Kori Ashton gives you 5 Tips to Help Make Your Life Amazing! with WordPress and Google Hacks.
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Full Transcript
Hey y’all, it’s Kori Ashton and it is another WordPress Wednesday. You have found a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress and today I have five tips that are gonna make your life amazing. You might say, well I might know one or two but I wonder if you know all five. If you do be sure to comment in the thread below and tell me, Kori I already knew all five or tell me hey, I learned two or three new things.
I hope this helps you and if you love this be sure to give a shout out to Pressable because they’re the one sponsoring all this goodness. Alright, let’s check it out.
Tip One – Gravity Forms (Stay in Place When Click Submit)
Tip number one. Alright, the very first tip has to do with Gravity Forms. If you’ve ever used a form, specifically Gravity Forms you’ve probably experienced something like this. I’ve got this form, actually, at the bottom of a page right now but it functions anywhere you put this form on any page for that matter. If I were to fill out the form and click submit, see how it jumps me back to the top of the page?
So if I had a thank you message there which I actually do have a thank you message right here. I’d have to scroll again right back down and actually see what the message said. It’s kind of annoying.
But did you know that Gravity has a feature inside of it known as Ajax and you can enable it and it’s super, super, super easy to do. So you actually do it when you go to embed the forms. You’ve already created the form. You can give it as many fields whatever you want it to have as usual.
Like you’d normally use Gravity Forms but when you come in here to embed the code I’m gonna delete what I currently had and I’m gonna go ahead and click Add Form. You’re gonna go ahead and choose the form that you wanna choose. Display the title, don’t display the title. What I want you to do is enable Ajax. Just click that little box right there and insert form. It’s gonna add Ajax true to your shortcode.
We’re gonna click update and I’m gonna show you now what it looks like whenever somebody fills out that form and how cool it’s gonna look and how simple it’s gonna look in the process of a user experience, right? So same form, same page, same placement, right? Askkori.com and where are gonna go here testing again Ajax, right? So that we know the difference. I’m gonna click submit and watch this. Stayed right where it was.
Gave me a little timer showing it was submitting and then there is my thank you message. Super cool, quick tip that you should be using on all of your Gravity Forms.
Tip Two – Site Search on Google
Second tip has to do with Google specifically. Did you know that you can do a site search for all of the pages, all of the files, that google has indexed on your website. Super cool, quick, easy. What I want you to do is type in the word site S-I-T-E, do a colon and you can do your own if you want Askkori.com click enter and it’s gonna spit out every single page that it has indexed. This is a super important thing for you to do.
Let me zoom in a little bit so you can see what the code is. Site, S-I-T-E, colon, Askkori.com is my URL. You’ll put in whatever domain name you have, your clients, whatever that looks like. This is so important to do because you can very quickly see if Google has been indexing or been able to crawl your website. Also, it’s a very quick overview of all your snippets so you can check out and see how Google is displaying every single one of your pages for people to click on. Cool, huh?
Tip Three – Non-Clickable Link on WordPress
Tip number three. This one has to do again back specifically with WordPress. Did you know that up in your menu you can actually have a link sitting up there that is not clickable? It can just kinda be a placeholder.
See this one currently, if I click on it, it actually does take me to my whole blog landing page. But what if I wanted to create just kind of a placeholder here and then allow to have drop down options underneath. You really don’t want this one to be clickable.
How is that done? I’m gonna show you right now. Let’s head into your dashboard. We’re gonna go over to Appearance and go to Menus. Right, Appearance, Menus. I want you to get to whatever menu you want to edit. Right now I want to edit that top menu up there and my primary menu. And I want to add in just another placeholder and then maybe just put my WordPress topics from my blog. Those categories underneath that.
So you’re gonna come over here to custom links. And instead of a URL, I just want you to put in a hashtag for now and I’m gonna say WordPress Topics and click add to menu. Now it’ll add it and I can take these other things and drop them underneath here which are, as you can tell, categories inside of my blog. And this just becomes kind of a placeholder sitting up there. So I can click Save Menu. Go back to the front of my website so I can see this easily and clearly. WordPress topics. Now, this is not clickable. If it is clickable, it just kind of resets the page and then WordPress Hacks takes me into my individual categories. Pretty cool, huh?
Once you actually get here, you could if you wanted to remove that hashtag completely. And then it’s in no way shape or form clickable. It just becomes that placeholder living up there. So, I’ll refresh so you can see it again. See how my cursor turned to that I? It’s not clickable at all. Kind of cool, huh?
Tip Four – Instant Images Plugin in WordPress
Tip number four. So this one is all about images because there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to build out a website but you have to go search for hours to find available free to use stock imagery. So frustrating. Did you know there’s a plugin that can remedy that for you with just a couple clicks?
You can embed, install, and activate this plugin called Instant Images that references images from Unsplash.com if you guys are familiar with that really great resource. Those are free stock images for you to use but this actually embeds them into your media library. Check this out.
When you go onto your plugins, you can go-click Add New you’re gonna go do a search for instant images. Once you’ve done that, install it now, and then activate it. Then, inside of your media area over here lives instant images. You can come in here and it’s basically sourcing all those images into your dashboard. You can come here and do a search, let’s see, for coffee. Just to get a really cool coffee cup and you see all these different ideas. And this, of course, is also available whenever you’re inside of a page.
So you can go in and embed any of these images inside of a page, inside a post. For your featured image, even. It’s just gonna be something that saves you a little bit of extra time, extra steps. And makes the user experience really great. Especially if you’re handing this off to one of your clients, right? You want them to be able to use images that are safe for them to use.
So now you got this Instant Images up here. I can click on that. Come over here again. Do our same search for coffee. Enter. Find the one you wanna use and embed it right away. It’s gonna go ahead and do everything it needs to do to resize the image, allow it to be used, and a safe mode inside your website. And then all you do is click insert into post. Kinda nice, huh? Slick, sleek, easy to use and you know for a fact that you’re not gonna get in trouble for infringement on an image that isn’t available to be used legally.
Tip Five – Free Resources on Themeforest.net
Alright final tip of the day, number five. If you have ever done nay searching whatsoever for WordPress Themes, you have probably found yourself over here at themeforest.net. But did you know they have as of today at least, they have had this for considerable years, I believe.
As of today they still allow free stuff. Every week, every month, they’re giving away free stuff. You can come over here and grab themes, templates, audio files, all of these things that are normally products that they sell. They’re giving you totally for free whenever you sign up which is a free account and be a part of the community. So get over here, be sure to check out this website every single month and pick up some of these really cool images. Video pieces that they’re letting you use. Especially if you’re trying to figure out how to use a specific software. You can come over here and grab some of these templates and play around with ’em. This specific one is an After Effects template, super cool, all for free and free is always in the budget.
Alright, you guys, I hope this helps you today I hope you’re having a great week. Be safe tonight, if you’re going out trick-or-treating, alright way to go I just dated this whole video but that’s okay. And I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, everybody.
