State Sen. Elder Vogel Jr.'s bill providing tax incentives for landowners to lease or sell to new farmers was signed into law by Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday and lauded as a potential boon for Pennsylvania's agricultural industry."The lack of affordable farmland to rent or buy is often listed as a top reason why young people do not pursue careers in farming," said Pennsylvania Farm Bureau President Rick Ebert in a statement. "We are hopeful that this new tax credit will create more [...]
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السبت، 6 يوليو 2019
10 WordPress Tips Every Webmaster Needs to Know
More than 500 websites are being built on WordPress every day. This platform powers 14.7% of the top 100 websites across the globe.
On average, 17 new posts get published on WordPress every second. In a month, WordPress is searched on Google more than 37 million times.
WordPress is a powerful CMS. More than 19.5 million sites across the world use the platform.
So for those of you who are new to the growing WordPress network, welcome to the club. Launching a new website can be intimidating if it’s your first time. But if you can quickly learn some tips and tricks on WordPress, it will make your life much easier.
Some of you may have been using WordPress for a while. Others might have had some failed sites and need some guidance moving forward.
Regardless of your situation, this guide will help you succeed.
While I definitely wrote the guide with WordPress beginners in mind, some of these tips are being overlooked by people who have been using WordPress for years.
1. Find the right web hosting plan
WordPress is an open-source CMS (content management system). Simply put, it’s a tool for creating and managing websites. You can use WordPress to build a personal blog, business website, ecommerce store, or anything in between.
But the platform itself does not host websites. This is a common misconception that I find with prospective website owners.
WordPress recommends three different web hosting options:
With that said, you can use any web hosting provider that meets the WordPress minimum hosting requirements. Basically, your host needs to have a PHP version of 7.3 or higher. It needs a MySQL version of 5.6 or higher or MariaDB version 10.1 or higher. Your host also needs HTTPS support.
When it comes to web hosting, there are lots of different options to choose from. After you find the best web hosting provider, you’ll also have to determine the type of hosting you need. Shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting are the most popular options.
Choosing the right plan and host from the beginning is crucial. It’s important that you find a plan that gives you enough resources to meet your traffic needs.
Picking the wrong hosting plan can end up causing slow loading times, crashes, and downtimes. Plus, changing hosts down the road can be a pain.
2. Pick a quality theme
The options are seemingly endless when it comes to picking a WordPress theme. You can browse for options from the WordPress theme directory.
However, too many people make the mistake of rushing when they pick a theme. That’s not going to benefit you at all.
There are tens of thousands of themes out there. Not all of them are offered directly from the WordPress theme directory.
Resources like ThemeForest have nearly 46,000 themes to choose from. In order to get a quality theme, you might have to pay. It’s not a huge expense, and most themes are reasonably priced.
Your theme should also be based on the type of website you have. For example, the best WordPress themes for blogs will be different than the best ecommerce WordPress themes.
That’s why you should always look at the live demos of themes. It will give you a chance to try a theme out before you install it. This way you’ll be able to get a better idea of the look and feel of a theme from the user’s perspective.
It should go without saying, but you need to make sure that any theme you install is mobile-responsive. Themes are useless if they can’t be displayed properly on mobile devices.
3. Use Google Analytics
It’s impossible to know how well your site is doing unless you can measure its performance metrics. WordPress alone won’t give you enough information.
But by installing a Google Analytics plugin, you’ll be able to get added insight into how site visitors are behaving on your pages.
MonsterInsights is a top option to consider for this.
The plugin has more than 2 million active installations. It’s definitely the most popular Google Analytics plugin on the market today.
After installing this, you’ll have access to audience reports, behavior reports, content reports, and ecommerce reports (if applicable).
The best part about using a Google Analytics plugin is that you’ll be able to view all of your data directly on your WordPress admin dashboard. It’s better than having to bounce around between multiple sites and platforms to access this information.
4. Install a plugin for SEO
In addition to Google Analytics, you’ll also want to use a WordPress SEO plugin. There are hundreds of options out there, but I personally recommend Yoast SEO.
Without a proper SEO strategy, your WordPress site won’t get much organic traffic. This is crucial for survival in today’s day and age.
You can’t just assume that your content alone is good enough to bring people to your site. I don’t care what type of website you have or what industry you’re in, SEO needs to be a top priority.
