How to Edit Your WordPress Website and Make It Fabulous in 2021
There’s more to having a website than picking a great WordPress theme, populating it with some kind of content, and waiting for the audiences to flock to it. Not that you can’t do it like that, it’s just that the final part where people come in droves to see your website is never going to happen.
Why? Because it takes a lot of very hard work to see results in today’s digital climate. Whatever you’re doing with your website, someone else is probably doing better, and for longer.
Do not despair, however! It can be incredibly easy to get back into the game and make your website attractive, and, why not, fabulous! If that’s a plan you have, here are a couple of tips to show you how to edit a WordPress website for maximum fabulosity in 2020!
Do an SEO makeover of your content.
You absolutely cannot let the content on your website be online without optimizing it first. Even if you don’t see a reason to include strong SEO practices in your content creation, your competitors probably do. Without taking SEO into account when creating content, you’ll never be competitive.
Don’t fret, as you can easily adopt new SEO practices for your content and make sure that every new piece you put out there is properly optimized. For the content you already have on your website, you’ll have to do an SEO makeover. The best way to go about it to get one of the SEO plugins that can scan your content for SEO mistakes and faux pas.
Check your website for broken links.
Dead links can become a heavy burden for a website. If you’ve had yours for a while, and especially if you’re running a blog that tends to have plenty of links in its posts, you’re bound to encounter some dead links in your content. No one likes bad or invalid links, so better to weed it out.
Checking for dead links can be an arduous task if you do it manually. The better way to do it would be to install a plugin such as the Broken Link Checker and automate some of the processes. Not having time to deal with them isn’t an excuse to enter 2020 with a website full of dead links.
Use Google Analytics.
There’s no way you can run a successful website without having any analytics tools to show you how well you’re doing, and what you should consider doing next. One of the best things about having a website is just how much data you can gather and analyze for actionable insights.
Google Analytics is the best tool in the business. At the very least, it’s in the top five. After you connect Google Analytics with your website, it will show you all the good stuff you need to know about your visitors, their habits, and your website’s performance. It’s something you should have started doing way before 2020, really. But it’s never too late!
Take website security seriously.
The internet is not a safe place. You can spend hours upon hours surfing it without a single care in the world, only to be startled by a screen telling you to pay up or your hard drive becomes permanently locked or erased.
Web security threats affect everyone, from individuals and small businesses to governments and corporations. If you’re online you’re in danger. For your website, it would be a good idea to install a professional WordPress security plugin. Even more importantly, however, you want to become invested in your website’s security in 2020.
Create a backup of the whole site.
For one reason or another, you can be left without your website’s database. Maybe you haven’t heeded the advice we offered before this one, or maybe it was a simple human error that cost you and your business of all the data you’ve had tied with your website.
To say that these things are bad when they happen would be the understatement of the decade. Losing your data is bad for a good reason. To make sure it doesn’t affect you, get a good WordPress backup plugin and set it up so that it backs up your website in the way you prefer.
Give images some love and attention.
You should really pay close attention to the images you place on your website. People prefer photos to text, after all, and if your website has lousy visuals, people won’t bother with it too much. So let 2020 be the year you give your website’s visuals some love.
The first thing you can do is visit a couple of stock photo websites and websites that offer vector illustrations and shop around for new, snazzy visuals. Keep in mind that, if you’re using free images, you might be required to add image credits, or you could do it anyway out of good manners. Final advice: optimize your images for the fastest loading speeds with the best possible quality. It’s very important.
Add an image gallery.
So let’s say you really loved having so many images on your website, and you found them very useful when you optimized them. Your website visitors, being people and thus inclined to watch content and not just read it, loved your new image content too.
It’s obvious what you should do next: add an image gallery to your website. Sure, image galleries are better suited to some websites than others. You’ll also need a lot of images to fill out a couple of galleries, which shouldn’t be a problem if you have a visual portfolio. As for the gallery itself, as always, there are gallery plugins for WordPress that can give you all you need.
Add the parallax effect (appropriately).
It doesn’t really matter that design snobs find it obnoxious, parallax is still a widely used effect in web design. Why? Because it turns out that people are naturally inclined to pay attention to things that move at different speeds.
Even before they notice the images on it, your website visitors will turn their attention to whatever you applied the effect to. How to take full advantage of it? Learn how to add parallax effects to your website. Hint: there are great parallax plugins, so you won’t have to bother with it too much.
Create a nice 404 page.
A 404 page shouldn’t be the end of a customer’s journey. While it notifies that a page the customer wanted to reach isn’t there, it doesn’t mean that they have to leave your website and find what they need at a competitor’s.
A well-designed, custom-made 404 page can do that for you. It might not be able to outright prevent people from leaving your website, but it can give them a nudge in the right direction and get them back and browsing. At the very least, it can make them smile. You can win customers if you can make them smile.
Design with mobile in mind.
It’s been a couple of years since mobile searches on Google overtook desktop searches. We’re living in a mobile-first age when digital natives can easily have a mobile device as their first connected device. It’s a big shift, and it’s affected everything from how we shop to how we interact with one another.
For your website, however, this means only one thing — you should think about mobile-first design. Instead of making a website for desktop and finding ways to adapt it for mobile viewing, do it the other way around. It doesn’t matter whether you think you need it or not, really. It’s just time to start doing it.
Add a timeline to your website.
Why use a timeline? Why not! People like looking at them. They are a great way to organize things in chronological order. Thanks to some cool WordPress Timeline plugins, it’s very easy to have a timeline on your website.
If you’re having problem finding timeline-appropriate content, here are a couple of ideas. You can always display your websites “about us” info on a timeline. If you want to explain processes, you can use timelines for that as well. Even presenting the work you’ve done on a project can look better if you do it with a timeline.
Connect your website and social networks.
You can’t have a content strategy and not include social networks in it. They are such an important channel of communication with customers that it’s almost unimaginable that a business would forgo them, or fail to integrate them into an overall strategy.
The very least you can do when connecting your website with your social channels is to add social icons to your website. They can facilitate social sharing and improve your standing with social networks as well as search engines. Just make sure you check out a couple of social sharing plugins to find the one that works best for you.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
2019 has been a bumpy year in many different ways, but it doesn’t mean we have to carry with us all of the baggage we accrued into 2020. We can let go of some things, especially if they were holding us back.
So if your website was a charming but unoptimized mess in 2019, why not give it a makeover in 2020? Learn how to edit a WordPress website for maximum visibility, functionality, and attractiveness, and you’ll give your website visitors fabulous user experience. And that is what it’s all about.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
