I am quickly becoming known as WordPress Evangelists because I am VERY passionate about not only using WordPress but also helping its users gain a better WordPress Experience. That’s pretty much why I started this blog. It’s all about helping our local San Antonio WordPress community grow as well as providing resources around the world via our YouTube channel and these blogs.
Below you’ll find 7 quick tips on bettering your WordPress Experience. If you have any tips to add – be sure to include them in the comments below.
1. Keeping two browser windows open when you’re working
A lot of times when you’re working on your WordPress website it’s easy to get turned around and accidentally close a window you’re editing. The first thing we’ll cover in this video offers a quick tip to help you be a little more organized.
2. Clean up the WordPress Dashboard
When you log into your WordPress dashboard do you like seeing all of that clutter? The ads / news and distractions of others? Check out this quick tip that will permanently clean up the WordPress dashboard.
3. Clean up the page or post page
Another annoying area that can cause distraction and frustration is inside the admin area of your posts or pages. We will use the same methods as above to clean up the clutter on these pages.
4. Open a link in a new window
Are you struggling to figure out how to make a link open in a new browser window in your WordPress website? Inside this video watch the step-by-step instruction on how to make this happen.
5. Adding options to your pages’ or posts’ editing toolbar
Have you ever wondered how to set your H1’s or maybe change the font color of your text easily in your page or post? This tip will show you the once icon that’s hidden in the open!
6. Editing Posts / Pages in Bulk
At times there could be a need to make changes to your Posts or Pages. Perhaps you needed to remove the comments options or change the author of several posts / pages. Here’s a wonderful shortcut that can save you lots of time! Bulk editing your posts or pages in WordPress. This is one of those AMAZING tips on bettering your WordPress experience!
7. Use Permalinks
Permalinks are key to good UX practices as well as good SEO practices. The function allows you to overwrite the way WordPress presents your pages’ URL. You don’t want a URL that reads something like www.wpwed.com/ksjla_1822=?ee21 You need to make those links read with actual words – and preferably words that will help with your search engine optimization. Edit your permalinks in Dashboard >> Settings >> Permalinks and get all sorts of permalink options here.
Video Transcript
Hello, Everyone. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. Stay tuned because I’ve got 7 tips that are amazing that will hopefully revolutionize the way you see your WordPress website or blog.
Hi, Everyone. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. I am so excited to show y’all the brand new setup that we’ve got. We are so thankful to Rusty, who is actually my dad and one of the founders of WebTegrity. He spent the last two days creating this set behind me, and we absolutely love it. We want to say thank you, and thanks to you guys. Because really, if we hadn’t been getting all the e-mails we’ve been getting, if we hadn’t been getting all the great response that we got to our very first WordPress Meetup Wednesday that we did this past month in June, we wouldn’t be doing this. We wouldn’t be going to this much trouble, but, oh my goodness, it is totally worth it. So, thank you so much and keep those comments coming in.
Just as important as it is to have amazing, inspiring, beautiful things all around you as you’re working, it is just as important to have amazing things and an amazing environment around you when you are working in your WordPress blog or website. So, I want to pass along to you 7 amazing tips that I basically use every single time we develop a website. These 7 tips hopefully—if you use every one of them—will radically change the way you see WordPress.
So, the very first tip I want to show you is how to be a little bit more organized whenever you’re going back and forth between the dashboard area or your edit mode that looks like this and the front side of your website looking at what everybody else sees or how everybody else sees your website. So, the very first tip is, we actually keep two browser windows open whenever we’re working so that we can very easily and quickly go over here to the front side and take a look at the website. Try to make that the best practice as whenever you’re editing your website. You’ll have two tabs open and you’ll be able to come here to the front side to see what is going on. Soon as you need to make and edit, instead of clicking on that top edit option, you would just come here to this other “tab” and make your changes here and click “publish” or “update,” and of course, that change would be made visible here once you click “refresh.” So, that is definitely a very quick tip that will hopefully you not get so disoriented whenever you are doing your edits.
The second thing I want to share with you is also a way that you can clean up the WordPress dashboard. It is very frustrating to log into your dashboard and see things like this. Let’s see—so, you’ve got “Welcome to WordPress,” all this customized stuff, you’ve got the “WordPress News” and all their blog options, all these activities, and spam comments that you don’t want anyway, forms, and “At a Glance.” You get to see this. So, how can we possibly—and you might have other stuff on there actually—but how can we possibly trim this down a little bit?
Up in the right-hand corner, you’ve got screen options. If we open up that little drawer, we can actually unclick the things that we do not want to be here anymore. So, I typically streamline my dashboard down to just the absolute necessity, which is “At a Glance.” I am going to click on it and drag it over here. Also, I have a forms plugin and I like to see quickly how many times my form has been filled out or how many times, you know, somebody has viewed it. So, I get to do that here. Now, every single time I log into my dashboard, it is going to be nice and clean like this with no more clutter. How great is that!
There is also a way you can clean up your pages and posts. If you go into one of them and your scroll down and you begin to see all this extra stuff that is just not needed—maybe revisions and custom fields, discussions, slug, and author—all of this stuff is kind of unnecessary—so, one thing you can do is come up here to this screen options drawer and go ahead and uncheck some of the options you think you just don’t need to see all the time. It doesn’t erase them. It just, in a sense, kind of hides them. So, you can always get it back if need be. You can always come back in and just open up that drawer again, and replace what you need. But, this way your page and posts are clean. Of course, this also only applies per user. So, you can customize this just for you and the way you like to see your pages and your posts.