A plugin like this makes things easier for you whenever you want to optimize your site for SEO.
It will analyze keywords and content to ensure that you’re taking the right approach. Yoast also helps you handle the technical side of SEO, like managing your sitemaps or robots.txt files.
5. Don’t use too many plugins
I know this may sound contradictory to my last two tips, but you need to limit your use of plugins.
Google Analytics and SEO plugins are definitely necessary, as with some other plugins to add functionality to your website. There are great plugins for things like:
- Caching
- Forms
- Directories
- Bookings
- Memberships
- Popups
- Backups
- Security
But with that said, you don’t need a plugin for every category. If you’re not going to actually add popups to your website, you don’t need a popup plugin. Don’t install a bookings plugin unless you run a business that would benefit from it.
Installing too many WordPress plugins can ultimately make your site slower. Adding the extra code associated with a plugin can weigh down your website.
More plugins don’t necessarily translate to a better or more functional website. So just don’t go overboard when you’re installing them. Limit plugins to ones that you’ll actually need and use.
6. Compress images
Like excess plugins, images are another way to slow your website down. But that doesn’t mean you should shy away from using lots of images in your content.
In fact, I encourage you to use as many images as possible, all over your website. Incorporate them into your blog posts, use them on landing pages, add them to product pages and descriptions as well.
There aren’t many circumstances where I would say an image doesn’t belong on your site.
But with that said, these media files are large, and result in slower loading times. That’s why every image should be compressed before it’s published.
I’d recommend using a tool like the Kraken Image Optimizer.
As you can see from this example, Kraken reduced this file size by 61%. I like this tool because you can handle all of your image compression on the web, without forcing you to download any software.
If you’d rather do this in WordPress, you’ll need to install a plugin.
7. Modify your permalinks
Are you familiar with permalinks?
This is the part of the web address that comes after the domain name. These are the web addresses of each individual landing page and blog post.
Each time you create a new page or post on WordPress, it automatically generates a new permalink by default. However, these defaults need to be changed before you publish the page.
A carefully crafted and custom permalink is very valuable. It gives your website visitors an understanding of what the page is about, without having to read the content.
They keep everything organized, and can be used by search engines and site visitors alike for accessing content.
To modify your permalinks, navigate to the “Settings” option from your dashboard. From here you’ll see a “Permalinks” button. The “Post Name” option is the one that will provide the most SEO value, so that’s what you should go with.
8. Prioritize safety
We discussed the popularity of WordPress earlier. Since it’s so common for websites to use this platform, it’s also common for hackers to target WordPress sites.
You need to update your WordPress version whenever a new one comes out. This will help you avoid some bugs and hackers. But that alone won’t be enough to keep your site secure.
There are other steps you can take to beef up the security of your WordPress site.
The first thing you should do is get an SSL certificate. This will encrypt information on your site, including sensitive details like customer data. The best web hosting services (like the ones we mentioned earlier) will usually include an SSL certificate.
You should also be backing up your site on a regular basis. If something goes wrong and your content gets lost, you don’t want to be forced to start over from scratch. There are plugins you can install for backups, as well as plugins made for enhancing your site’s security.
9. Learn how to use heading tags and meta tags
These are meta tags that appear in SERPs.
I’m sure you’ve seen them before.
Heading tags get used within your content. For example, this blog post that you’re reading right now has 12 tags. There’s a title tag at the top, a heading for each of the 10 tips, and a conclusion tag at the bottom.
Both meta tags and title tags have SEO benefits. They also make it content easier for website visitors to consume content.
Imagine trying to read this post without these headers? It would not be as easy.
Based on which type of header is used, it ranks the tag’s significance on the page. The size of the text will change based on this as well. For example, H1 tags are the biggest and most important, while an H6 tag is smaller and less important.
If you’re not familiar with how these work, just review my guide on how to use heading tags to get more search engine traffic. I also wrote a guide on how to craft meta tags for SEO and CTR.
Both of these are valuable resources for your WordPress SEO strategy.
10. Eliminate clutter
WordPress gives you tons of customizable options for your website. You have the option to include ads, banners, and widgets all over your page.
However, all of these extras just add clutter to your website. This makes your page looks untrustworthy and unprofessional.
