When it comes to creating a business site, one of the top platform options is WordPress and for good reason.

WordPress isn’t just a simple blogging platform. It’s capable of running some of the top websites in the world from major brands.

While it’s great for personal sites too, businesses are opting for WordPress too as a way to take their companies online in an easy, yet powerful way.

WordPress Popularity

WordPress is used by over 29% of websites worldwide and has a 60% market share among content management systems. While there are numerous personal sites and blogs out there, business websites make up a large portion of that 29%. If you’re curious about which brands are using WordPress, see:

• 8 Examples of Major Sites Using WordPress (by yours truly)
• 40+ Notable Big Name Brands That Are Using WordPress
• Notable WordPress Users

Tiny Learning Curve

So why choose WordPress when there are other options for your business site? The most obvious reason and the one you’ll notice the quickest is the tiny learning curve. Getting started takes minutes. The straight-forward dashboard gives you easy access to publish posts, add/update pages, add/change media, check out stats, optimise your site and much more.

While you may want a developer to help with creating a custom theme and ensuring plugins are implemented correctly, WordPress itself is incredibly easy to use and makes managing a site a stress-free process.

Update Content With Ease

You likely already know the importance of blogging. If not, take a quick look at these inspiring statistics from Writtent. Blogging helps businesses gain more customers and boosts conversion rates. WordPress has an easy to use content editor for creating and uploading content. Plus, SEO plugins and WordPress’s built-in SEO features help you to easily optimise every post for better traffic.

This means you spend less time on formatting and optimising and more time on what’s important – creating engaging content for your readers. Plus, you content is optimised to bring in more traffic, leading to more business.

Flexible For Any Use

In the past, I covered how WordPress goes far beyond blogging, which is what makes it ideal for any business website. Whether you want ecommerce or a membership style site or anything in between, WordPress has the features you need. For instance, a fashion retailer might need interactive product images and a stylish theme to match the personality of the retailer.

On the other hand, a B2B company may require a minimalist theme and a simple blog to effectively connect with customers. WordPress is flexible, plus it’s open source, which means you can customise it to your needs. For instance, if you can’t find a theme or plugin that fits your needs, a WordPress developer can work with you to create just what your business needs most.

Scales With The Business

Scalability is crucial with any business website. It might be tempting to use a free site builder, but stop and consider your limitations first. Your site will always be limited by the platform you use. With free site builder tools and even some other CMS platforms, you’re limited to only a small number of plugins (if any at all), basic themes, little to no customisation options and the amount of content you can upload.

This isn’t going to help you grow your business. This is why so many businesses choose WordPress for their business website. You download and own your installation of WordPress. All you need is a web host that offers the storage and bandwidth you need to continue growing your site. Whether you’re a business selling a few products a week or a giant like Amazon, WordPress scales as your needs change

Are you ready to use WordPress for your business website? Contact me today to find out how I can help.

Image: Anders Jildén

It’s a common misconception that WordPress is just a blogging platform. After all, that’s what the original purpose was for.

However, it’s all the other features that make WordPress more than a blogging platform. The possibilities for using WordPress are seemingly endless.

If you’ve ever wondered just what WordPress is capable of, it’s time to look beyond the blogging aspect and uncover some of the other powerful features.

Blogging Is Just One Feature

WordPress was initially developed as a personal publishing system, but it developed into something much more advanced. Since then, the blog portion has become just one of the many features. Now, WordPress includes features, such as:

• Develop and manage static pages
• Sell products
• Optimise for search engines
• Implement your own features (through open source coding and plugins)
• Create responsive sites
• Store and manage data for your business and consumers

While this list could easily fill this post, it’s just a sampling of what makes WordPress more than a blogging platform. With all these features, there’s no reason to limit yourself to just blogging.

Run An Entire Online Business

About this time last year, I covered the reasons why WordPress is ideal for small business websites. Yes, you can host your business’s blog, but you’re able to run your entire online business through WordPress. With ecommerce plugins and themes, you’re able to manage and sell inventory online. Interact with customers, build an email list, connect social media accounts and much more.