Some people struggle to find out how to make a link open in a new browser window. So, there is this little trick; I want to show you how to do it. If you wanted to come in here and, let’s say, you wanted to link this spot right here over to “His Bio” page. What we would do is click on the little link, and this little box right here that says “Open link in a new window or tab”—that’s what you check. After you drop in that link—let’s see, there’s our link—drop that in. Now you see that it is blue. So, that’s linked. If we go behind the scenes, we are going to see that it actually dropped in a little bit of code here. This is our full link. This little bit of code says “target=”_blank.” That means to open up in a blank window or open up in another window. So, that is the little trick on how to make that happen.
Have you ever found yourself looking at your admin screen here where you are making editing changes and you want to be able to maybe take this name and turn it red or purple, for that matter? To make it a different color—and there are just not the right options up here? I want you to notice this very last icon sitting here in your toolbar area. It says “toolbar toggle.” If you click on that and open it up, you are going to see all these extra fun options. Here’s your text color right here. It opens up and you can set to whatever text color you might desire. It also gives you the opportunity to change certain items to an H1 tag. So, if you wanted something to be a header title sitting here on the page, you can easily grab that, highlight it, do a drop-down option here, and set it to header 1. That will make that text nice and big. There are all sorts of cool options here. As you scroll over, it will tell you exactly what each option allows you to do. This is a super, super helpful resource. So, if that little thing (if you are running an older version of WordPress), it’s going to actually hover over and say “show or hide the kitchen sink.” That is kind of a little bit of a WordPress trivia there for you.
If you have a blog inside your WordPress website, you know the frustration it can be to edit multiple, multiple articles at one time. So, this little tip was something I learned the hard way; but I love it, and I want to pass it along to you. Let’s say you wanted to, on your WordPress blog, come into all your posts, you are going to check on this top box up here that then lights up all these on one page. It is just going to be the first 20. If you have more than 20 items, there is going to be pagination over here on the right side. Unfortunately it only affects 20 items at a time, but that is still a lot faster than 1 at a time. You can come up here to “bulk actions.” You can click on “edit” and then click “apply.” What that is going to allow you to do very quickly and easily go through here and make adjustments in a bulk-type manner. So, in other words, if I wanted to disallow comments on all of my articles, I could do that by clicking “update” and immediately it would go through all of these 20 on this page and take off all the capability or disallow the capability of commenting. If I wanted to assign them maybe to a different author, I could again check that box, click edit, apply, and I could choose whatever author I wanted. If I had multiple authors, I could choose that and assign these certain articles all to one particular author. So, it’s very quickly and easily making these things accessible to you.
You can check here, check different categories, add tags if you wanted to, make them sticky, pings, to allow or disallow all these different options very quickly and easily right here in one screen. Super handy, and you can use this method over on your pages as well. It functions the exact same way. Just check the box, click edit, apply, and it will allow you to make adjustments here. You can change your page templates, again comments if you have that enabled inside of your theme, and all sorts of changes here. If there is maybe one page that you’ve selected that you didn’t want to be a part of, you can just click on that “x,” and it will remove it quickly from this list.
The last really quick tip that I want to share with you is all about permalinks, which if you are not overly familiar with WordPress and if you are a total beginner, this might be a little bit intimidating, but let me walk you through it because it is super, super important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Out of the box and by default, WordPress actually makes your URL’s or the links to your pages look something like this. They have your root domain name, right? Then they have a forward slash and then they put something a little funky behind it here that really makes zero sense not only to the end-user but also to search engines. It does not help you in any way, shape, or form. Thankfully they have a solution and that is called “permalinks.” Alright, so what we do is go into the dashboard area. We are going to scroll down to “settings” and then go into “permalinks” right here. Clicking on that takes you into all sorts of options here. See, this is the default. See how weird it looks? That’s just funky! You could have all sorts of things. If you are doing a blog and you really want to organize things by date and name, you could do that here. These are just some of the default options that they have.
I typically do a custom structure that includes my category and then my post name, but you can do all sorts of different things. I would suggest you only setting this at the very, very beginning, though, when starting your website. If you do this retrospectively, you can certain mess up and have a lot of broken links on your website. So, you want to do this out of the gate. When you first start to build your website, you want to come in here and set this to a custom structure. Inside this blog article, I do have the link right here that you can go to see all the different options for using permalinks and what the different types are that you can set behind that path.
I hope those 7 tips are really going to help you completely revolutionize the way you are using your WordPress website of blog. If you have maybe a tip or a suggestion that you would like to add to this list, please take a moment and put it down in the comment box for everybody else to see. I know they are going to appreciate it. I do, absolutely! Or, maybe there is a topic that you would like to hear us answer on WordPress Wednesdays. Please take a moment to go over to AskKori.com (I will list the link right here for you) and comment for us there. Or, ask a question. We have got a little link up at the top where you can ask a question for us. We would love to answer your questions here on WordPress Wednesday.
Be sure to check out our local WordPress Meetup group. Ours in San Antonio meets almost weekly. We would love to see you at one of those. Have a great day, Y’all! Bye, bye.