Adding too many elements to your website is also very distracting to your website visitors. It makes it hard for them to focus, which means your content won’t get consumed and they won’t click on your CTAs.
While it might be tempting to take advantage of everything that WordPress has to offer, in some instances, less is definitely more.
Conclusion
WordPress is one of the best content management systems on the market today. It’s easy to use, and extremely versatile for nearly every type of website.
However, WordPress isn’t really a set it and forget it platform. You’ll still need to actively manage your website.
With so many different features, functions, and add-ons to take advantage of, it can be a bit overwhelming at times. But don’t let yourself get distracted. If you follow these 10 simple WordPress tips that I’ve outlined above, your site performance will improve.
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Inspiration from Brittany Packnett, Marcus Aurelius, Simon Sinek, and More
Once a month (or so), I share a dozen things that have inspired me to greater personal, professional, and financial success in my life. I hope they bring similar success to your life.
1. Simon Sinek on passion versus stress
“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stressed; working hard for something we love is called passion.” – Simon Sinek
It feels good to work hard on something that you love and really care a lot about. It’s even better when you’re paid to do it and there aren’t other elements making it less enjoyable.
It feels bad to be made to work hard on something you don’t care about at all because of professional pressure and the need for a paycheck. Call it stress or something else, but it’s not pleasant or joyful.
It’s worth noting here that very few people love deadlines. Often, they don’t care that much about them, so they can sometimes transform things we love into things we don’t care about because we’re forced up against a deadline.
2. Brittany Packnett on building your confidence and discovering it in others
From the description:
“Confidence is the necessary spark before everything that follows,” says educator and activist Brittany Packnett. In an inspiring talk, she shares three ways to crack the code of confidence — and her dream for a world where revolutionary confidence helps turn our most ambitious dreams into reality.
Those “three ways to crack the code” are permission, community, and curiosity. In simplest terms, reflect on when you’ve been confident in the past, find a group of people you feel safe being confident around, and use that confidence at first to follow your own curiosity through self-learning.
This hits upon something I’ve found that’s very true with my own kids. One of the best confidence builders I’ve found for them is to encourage them to seek out answers for their own questions. I always encourage them to ask lots of questions, but when they want answers, I often don’t give them tidy packaged answers. Rather, I encourage them to go find the answer and report back. I give them permission to go out on their own, a community in which they feel engaged, and the curiosity to go do it.
That mix creates confidence, and I often see that confidence spreading out into other aspects of their life. They’re not afraid to try things. They’re not afraid to be leaders with their friends. It’s something that’s really beautiful to behold.
This talk really cinched something I’ve always felt, that my encouragement for them to go out there and seek answers to their questions and report back was a confidence builder. I felt that it was there, but I didn’t really put it together until I heard this talk.
3. Tim Kreider on the sanest people
“The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch.” – Tim Kreider
There was a point in the history of The Simple Dollar where I had some opportunities on the table to turn the thing into what you might call a small media empire. At the time, I had a couple of virtual assistants helping me run the site, an ad agency wanted to partner with me, and there were a few additional deals floating around that would have made me a ton of money, including a multifaceted deal with a pretty large entertainment conglomerate. Yep, Trent Hamm would have been on your television and your magazine aisle.
Here’s the thing – had I jumped on board with those deals, I would have found myself doing a lot of things I was just not very interested in doing with my time. I would have been spending a lot of time managing people, negotiating deals, and so on. I actually talked seriously with some people I trust about hiring a business manager and an agent.
I just realized I didn’t want any of that. What I really wanted more than anything was to have a useful job where I actually helped people, a family that I loved and a bunch of good friends, and a nice home to go home to.
So I said no to almost all of it aside from a book deal that I largely regretted. I eventually sold the site with an arrangement me that allowed me to stick around and do what I love, which was write.
That quote sums up how I feel about the whole thing now. Sure, I would probably have more than enough money in the bank to retire now and I’d probably have some lifestyle accoutrements that would be really nice, but I would have missed a lot of my kids growing up and I would probably not have a strong marriage.
I think… no, I know I made the right choice for me.
4. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
You might think “this is just an autobiography of a stand-up comic,” and you’d be right, but like every really worthwhile autobiography, it manages to say a whole lot more than just the simple recounting of the details of one person’s life.