If you want to see examples of major brands doing just this, check out my post 8 Examples Of Major Sites Using WordPress. WordPress.com and WordPress.org also list some of the most notable users and sites. Between these three links, it’s difficult to imagine using WordPress just as blog, though that’s still an option, especially for personal blogs.

Create Full Applications

The ability to create full applications makes WordPress more than a blogging platform. One company actually used WordPress to create a SaaS application (software as a service). In fact, they did it in just one month. This shows the versatility of what started as a user-friendly blogging system. While most businesses probably won’t think of WordPress for this use, it is an option for creating your own in-house SaaS apps.

Plugins And Themes Go Beyond Blogging

Take a quick look at the most popular themes and plugins on WordPress.org. How many of those seem exclusive to blogging? While some of the SEO plugins definitely cater to blogs, they also work for static web pages. After all, if a page has content on it, it’s available for Google to index. You want to optimise every single page on your website.

The themes listed are what truly show the difference between a simple blogging platform and a complete content and website management system. Most look like professional business sites, which is kind of the idea. They’re designed not just to showcase your personal thoughts on whatever crosses your mind, but to impress potential customers and clients.

If WordPress was just a blogging platform, you’d see much simpler themes that just focus on organising posts and categories. In fact, it’d probably look more like the early days of Blogger versus the highly used WordPress.

Powerful Database Features

One feature that’s often overlooked when it comes to WordPress is databases. You probably already know about the databases tied specifically to your site’s content and files. These are just the basics. These are the databases used to organise your site’s content and users.

However, when you’re using WordPress for a business, you’re able to create databases to store and organise customer data. For instance, certain plugins provide detailed analytics based on customer data on your site. This data is stored in databases within WordPress for you to use to provide better experiences for your customers.

Ready to see what WordPress could do for you? Learn more and find out how to start your own WordPress site by contacting me today.

Image: Corinne Kutz

You’ll find no shortage of ecommerce options for your website, but one you might want to consider is WordPress.

WordPress offers the best ecommerce solutions, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the popularity of WordPress as a whole. Still, some think of WordPress only for blogging and not for an online business.

Once you realise all that WordPress has to offer, it’s easy to see that it’s far more than a CMS and works well as a full ecommerce solution.

Integrates Well

One of the things that make WordPress so popular is how well the platform integrates with other services. For instance, take a look at WooCommerce, which powers 28% of all ecommerce sites. Hundreds of extensions are available for accepting payments, scheduling package deliveries and managing an email list. All it takes is a few clicks to integrate with most popular ecommerce solutions.

When you’re able to use the services you already know and love, it’s easier to manage your site the way you want.

Simple Installation

WordPress easily offers the best ecommerce solutions simply due to ease of installation. Most web hosts have a one-click WordPress installation feature and ecommerce themes install easily as well. You’ll get online faster versus spending weeks just trying to get started. Of course, between WordPress developers and the WordPress community, you always have support whenever you need it.

Customise Both Appearance And Function

WordPress offers thousands of themes and plugins to let you fully customise the appearance and function of your ecommerce site. With other solutions, you might find yourself limited. For instance, if you want to ensure your site is available for mobile visitors, you can choose a responsive theme that automatically adjusts based on your visitors’ screens.

Many plugins are designed specifically for ecommerce and make it easier than ever to customise your store. Some of the best ecommerce solutions for WordPress to include:

• WooCommerce
• Ecwid
• Easy Digital Downloads
• WP Ecommerce

No matter which solution you choose, you’re able to customise it completely along with your theme to ensure you site is unique to your business.

Includes Regular Security And Feature Updates

While this doesn’t just apply to ecommerce sites, it is something that sets WordPress apart when choosing the best ecommerce solutions. WordPress is often a target for hackers since it’s so widely used, but to combat that threat, WordPress releases regular security updates. Of course, you have to make sure you install them in order to keep your site safer. Remember to take extra security precautions too, such as changing admin passwords and using a security plugin.

In addition to security updates, feature updates are also released. This means you get to take advantage of the latest WordPress has to offer and it’s all offered for free.

