WordPress’ popularity is reaching new heights, as it powers around 22.3% of the top-notch websites. WordPress is today touted to be the best CMS, but you can’t ignore the fact that it was designed initially as a blogging platform. And even today, WordPress is favored by bloggers around the world, owing to the remarkable blogging capabilities it offers. If you’re a neophyte and wish to create your own WordPress blog, I’ve come up with 4 handy tips that will help you create a successful blog.
1. Pick the Right Hosting Plan
The first and foremost step that helps optimize your WP blog requires selecting a suitable hosting plan. If your blog takes time to load, visitors won’t take much time to abandon your blog page, and without further ado, click on the back button. So, it becomes necessary that your blog page must load faster. Many blog owners have the wrong perception in mind that the hosting company is responsible for such a problem. But that’s not the case! Hosting companies can’t be blamed for slow response times. You may have partnered with a good hosting company, but choosing the wrong hosting plan is the root cause that resorts to slow loading times.
Keep in mind that a hosting plan can succumb to issues such as insufficient RAM and CPU throttling. Hence, it becomes needful for you to pay heed to which hosting plan can help make your blogging site run smoothly.
2. Choose a Plugin that Allows Users to Submit Posts
Allowing your website users to submit their posts helps keep your blog active. In addition, you’ll get unique content from people spread around the world, which will help make your blogs more versatile. Almost every person glued to the web world knows about the thousands of powerful plugins WordPress provides to users as freebies. You can even install a WP plugin in your WordPress blog page that allows users to submit their posts. Here I’m going to talk about the User Submitted Posts (USP) plugin.
USP is an easy-to-use and intuitive plugin that lets your site’s visitors submit text as well as images via a form. The best aspect about the plugin is that even non-logged-in visitors can submit their posts. As soon as the visitors click on the submit option, the material enters your post queue in the form of a Pending post. You can either publish the post, edit or delete it.
3. Monitor Who’s Visiting Your Blog
Monitoring who is visiting your blog helps you plan your content and marketing strategy accordingly. In your WP blog, you can analyze traffic with the help of a plugin installation. For doing so, you’ll need to install a plugin from the “Add New [Plugin]” option given in your WordPress Dashboard’s sidebar. For instance, you can add WordPress.com Stats, Google Analytics, and a few other plugins that best fit your needs.
4. Opt for Dynamic Sidebars
Every visitor possesses different habits, but one thing that is common among all is that they tend to overlook sidebars, as all of them appear to be the same. Below are a few other reasons why visitors often miss out on the content posted on the sidebar:
• The content is not changed frequently.
• The same content is posted throughout the blog.
• The tagline seems too boring and much more.
However, adding relevant posts to the sidebar and updating them on a regular basis is a surefire way to make it a bit more noticeable. Fortunately, WordPress helps improve the sidebar’s functional ability in the following ways:
1. It makes use of PHP include and conditional tags in order to embed an item.
2. With WordPress, you can create separate sidebars for your single posts.
3. It also helps tweak the sidebar style by switching the stylesheet.
In Conclusion
I hope you’ll find this post useful to understand some basic tips for writing WordPress blogs. But there are a lot of other blogging tips and tricks available on the web that you can consider while creating a WordPress blog page or site.
Author Bio – Sarah Parker is a blogger cum WordPress developer at Designs2HTML Ltd, a leading markup conversion services company that has delivered top-grade markup conversion services since 5 years. She loves writing information-rich blogs on PSD to WordPress conversion services.
WordPress Development | WordPress Theme Development | PSD To WordPress
