With more than 4 millions installations, WordPress contribute around 30% of the website online. Today, from small personal blogs to big business websites, WordPress is present everywhere. It is the first choice of every developer for building a blog.
But, do you know? By default, WordPress is not a well Optimized blog. The default installation will not help you to rank your site on the search engine. It needs to be optimized further.
Optimize Your WordPress Blog
After installing the WordPress blog, you need to make lots of changes in it. These changes are required to make your blog well optimized for the various search engine. Below, we have shared the list of changes you need to make for optimizing your WordPress blog.
Change Permalink
The default Permalink structure of WordPress is not optimized properly. It will look something like this ( http://example.com/?p=XX). This type of permalink structure is not good for your blog. In this case, your post will be represented by a number instead of text. Hence, the search engine will find difficulty in reading and understanding the URL and its content.
Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you should change your permalink structure after installing the WordPress blog. You can easily change the structure from your WordPress dashboard. Just select the ‘Permalinks‘ option under the Setting, from the left navigational menu.
Improve Loading Speed
Loading Speed is one of the key factors for starting a successful blog. In WordPress, by default, many options are enabled. You can change these option to further optimize the loading speed of your blog. Below, we have shared the top 5 ways to improve the loading speed of your WordPress blog.
- Disable and Delete unwanted plugins installed on your WordPress blog.
- Disable WordPress Emotions.
- Add your blog to Cloudflare
- Install any Cache Plugin on your blog.
- Optimize Images uploaded on your blog.
Above all are the few ways to achieve 90% score on loading speed of your WordPress blog.
Cloudflare Apps
Do you know? In Cloudflare, there are many apps available at free of cost. We strongly recommend using these apps instead of installing additional plugins on your blog. This will reduce the number of plugins and thereby optimize the loading speed of your blog.
For Example, In WordPress, you will need to install a separate plugin for GDPR compliance- Cookies Notification. But if you are using Cloudflare then you can enable this option without installing any plugin on your blog.
We strongly suggest having a look over these free applications. It will remove few plugins from your bucket list.
WordPress Tags
In WordPress, by default, there is an option to add tags to your post. These tags are the pre-defined taxonomy in your WordPress blog. These Tags are used to focus your post on specific topics. For Example, In case of Book Review, you can use the tags like Fiction, Mystery etc.
We know this is known fact to every blogger. But, do you know, there is a hidden trick in it. To optimize your WordPress blog, we strongly suggest using one standard tag in your post. For example, Whenever, we write a post on WordPress, we make sure that ‘WordPress’ is used as one of the tags in the post.
This is because, if in future, we want to create a separate category for WordPress posts then we can use this particular tag as a category. We will click on this tag and it will take us to the archive page where all the posts with that tag are listed. Next, we will add that archive page to the navigation menu and it will create a separate category for my blog.
This trick will only work if there is one particular tag in your all posts.
We know in WordPress there is an option to convert tags into a category, but this option will not work if you want to convert any particular tag only.
Organize Media Uploads
In WordPress, there are two options to organize the uploaded media. First, you can upload it to one place and Second, you can organize it month and year based folders.
In the first options, all the uploaded media will be available in one folder whereas, in the second option, you will find the month and year wise folder for your uploaded media. It is very important that you take this decision, initially before starting the blog. Your decision will impact two things as listed below.
- Your decision will decide the permalink structure of your uploaded media.
- If you decide to organize your uploaded media, month and year wise then you may find difficulty in finding the media when required.
Hence, it is very important to select the best option before starting a blog on WordPress.
Install Security Plugin
Last but the most important changes to your blog. WordPress, by default, is not secure. In fact, with more than 4 millions installation, it is the best open source platform for hackers.
According to one study, around 74% of the most popular WordPress installations are vulnerable to security vulnerabilities. Further, WordPress gets 132 million spam messages every month.
Hence, it is very important to install a good security plugin on your WordPress blog. This security plugin will secure your blog from various vulnerabilities like brute force attack, malware injections, spam comment etc.
Here, we strongly suggest to change the login URL of your WordPress blog and enabled re-captcha on your blog to security reasons.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms. But, if you want to build a successful and highly secured blog then we strongly suggest implementing the above tips immediately. Never use the default setting on your WordPress blog. It is highly vulenrable.
At last, if you think we have missed out an important point then feel free to contact us or share your message in below comment box. We will be happy to listen to you. You can also contact us if you face any problem in optimizing your WordPress blog.