The popular WordPress ecommerce solutions also release regular updates to put security first. For instance, a single outdated plugin could compromise your site. Keep your theme and plugins updated for a more secure site for your visitors.

Easy To Learn And Manage

WordPress is designed to make it easy for anyone to manage their own website. The intuitive backend helps you upload content in minutes. As a result, it offers the best ecommerce solutions because the learning curve is so small. You’re not going to spend forever trying to figure out how to upload product images and descriptions. It’s not difficult to master setting up a shopping cart and checkout process.

The less time you have to spend learning how to use your ecommerce solution, the more time you can spend on what matters most – getting your products/services in front of potential customers.

Start your search for an ecommerce solution with WordPress and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what the platform has to offer.

Want to set up your own ecommerce site with WordPress? Make the process even easier by contacting Darren today to get started.

Image: Jens Kreuter

It’s a satisfying feeling to finally get your WordPress site up and running. You’re feeling so confident that you’re ready to take on the world, or a least, your own WordPress maintenance.

After all, the hard part’s over, right? Before you get too excited, you might want to think about hiring a WordPress service provider.

Regular maintenance and site tweaks are more difficult than you might believe. If you’re already trying to do it on your own, you can reduce your stress and save your sanity by considering the following three tips.

Stay Within Your Budget

Saving money is always a good thing. It’s also why managing your site yourself seems like a great idea. Instead of a monthly fee, you save money by doing it yourself. However, you may not be saving as much as you think.

First of all, maintenance tasks take time. This is time you’re spending away from your business. Add up all the extra hours and hiring an expert service provider suddenly seems more cost effective. Another thing to consider is experience.

How much do you know about WordPress? Is it enough to reduce the risk of a hack? In 2016, data gathered by Sucuri showed that WordPress is still the most hacked CMS, accounting for 74% of all hacked CMS platforms in 2016. A hacked site could ruin your business. If user data is leaked or data destroyed (that’s not backed up), it could easily cost you thousands or more to handle everything.

A professional WordPress service provider knows WordPress inside and out. You’ll save money and headaches simply by letting an expert take control.

Gain More Time

WordPress compares WordPress maintenance to getting regular work done on your car. In most cases, it’s usually quicker to let professionals handle the maintenance than try to do it yourself. The same holds true with managing your site.

You’ll not only save your sanity, but gain more time for managing your business. WordPress has created a monthly maintenance calendar. A quick look is enough to show you that it’s not something you can do in a few minutes each month. Plus, you also have to consider the learning curve.

Trying to find the right settings and plugins, without corrupting your site, takes valuable time. Figuring out how to tweak your site for optimal performance isn’t a skill you learn overnight. Experts have spent years studying WordPress, which allows them to take care of your site far faster than you could do it on your own.

Get The Highest Quality

Your WordPress site deserves the best service and your visitors deserve the best website. Managing your site on your own means your site may have problems you don’t even notice, such as:

• Slow page loading speeds
• Broken links
• Major security flaws
• Outdated software (themes, plugins, WordPress core)
• Bad or no backups
• Site glitches

WordPress service providers know what to look for to prevent common problems. This means you get a smooth running website that offers the best experience for your visitors. You’ll also know that backups are available should the worst happen to your site. You’ve already invested in the site’s development. To maintain a quality website, you have to invest in its future as well.

Save Your Sanity Starting Today

It usually only takes two to three months to start feeling like you’re going crazy as you try to balance site maintenance, uploading new content and managing your business. Save time and money, while keeping your site at its best. Go ahead, save your sanity and hire an expert instead.

Does your WordPress site have issues? Find out today by contacting me about WordPress support.

Image: Carl Heyerdahl

Businesses create websites for one reason – to work as a business tool 24/7. When your website is this important, you have to make sure it’s managed properly.

Odds are, you already have the content part taken care of, but what about regular maintenance or changing features? You could try to do it alone, but it’s time consuming and if you make a mistake, your website could be offline for hours or even days.

To get the most from your WordPress, you need experts to help you manage it. Think of it as a way to keep one of your most valuable business tools in optimal condition without you needing to worry.