In the 1970s, Steve Martin became the most popular stand-up comedian on Earth. In 1981, he walked away from it forever. This book has a dual nature, then; it explains how he was able to come from a modest background to be an incredibly successful stand-up comedian, and it also deals with why he walked away from it.
The issues he goes into are ones that we all deal with. How do I get better at something? (Practice, practice, practice, seems to be the answer.) What really matters in my life? What’s worth giving up and what isn’t?
Martin’s gift as a writer is on full display here, because as he’s tackling those questions in his own life, he’s also effectively asking you those questions about your own life. If you want to get really good at something, here’s how you do it, but it’s going to require sacrifices. Are you willing to make those sacrifices? What’s actually important to you? How important is your integrity? How important is your family?
I couldn’t put it down and it left me thinking a lot afterwards.
5. Henry David Thoreau on time and money
“The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.” ― Henry David Thoreau
In this quote, Thoreau was basically laying down the groundwork for my own personal finance philosophy, which is pretty similar to that embodied in the seminal personal finance book Your Money or Your Life.
The truth is that everything you buy with your money was, in the end, bought with the hours of your life, and there are really only so many hours we each have in our lives. How do you want to spend those hours? Do you want to spend them so you can then use the money you earn on forgettable things? I think that’s a waste of a life.
Use your life’s energy earning money so that you can spend it on things that really mean something to you. If you’re not sure, bank it for later and use it to buy freedom.
6. Alice
Recently, my youngest child participated in a weeklong summer program centered around Alice, which is a simple 3D modeling tool and scripting language that you can use to tell digital stories.
At the end of the week, he gave us a demonstration of what he’d learned, starting with a few simple things that were clearly oriented around learning how to use the software and culminating with this great animated story about the friendship between a dragon and a ghost, culminating in the revelation that the ghost was actually the ghost of the dragon’s mother.
Not only was this story impressive (and his use of the medium and the tools to tell it), but his sister immediately grabbed onto the software and started creating things of her own. She’s now in the midst of creating something absurdly elaborate – all I can really tell is that it involves a flock of birds and it’s quite long.
We currently have just one family computer and the two of them have been taking turns (with varying levels of cooperation, as one might expect from siblings) working on various stories.
It’s amazing to see a tool like this unlock both their creative and logical natures. (It also makes me want to make an Alice story as well.)
7. Binging with Babish
Binging with Babish is a Youtube cooking channel that features two distinct types of videos – “Basics with Babish,” which are basic kitchen technique tutorials, and “Binging with Babish,” which is kind of the “main” show in which the host shows how to make some kind of dish that has some degree of pop cultural relevance.
For me, this channel not only hits on an interest of mine (home food preparation), but I love that over the course of the history of the channel, you can see the evolution in Babish’s presentation skills and the quality of the information provided. The early videos are definitely good, but he’s really in a groove in the later videos, melding useful and entertaining almost perfectly.
A great example of this is the recent “Basics with Babish” on coffee:
The video does a great job of presenting the basics of making coffee at home, mixing a breezy tone with his guest, a lot of useful information for someone new to home coffee preparation, and keeping it in a relatively short video. There’s a ton of info that’s just set up perfectly for people to jump off into more specific topics if they’re interested while still communicating what you need to know and still being entertaining.
On the other hand, this episode of “Binging with Babish” where he tries to make eggs Florentine from “Frasier” is great (and actually works really well – I used this as a guide to make eggs Florentine one morning for fun, and I made the English muffins multiple times):
This is a very information-rich walkthrough with lots of useful videos and just enough humor to keep it entertaining without detracting from what’s being made. Perfect.
I am really careful with the Youtube channels I subscribe to so that my Youtube subscriptions page is always loaded with stuff I want to see, and Babish’s videos are always a welcome presence there.
8. Marcus Aurelius on your thoughts and your life
“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius
Perhaps the single biggest revelation I had during the last ten years is that I have a ton of control over what I think about, and what I think about ends up shaping how I feel about a lot of things, how I react to things, and what I choose to do in life.
