Optimizing Your WordPress Website
You've spent a ton of time and money to ensure that your WordPress website is beautifully designed and has all of the functionality you need for your business to run effectively online. But have you made sure that the people visiting your website are having an ideal experience? As we've mentioned before, with so little free time, you definitely want to know that your online users are viewed your website as you intended and having a pleasant experience, as they'll be telling their friends and family about their exposure to your company online – good or bad.
Here are some tips and tricks to optimize your WordPress website and build your online reputation, so your customers only have good things to say about you. Before you get started in optimizing your WordPress website, make sure you have an understanding of your site's current capacity, so you can accurately measure any improvement. Without this touchstone, it's difficult to understand where you've improved and how to improve even more.
Keep Up:
Make sure that you're always updating to the latest version of WordPress and not running off an old version. Updating to new versions of WordPress not only allows you to take advantage of any new or additional capabilities, but it also protects your website from a security perspective, which keeps your website running as it should.
Update or Remove Plug-Ins:
If you're not using a plug-in that you were using previously, remove it. Keeping them around slows down the speed of your WordPress website. Also, if you're still using a plug-in, make sure you're updating it to the latest version since it wont work as effectively if you don't.
Use a SEO Plug-In:
While you're updating or deleting your plug-ins, make sure you have a search engine optimization plug-in installed on your WordPress website. Some really effective free SEO plugins include; WordPress SEO by Yoast, HeadSpace 2 SEO, and SEO Rank Reporter. Some are easier to work with than others, but they all take a little bit of getting used to. Once you understand how to use your chosen SEO plug-in, it can be very effective in helping you understand the rankings of particular keywords on your website, allow you to control descriptions and page titles, and show you how your page will be viewed in search results.
A combination of the above, plus a host of additional optimization techniques will really help your website be the go-to in your industry in the highly competitive online marketplace.