Keep It Secure

As the most widely used CMS, WordPress is a popular target for hackers. That’s also why WordPress releases regular security and core updates to keep your site as secure as possible. If you’re handling WordPress security yourself, you’ll have several regular tasks to keep track of, such as:

• Updating WordPress and ensuring your theme and plugins are compatible
• Maintaining security software, such as anti-virus and firewall (your host may handle this for you)
• Locking down all accounts
• Monitoring for potential problems, such as files that shouldn’t exist or logins that happen during odd hours

You may think no one would want to hack your site, but hackers don’t care about the size of your website, they just want it for things, such as:

• Steal your bandwidth
• Storing and sharing malicious files
• Using your website to hack other sites

If you’re not diligent, it’s the same as leaving the front door of a brick-and-mortar business wide open 24/7, even after closing. Having experts manage your security means you don’t have to worry about leaving the door open to your site.

Stay On Top Of Trends

Think back five years ago and only a few people were really talking about responsive design. Jump forward to today and it’s vital for your website’s success. However, staying on top of web design trends and knowing what’s best for your specific business is difficult. After all, you’re busy running the actual business.

WordPress experts understand the latest trends and can help you decide which new features might be best to help your site stay competitive and current. After all, using an outdated business tool isn’t going to be helpful for building your business.

Maintain Current Backups

You’ve likely heard that every business needs a disaster and recovery plan. A crucial part of this plan is having current website backups. If something was to happen to your site right now, are you certain you have a recent backup that works? Even when you have the best of intentions, it’s easy to forget to back up your site after a major change.

Experts manage your backups and help you get back online when the worst happens. They even ensure the backup is viable and doesn’t cause you more problems, such as putting a backup online that still contains malware.

Handle Theme & Plugin Installation

Themes and plugins are two of the best things about WordPress. They also help you highly customise your business tool to your needs. The problem is they’re not always easy to install and maintain. For instance, they’re just as vulnerable to security issues as WordPress itself. Take January 2017’s vulnerability roundup as proof.

You need someone who not only knows how to install a new theme or plugin without it crashing your site, but also keeps it updated and ensures your site isn’t using malicious plugins or themes.

Review Your Site For Issues

Unless you’re using your website yourself, you might not notice any suddenly speed problems or downtime. You might not realise that a page isn’t loading correctly. WordPress experts keep an eye on your website and watch for issues that can drastically damage your site’s reputation and rank.

An Expertly Managed Business Tool

The best business tool is one that’s expertly managed. Trying to wear all the hats in your business just makes you tired. Leave your website in the hands of someone whose business is WordPress and never let WordPress woes get you down again.

Looking for someone to help manage your site’s design and keep it current? Contact Darren today to see just how WordPress experts can help you.

Image: Carl Heyerdahl

You have two main options when creating a WordPress site – do it yourself or pay for a WordPress developer.

Your first thought might be that DIY is cheaper and better. If you want more than a simple site for a personal blog, it’s actually better to go with a WordPress developer.

All you have to do is look at the difference between a DIY and professionally developed site to see the difference. Which one would you want to visit?

Give Your Visitors Custom

You’ve envisioned your dream website, but can’t quite find the right theme. The great thing about WordPress themes is they’re customisable. Fonts, color schemes, layouts and more can be changed to better match your site’s personality and purpose. You can even do more advanced customisations if you know how to code.

You can go a step further and turn your design into a custom theme if you want. This does require knowing how to code. Plus, you have to make sure your theme is compatible with your plugins and the latest version of WordPress. If you’re not comfortable coding, this is where a WordPress developer is helpful.

Choose The Right Plugins

Plugins are crucial to getting the most from WordPress. Do you know which ones you need? Many people who try to save money by doing it themselves end up with numerous plugins installed. All this does is slow down page loading times. When your site loads too slowly, visitors leave and they don’t come back. Every second counts.

No amount of marketing will fix this problem. When you pay for a WordPress developer, you know your site is using only the plugins necessary for security, backups, SEO and anything your specific site needs. You don’t have to worry about installing them or setting them up incorrectly. Plus, a developer can create custom plugins to make your site even better.

