Guide to WordPress
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free open source software that functions as a content management system. WordPress allows you to design, create and maintain a website or blog. From simple websites to the most complex ones.
With wordpress you can create all kinds of websites. Personal and professional websites, e-commerce, digital magazines, blogs, forums on any subject, digital platforms, etc.
WordPress is the simplest and most popular way to create a website or blog. Basically, it works as a content management system and makes it easy to manage all the important technical aspects of a website, without the need for programming knowledge.
WordPress has a system of plugins, which allow you to extend the capabilities and features of the system. In this way, a more versatile content manager is achieved.
As a result, we can incorporate more forms of interaction and content to enhance the user experience on a website or blog.
WordPress is also very useful if we have a website that is frequently updated. In addition, it allows us to keep these content entries in chronological order as we incorporate them into the website.
In this way, users who access the site can have the content organised and updated by date and keep abreast of new additions to the website.
Why use WordPress?
In 2020, more than 455 million websites will be built with WordPress, i.e. 35% of the current websites, and its market share is still growing.
The following are listed below Top 5 reasons why you should use wordpress if you are thinking of creating a website or a blog.
1. The most widely used platform for web development.
The advantages of using wordpress, and the fact that it is currently the most used platform; apart from the fact that the platform is free; is the guarantee offered by a platform backed by, the number of users, support, developers, tutorials, plugins, etc.
All these elements give this tool an infinite capacity to develop your web project according to your needs.
2. Simple to use
WordPress is easy to use softwareThe settings panel and tools are easy to use, even though it may seem cumbersome at first. Your settings and tools panel is intuitive and allows easy access to all the features necessary to have a good control of the platform.
Adding content, incorporating and editing new urls to our website, including and editing new blog entries or adding multimedia content and images is a very simple task in this tool, very similar to a simple video or text processor.
3. Customisability of any website
In WordPress we have two fundamental elements for the development of a website.
On the one hand, we have the THEMES; which are templates that allow us to establish an appearance or design for our website. There are platforms on the internet dedicated to the commercialisation of themes for websites or blogs.
Here you can get free wordpress themes or templates for your business.
There are also payment platforms where you can buy the look and feel you like according to your needs, sector of your website and desired structure. For example: www.themeforest.net
On the other hand, we also have the PLUGINS; that add functionalities to WordPress to add extras to our website and improve its features.
This improves and facilitates usability and user experience.
There are currently countless plugins for WordPress with which you can create forums, share content on social networks, insert photo galleries, create forms, create newsletters, improve the SEO positioning of your website, increase security for the host and the user or create an online shop.
It is advisable to make a moderate use of plugins, as they can generate speed problems in loading our website. Likewise, the functioning of our website may be affected by incompatibility problems between some plugins. Caution on this point.
4. Improve the organic positioning of your website (SEO)
WordPress is designed to improve the organic positioning of your website or blog on the internet and to index your content more quickly in search engines.
In addition, there are plugins that help you to improve your wordpress SEO and improve your web positioning.
Recommendations for improving SEO in WordPress
Install a WordPress SEO plugin
A WordPress SEO plugin will help you to optimise your content based on the keywords you want to position. The most recommended is Yoast SEOwhich is one of the most widely used in WordPress.
Yoast SEOprovides relevant information to optimise our content according to the keywords we want to rank for.
It also helps us to define, among other things, titles and meta descriptions of our pages and posts on our website or blog and even helps us to improve the readability of our texts.
Keyword analysis
The study of keywords is one of the key preliminary steps that we must take to define the content strategy of our website and will help us to attract the traffic we want and define the theme of our website.
There are free tools that can be used to analyse keywords. One of them is the Google Chrome extension called Keyword Surfer.
Configuring the interlinking structure of the website or interlinking in WordPress
In the section Settings and permanent links, we can define the structure of the internal links of the website, with the aim of making them more "friendly" to search engine crawling. The recommended structure is www.tudominio.com / page-name/title-of-post
These more intuitive and clearer structures improve the user's navigation of the website and help in the crawling of urls by Google.
SEO optimisation of images
The optimisation of images can have a direct impact on the loading speed of our website. A web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load significantly increases the bounce rate.
Consequently, it is highly recommended to optimise the size of the images, so that the loading speed is not affected. Likewise, we must add keywords in the names of the images to relate them to the content of the website.
Likewise, images must include ALT and Title tags, and must also include the keywords we want to rank for.