An example: if I spend my time thinking negative thoughts about working out, it’s not going to be long before I’m simply completely uninterested in working out and I’m going to stop any sort of workout routine. Rather, if I catch myself thinking negative thoughts about it, I intentionally kill them and start thinking positive thoughts instead. “This will feel good. This will make me healthier. This will be fun. Remember how much you enjoyed that workout a few weeks ago? What did you do during that? Let’s recreate it!” Thinking thoughts like that intentionally gets me more excited about exercising, makes it go better, and makes me feel better about it afterwards, and eventually I don’t really have those negative thoughts any more.
This is true for everything. You have so much power over what you choose to think about things, and if you choose to think negative thoughts about the better but more challenging things in life, things will go poorly. Save your negative thoughts for the things that actually harm you and then let them fly, but give positive thoughts to the good things in life, like the person who’s nice to you even when you feel grumpy. That person is awesome. Think about how awesome that person is.
9. The Avett Brothers – Tiny Desk Concert
From the description:
With all due respect to its terrific albums and kinetic, frenetic live shows, if The Avett Brothers could put on a three-song acoustic concert at every workplace in America, the band would be a world-beating colossus. For proof, listen to this performance in the NPR Music offices.
The Avett Brothers are one of my favorite musical acts of all time. NPR’s series of “Tiny Desk Concerts,” where a musical act performs in the corner of a rather small office at NPR, is one of my favorite things to listen to. How did I somehow not know that the Avett Brothers had done one of these?
This is an excellent sampling of their earlier music which is very bluegrass/Americana oriented, rather than the somewhat more pop-friendly sound of their later stuff. They came off as so scruffy and passionate back then. I could listen to all of it hundreds of times and it would never grow old.
10. A.R. Moxon on the unjust person
“‘Meet me in the middle,’ says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. ‘Meet me in the middle,’ says the unjust man.” – A.R. Moxon
I think, in some part of our lives, we’re all the unjust man, and in other parts of our lives, we’re all the person taken advantage of by the unjust man.
The thing is, I don’t think many of us recognize we’re being the unjust one. We feel like we’re merely sticking to our guns and simply aren’t seeing that others are trying to cooperate with us.
Similarly, it can be incredibly frustrating when people in our lives (or people whose choices affect our lives) are the unjust one. We feel like we’re compromising and cooperating, and they don’t care and just take and take and take.
The only solution to this is communication. Open your ears and you might hear more communication and conversation than you think you do.
11. Timery
So, let’s back up for a bit here. In about 2015, I got really into time tracking. I wanted to get a clear sense of how I was spending my time at a scale beyond just a day or two. I could usually tell if a single day was productive or not and have a good idea of what was unproductive and productive about the last day or two, but in terms of larger trends and a bigger picture, I was pretty blind.
I started using Toggl as a time tracking tool and stuck with it for a couple of months really well. There were a number of things I really liked about Toggl, but the actual use of it when I just wanted to tap a button to track my time was always really awkward. It felt like I had to tap several times to do anything, and that meant it kind of got in the way of being productive. It was that lack of ease of use that got in the way.
Well, Timery is basically an extremely well designed free app and widget that sits on top of your Toggl data and makes tracking your time really easy. I’ve jumped back into time tracking over the last few weeks mostly because Timery makes it easy to do what I want to do – do all of the setup, then after that, I mostly just tap once on my phone when I want to track something different. It’s great, and the data is already useful. It kind of slaps me in the face with how I use my time poorly, much like a credit card statement can sometimes do when your spending is all out of whack.
12. Catherine Wallace on parenting
“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.” – Catherine M. Wallace
There are few things I enjoy more than my children telling me something about their lives: something they care about, something they made, something they accomplished. The thing is, if they’re telling me about it, it’s not small to them.
This isn’t just true for other kids. Most of the time, aside from a small minority of people who just talk all the time about whatever comes to mind, people who are talking to you about things are bringing them up because they care about them, and at the very least acknowledging that is a huge part of building trust with other people. You don’t have to love what the other person is talking about. You just have to recognize that it is important to them. If you do, you’ll build a connection rapidly.
The things I consider unimportant are regularly things other people consider important, and vice versa. If I just act like those things are unimportant, I’m effectively telling them that they’re unimportant, too, or at least that I view the things they care about as unimportant.
If you want to build a deep relationship with anyone, keep that in mind.
The post Inspiration from Brittany Packnett, Marcus Aurelius, Simon Sinek, and More appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
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