Make Your Site Functional

Your WordPress site is severely limited by your own skill set. You might have an eye for design and be able to create a stunning front-end, but what about the back-end? A design is useless if it’s not functional. Even after purchasing a theme and getting hosting, your site still looks basic and many of the changes you’ve made don’t work correctly.

A developer knows how to edit a theme, install plugins and customise a WordPress site. They can turn your amazing design into a fully functional site. Would you rather just have the basics or pay a developer to take your site to the next level?

Save Time And Money

Money is usually the main issue when it comes to hiring a WordPress developer. Take a moment to think about how much time and money you’re spending yourself. Then look at the final result. When you take the DIY option, you pay for a theme, hosting and plugins. You have to take the time to search for how to change everything single thing on your site. You have to research which plugins to use, how to install them and test settings to see what works best for your site.

You could spend months tweaking your site and still not be happy. A single change could ruin the entire site and leave you back at square one. Paying a WordPress developer upfront saves you both time and money. You get a site that looks professional and it’s up and running faster. This means you can focus on creating content, marketing your site and boosting visitors.

Meet Google’s Technical Guidelines

Developing a site to meet Google’s standards isn’t easy. WordPress developers understand what Google wants, such as a responsive design and clean code. Choosing a random theme and adding content isn’t enough. The last thing you want to do is spend months developing your site only to have Google penalise it for a flaw in the code or bad plugin that endangers your visitors.

Prevent You From Settling

One of the most important reasons to hire a developer is to prevent yourself from settling. You have a vision of what you want your site to be. Without the expertise, you settle for something close. You choose a theme that’s similar to what you envisioned. You have a few of the features you dreamed of. All you have to do is talk with a WordPress developer to turn your online vision into a reality. The right developer works with you to give you a site that goes above and beyond your expectations.

Conclusion

The DIY approach is ideal for a small personal site or blog. When it comes to a site that’s the face of your business or brand, you need a WordPress developer. Make your site more successful for paying a professional to do it while you focus on marketing and content creation.

Ready to go beyond a basic WordPress site? Contact StuartMedia to get started on a professional WordPress site today.

Image: Serge Kij

Many people aren’t aware of the people or company behind WordPress. They just know the single tool.

Automattic is a large company with employees based around the world. WordPress is far from the only service or tool the company provides to millions of users every day.

If you only know WordPress.com, you only know a small part of the story. While it could take hours to fully explain the company, an overview of Automattic should give you a good idea of how important this company is to the Internet.

Beginning With WordPress

Automattic had humble beginnings when a teenager decided to create his own unique blogging platform. The idea was to combine the best features of other popular blogging services and create something that was more user friendly. What started in 2003 quickly grew into a company that has continued to focus on user friendly products that are usually free or at least extremely affordable. If it wasn’t for the desire to create something better, Automattic or WordPress may have never been developed.

A Growing Company

Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic in 2005. As you might have noticed, he included a play on his own name within the company name. What started with only a few people has turned into a much larger company with 393 employees from 36 different countries. Don’t let the small number of employees fool you.

Automattic is well known for favoring Open Source and the large WordPress community is often responsible for helping the main staff create new features, fix problems and even create brand new tools and services based upon the source code for many of Automattic’s many services.

More Than Money

Even if you don’t look at any other services under the Automattic brand, you’d think WordPress.com alone would have made Mullenweg a billionaire by now. What’s important to remember is the WordPress.com is free to use and the self-hosted WordPress.org software is free too.

Currently, only 1% of WordPress.com users actually pay Automattic. This is usually for additional services such as domain names and the ability to edit their CSS. Those freely hosted sites are may also show occasional ads while some of the more popular sites are being invited to an ad-sharing service. Of course, this excludes WordPress.org users who download the software and buy their own hosting.

As of 2012, Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, only projected $45 million in sales. Schneider did admit that monetization was still fairly new for the company. He also said sales had doubled each year since the company was founded.

Mullenweg is focused more on creating a quality product than earning millions. It’s one of the reasons he’s stood strong against numerous takeover offers that only sought to capitalize on the highly popular services under the brand’s label.