There are wordpress plugins that help to optimise the size of images, for example, Imagify Image Optimizer
Loading speed
We have already commented in the previous section that, as we have said, the loading speed plays a very important role in your position in Google's search results.
There are wordpress plugins that help to optimise the loading speed of your website. The best known are LiteSpeed Cache o W3 Total Cache.
There are also free Google tools that can be used to measure the loading speed of a website. This tool is called Google PageSpeed Insights. You can access it from HERE
Choose a theme for your website that is optimised for SEO
When selecting an appearance theme to incorporate into your website, we must ensure that it is optimal for SEO.
These SEO-optimised themes have been designed with SEO-friendly structures, optimised according to the criteria required by search engines and even optimised for mobile devices or mobile friendly.
This last section is very important nowadays where mobile devices are so relevant in relation to the internet and digital transformation.
5. Security
WordPress is a system under constant review to fix possible bugs and security flaws. In addition to the constant updates of the system, we can find many plugins that allow us to manage the security of our WordPress
We also recommend making backup copies of our wordpress quite frequently in order not to lose relevant information in case of a problem.
It is also advisable to seek the advice of web developers who can help us to improving the security of our website against possible external attacks.
Best plugins for WordPress
As we have already mentioned, one of the great benefits of wordpress when designing and creating a website or a blog is, on the one hand, how versatile and flexible it is and, on the other hand, the amount of options it offers thanks to the WordPress plugins available on the platform.
10 must-have plugins to create your website or blog
1. Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin
The aim of this plugin is to prevent spam from entering your website and avoid unwanted comments on your pages or blog posts. Plugin recommended for all developers of blog type content websites.
2. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is considered the best plugin to optimise our content in search engines and to help the web positioning. It is designed to help us optimise and improve the quantity and quality of content on our website.
It works through a traffic light system that gives us clear information on how our content is likely to perform in search engines. Red means that we should check our content and green means that everything is correct.
It also helps us to evaluate the readability of our texts and to build XML sitemaps in order to be able to index them correctly in Google Search Console.
3. Contact Form 7
Perfect WordPress tool to generate contact forms on your website to improve communication with your users, generate CTAs (call to action), request feedback, and link to email.
Contact Form 7 supports Ajax, Akismet and Captcha submissions.
4. Litespeed Cache
The best all-in-one plugin to improve the performance and loading speed of your website. Plugin with optimisable features and compatible with WooCommerce if you have a website dedicated to e-commerce and compatible with Yoast SEO.
Remember that compatibility between plugins is very important when designing our website and avoiding conflicts. It is interesting to install only those plugins that are necessary.
5. WooCommerce
The plugin par excellence if you are going to set up an e-commerce of any kind. This plugin is a guarantee of good performance and a solid foundation for creating an online shop on the internet. Easy to install and accepts different payment options.
6. Wordfence Security
One of the most popular security plugins in WordPress. It is used to protect your website from attacks and online threats that can access the content of the same and cause damage or introduce inappropriate content on your website or blog. Highly recommended.
Recognises and blocks online threats, informs you of any incidents via email, helps you block users who have already tried to access your site, block IPs, etc.
7. Imagify Image Optimizer
As we have already mentioned in previous sections, images are a very important section in the creation of websites or blogs. The optimisation of images in terms of their size and quality, are sections that have a significant influence on the loading speed of the website.
The Imagify Image Optimizer plugin is in charge of analysing and optimising the images in our wordpress media library in order to adapt their size and avoid high loading speeds.
8. Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress
Google offers great free analysis and measurement tools to monitor our website or blog. With this plugin we will be able to have a Google Analytics within our WordPressWe can track and analyse our traffic from the WordPress dashboard itself.
This plugin allows us to obtain user and traffic data on our website in real time. It also offers us access to specific reports on Google Analytics.
9. Really Simple SSL
It is curious to see that many websites still do not have the SSL security protocol plugin installed.
The SSL protocol is the technology applied to maintain security between users and the host of a web page, avoiding spam, access and modification of personal or non-transferable information, avoiding access to hackers and a long etcetera.
It allows a secure connection to be established between the user and the server of our website. Offering our users a secure browsing site is essential to generate credibility and confidence in our customers.
10. Adapt RGPD
This plugin is used to generate the legal pages of Privacy Policy, Cookies Policy and Legal Notice. With this simple plugin, we can configure all these pages on our website easily and quickly.
