPress theme, or how to install one. But now I want to pay your attention to the maintenance of the quality of your website, to what you should do on your WordPress website to make sure it functions well.
A website must be responsive. You should find a theme for WordPress that will allow you to create a cool structure. But that’s not all.
Mobile Friendliness
We usually have time to read blogs and news on the way home or at lunchtime. At this time our smartphones are at hand. So, the very first thing you need to take care of is mobile friendliness. It is all about how your website looks on a smartphone’s screen. So, check it on IPhones, Ipads, Androids, both vertical and horizontally. Check your WordPress website via different browsers, like Safari or Google. Make sure that everything on your website functions well for mobile friendliness.
There is another option to check whether your website is working the way you want it – Google’s mobile friendly test. Just type your web-address and click to analyze. Google will review your WordPress website and provide a report.
Social Media
Social media is the key to new clients, and Google definitely wants to see social media links on your website. One of the best ways to do that is to locate a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram news feed inside your blog area in the sidebar. There is just a free plugin to use for social media and pull your Instagram channel, for example, directly into the website. That is really cool. You could take a picture with your phone, upload it to your Instagram account, and dynamically, it gets right to your website.
And of course, you can always place links in the footer. I would highly suggest using real icons instead of just linked text over to your social media accounts, so that people can find those quickly and easily.
Clients Reviews
As a regular customer the first thing I do after I find a product or service I am going to buy or order is reading what other people think of it. As a creator of a website, you want to see people’s interaction with you, so client reviews page is a great idea. You can have a blend of both: written testimonials as well as video testimonials.
Clickable Info
Check if your phone number and the address on the website (if they are visible) are clickable. While these days smartphones do read phone numbers, some do not. So, if you scroll down the bottom of your website, your phone number must be clickable and your address must link over to Google Maps. If your potential client needs to call you, they can click on the number and just contact you directly. Yet, probably you’ll need to write a code to make the phone number and address clickable.
Major Landing Pages
We are going to talk about SEO now. You must be absolutely sure that you are doing everything to rank well for every single keyword. For example, if you want to rank well for web design, you must have a major landing page on your website dedicated specifically to this topic.
One of the reasons why you need to have such page is because Google wants to be able to read what your services are. It is difficult to do that if all you have is one page with just a list of services like content writing, SEO, web design, etc. That is not even enough for Google to sink its teeth into and understand what you are doing. So, break out and create different pages on your WordPress website that would relate specifically to the keyword which you want to rank well for.
Yoast
We are not done with SEO. Using the free plugin Yoast inside your WordPress website is a beneficial idea. It is like having somebody who is an SEO expert, sitting beside you, helping write your content. You want to have as many green lights as you possibly can. Once you start using Yoast, you will understand that “green light” statement.
Security
The last tip is security. Backup is one of the most important things you need to take care of on your website. You know that WordPress always requires updates, and if you do not have a backup and you click “update”, you could easily break the entire website and have “the white screen of death.”
Be sure that your username is not admin, your password is really secure. I recommend you installing the Sucuri plugin. As for a backup plan, I want to highly recommend you “UpdraftPlus.” This is a free backup plugin you can install on your website. By the way, they have more than 700,000 active installations. So, if something ever goes wrong on your website, there is the one-click restore option: it will automatically roll back the site and fix everything that was broken.
And one more thing: make sure to back up not only your files but also your database.
Google Analytics
If you do not utilize Google Analytics, you really do not know whether all of the effort you are putting into your website ever boosts the traffic to get customers to your website. You can spend 20-30 hours per month writing blog articles. But will it bring you any profit? Google Analytics will come in handy. You really need to watch and see how much traffic comes to your website.
Google Analytics can also help you with analyzing the sources where the traffic comes from (including social media), determining what keywords and what type of browser are used to find your website, how long users stay on your website, what pages they visit, etc. It is a free way to understand what you may be doing wrong and how to improve it.