Acquiring Services

WordPress may be the company’s star service, but it’s not the only offering. Automattic has a long history of acquiring other services. Some have worked out well while others were never really heard from again. One of their first acquisitions was Gravatar in 2007. They merged Gravatar and their own WordPress avatar system into one service. Thanks to Automattic, Gravatar went from only 115,000 users in 2007 to processing more than eight billion avatar requests daily.

A few other notable services include:

• PollDaddy
• After The Deadline
• Cloudup
• BruteProtect
• WooCommerce

Odds are, if you’ve used WordPress, you’ve probably used at least one of these additional services. In the future, Automattic will likely continue to acquire even more services that compliment WordPress. The more services they own, the easier it is for the company to ensure those services work seamlessly with their core product.

Conclusion

Automattic started with Mullenweg’s dream of a better blogging platform and turned into one of the most well known companies online. With a large portion of the Internet being powered by WordPress, it’s easy to see that Automattic is a company that bloggers and site owners needed. Thanks to the company’s desire to give users control, WordPress, along with Automattic, is continually growing as more users choose the platform to power their sites and online businesses.

Ready to give Automattic’s services a try? Contact StuartMedia today to find out how to create your own custom WordPress site.

Image: Official LEWEB Photos

Many businesses still think of WordPress as a personal blogging platform.

It’s far more than that and numerous major brands have realised it. They’re now benefiting from the flexibility and customisation options.

With major sites using WordPress, the simple CMS has grown from a personal blogging tool to a well respected platform for any type of website and business.

Marks And Spencer For Business

The popular and well known brand chooses WordPress for one it’s most profitable divisions. Marks And Spencer For Business showcases a professional, yet friendly example of how businesses can use WordPress themselves. Multiple sliders, visually stimulating menus and well placed calls to action are just a few of the highlights. It’s the ideal business layout that no one would believe was WordPress by just looking at it.

Enterprise Magazine

The car rental giant uses WordPress to run their online magazine. Menus, sidebars, sliders and layout changes throughout the home page are just the start. The site accomplishes a visually pleasing site that encourages visitors to explore not just the content, but the world itself.

Facebook Newsroom

While Facebook doesn’t use WordPress for their main social network, the company has chosen WordPress for it’s Newsroom blog. The site itself is simple and elegant, putting content front and center. It’s a prime example of less is more. It proves you don’t have to go overboard to have an effective WordPress design. While WordPress has ample features, choosing the right ones for your site’s needs are what’s most important.

Metro

As the UK’s third largest daily newspaper, Metro is the perfect example of major sites using WordPress. The responsive design shows how adaptive WordPress can be. The magazine style layout is colorful and focuses on grabbing visitors’ attention immediately. It also features how easy it is to incorporate social sharing into a WordPress design.

Reuters Blogs

The international news source, Reuters, trusts WordPress to power its blogs. While color isn’t a major player, white space creates a professional news feel. A sidebar complete with major stories and the latest tweets keep visitors updated on what’s most important to them. The entire site is meant to give visitors the content they need as quickly as possible and their theme and layout does it perfectly.

Gizmodo

Tech news meets WordPress with Gizmodo. The header and footer stand out most. It showcases how easy it is to customise these areas to provide easier navigation. They layout varies slightly throughout with constantly updated stories in each category. The site is a shining example of how simple it is to update content at any time with WordPress.

The Rolling Stones

Classic rockers, The Rolling Stones, keep their fans updated with a WordPress powered site. The showcases the media rich features, such as integrated videos, a complete discography, iTunes integration and a photo gallery. Navigation is simple, yet effective with the real emphasis placed on what fans want most – media and band related news updates. The site shows WordPress is powerful enough to partner with one of the world’s most popular bands.

TechCrunch

As one of the most popular tech news sites, TechCrunch proves sites both large and small benefit from the seemingly endless benefits of WordPress. White space with a blog style layout makes the site seem professional, which you’d expect from a respected news source. The large header and footer encourage social sharing, site searching and email signups. It’s a good example of a WordPress being able to deliver everything a successful business needs to engage with visitors online.

Conclusion

There are no limits to the types of sites using WordPress. The platform is easily customised to fit any brand, business and purpose. These aren’t the only major sites using WordPress either. With the right developer, the site looks like your brand, not like a basic WordPress blog.

Ready to give WordPress a try for your own business’s site? Contact StuartMedia today for the guidance and skills you need to make the most of WordPress.

Image: Sean MacEntee

SEO is a key part of ensuring search engines find and rank a website.

Optimising your site yourself is often time consuming and confusing. WordPress has many built-in features along with add-ons such as different themes and plugins to better manage your website’s SEO.

WordPress has set itself apart as one of the best content management platforms for SEO. Simply using the CMS could help boost your site’s ranking.

Customised Permalinks

WordPress allows the user to change the permalink structure of post and page URLs. Search engines love links that contain the keywords or phrases you want to target. Instead of having a link with seemingly random numbers and letters, your permalink structure could contain part or all of your post’s title. This helps boosts your rank and allows visitors to find your site easier.

Takeaway: Take the time to edit the default permalink structure to show your post titles. A developer can set this up for you if you’re not sure how or want them highly customised.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds and other feed types are built-in to WordPress. These feeds allow a site’s content to be picked up by feed readers easily. The feeds could be used by visitors to keep updated on a site’s latest content or the feed may be posted on another site with links back to the original site. Site owners can submit their feed to numerous feed services to increase traffic. The SEO benefit is a site builds traffic and loyal followers, both of which Google factors in when ranking a site.

Takeaway: Take advantage of the built-in feeds to submit to feed services. They’re an easy way to market your site and improve your rank without dealing with extra code yourself.

Clean Code

By default, WordPress uses clean code that makes it easier for search engines to read a site. This code also makes it easier for search engines to determine if any malicious code is present. Adding customised themes and plugins can complicate things, but with the right developer, the code is still clean and optimised for search engines.

Takeaway: Consider hiring a developer if you want to add in customised themes and plugins. A developer will be able to clean up the code to make the most of WordPress’s SEO benefits.

Optimised Themes

While WordPress already boosts a website’s SEO, some themes are designed to further optimise a site. These themes may focus on more optimised layouts, better metadata, proper headers, built-in plugins and more. Many themes are also responsive. Mobile friendly sites rank higher when users search on a mobile device. Using a responsive design helps a site comply with Google’s new mobile ranking guidelines. Thousands of themes are available and developers can create a custom theme with even more SEO benefits built-in.

Takeaway: Combining an optimised theme with WordPress makes SEO even easier. Developers can ensure you have the right theme to make your site more SEO friendly.

SEO Plugins

SEO plugins are one of WordPress’s most powerful features for optimising a site. Hundreds of free and premium plugins are available to further optimise SEO on posts and pages. For instance, the popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin gives you an SEO section to fill out with a keyword, SEO title and meta description. It also shows you if you’ve used the keyword in all the right places. Think of these plugins as a guided SEO tool to ensure your posts are as optimised as possible.

Takeaway: Choose an SEO plugin to use for your website. The built-in SEO features are great, but a focused plugin helps even more. Ask your developer to install or develop an SEO plugin for you.

Add Content Easily

Regular content is an easy way to optimise a site. Many platforms make it difficult to add and format content properly for search engines. For instance, using H2 header tags in your content is better for SEO. The WordPress post editor has that feature built-in without the user having to add in any code. Plus, the ease of using the editor and posting content makes it easier for users to add content regularly and keep their site fresh in the eyes of search engines.

Takeaway: WordPress is a popular CMS because it’s so easy to manage content. Add content on a regular schedule to further improve your ranking.

Conclusion

WordPress is an SEO rich platform. The right developer can ensure the code is clean and all settings are in place to make the most of these features. Unlike many other platforms, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to optimise every post and page.

Stop making SEO so difficult. Contact StuartMedia today to find out how WordPress will do the hard work for you.

Image: Harsh Agrawal

WordPress plugins are the ideal way to add functionality and improve performance to WordPress sites.

While there are thousands of free and premium plugins available, I have my own list of favorites. From clients’ sites to my own sites, I’ve used all of these on a regular basis.

Each adds something useful to the site. From ecommerce tools to improved SEO, each is designed to make the sites I develop even better.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms provides a drag and drop interface for creating basic and advanced forms. It’s easy to build and customise forms to meet any site’s needs. You can even create your own fields and schedule how long a form is displayed.

Takeaway: If you’re building forms for WordPress, this plugin has you covered. It’s used on millions of sites for a reason.

WordPress SEO By Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular plugins for optimising posts and pages. SEO can be confusing, but this plugin makes it as easy as filling in a few blanks. It double checks your content to ensure it’s optimised. It doesn’t just focus on keywords. It also creates XML sitemaps, provides meta and link element control and improves RSS feeds.

Takeaway: Don’t try to manage SEO fully on your own. Let this plugin give you the help you need for a more optimised site.

WooCommerce

Run a full ecommerce store with the WooCommerce plugin. You can manage inventory, accept payments, create sales reports, run marketing campaigns and much more. The long list of features provides everything you need for your store. Plus, there are hundreds of extensions available to boost the power of the plugin.

Takeaway: No WordPress ecommerce site is complete without this plugin. It currently powers 24% of all ecommerce sites.

Jetpack

Jetpack offers a wide variety of features for WordPress sites. My favorite features include WordPress.com Stats, Publicize and Sharing. The first provides detailed stats without degrading site performance. The latter two make it easy to automatically share posts and provide one click social media sharing.

Takeaway: Use just the features you need to optimise and learn more about your site. Plus, it doesn’t harm a site’s performance.

WP Migrate DB Pro

Migrating WordPress sites can be time consuming and difficult. WP Migrate DB Pro helps save valuable time so clients’ sites are moved quickly. It gives developers full control over the migration process, including backing up the database.

Takeaway: Reduce the stress and hassle of migration. Use this plugin instead.

Automatic Domain Changer

Automatic Domain Changer does exactly what the name implies. It’s a life saver for ensuring a smoother migration from one domain to another. The plugin detects domain name changes and updates all your WordPress tables to reflect any changes.

Takeaway: This is another must have plugin for WordPress migrations. It helps prevent annoying domain errors during the process.

Custom Sidebars Pro

Custom Sidebars Pro gives you full control over customising exactly how, where and even when widgets appear on a site. It integrates with the widgets area in WordPress to make it easier to manage complex widgets across the entire site.

Takeaway: Using this plugin gives you far more control over widget customisation. It also makes managing the look and feel of widgets even easier.

Easy Add Thumbnail

Easy Add Thumbnail automatically adds the feature image ID to posts, including old ones. It doesn’t actually change anything in your database. This removes the need to manually set it for every post. It’s ideal for any themes that don’t automatically add thumbnails for featured images.

Takeaway: Adding the thumbnail meta key for old posts takes hours. This plugin does it quickly and prevents you from forgetting to do it on future posts.

W3 Total Cache

A cache plugin is a must for optimising WordPress site performance. W3 Total Cache can boost page loading speeds by up to 10x when it’s fully configured. This helps improve a site’s rank and visitor satisfaction. It helps improve server performance and handles compression for optimal bandwidth savings.

Takeaway: Visitors expect sites to load quickly. This caching plugin gives site the extra speed boost they need to prevent visitors from leaving due to slow loading pages.

Post Thumbnail Editor

Some WordPress themes create thumbnail cropping chaos. Post Thumbnail Editor provides an interface to manually fix the random sizing and cropping issues of thumbnails on WordPress sites. This allows you to create a more uniform and professional look for thumbnails across the entire site.

Takeaway: Automated thumbnail sizing tools don’t always work as expected. Use this plugin to fix any issues left behind.

Conclusion

I don’t just use these on clients’ sites. I also use them on my own WordPress sites: Retro Race Cars and The Startup Pitch. Professional developers utilise these plugins and many others to provide the best sites for their clients. It’s important to have a developer set up these plugins to ensure a site receives the most benefit.

Thinking of using any of these WordPress plugins on your own site? Contact StuartMedia today to see which ones are best for your needs. 

Image: Rob Davies