WordPress Tips For Advanced Bloggers

In the beginning, blogging may seem like a breeze. You have an idea, you write a few hundred words about it, maybe you find a picture from the web to go along with it.. and “ping,” you’re off and running.

But you may eventually discover that the most professional-looking blogs, the ones that get the most traffic, as well as most corporate blogging entities, are working with designs and variables that you don’t seem to have access to in the WordPress environment.. at least, not right away. That’s because most of the options are going to be from under-the-hood adjustments that you will eventually make.

And that means learning HTML, CSS, and scripting modifications, as well as grasping how to really squeeze all the search engine optimization strategies into your posts and framework. Once you get to that “advanced” stage, you’ll really join the pros of blogging.

Get the Creation Out of the Way First

But a few other things have to be addressed first. If you don’t have your space up and created for your operation yet, start by learning how to create a blog, typically via your web hosting service and a few quick WordPress installation links.

This will be the easiest part. You hit some buttons, tell the installation program what directory you want the files to be in, provide a few basic pieces of information (such as the name of the site and basic admin info), and suddenly you have a page that people can look at and enjoy in all its glory.

Scan the Premium Plugins

At this point, you’ll probably spend some time using the free WordPress plugins that are available. Especially if you’re not familiar with such elements as shortcodes or custom classes, the plug-and-play, out-of-the-box extensions are going to be your go-tos.

But once you start to feel the limitations of the freebies, start checking out premium plugins. These are the ones that will require you to buy a license.

Maybe only $50 or $100 later, however, suddenly you’ll have all sorts of additional, expanded capacity and options in terms of audio, video, fonts, responsive articles, and ad boxes. And at the higher price points, all of the extra plugins will be incredibly customizable.

But you do have to dig into the documentation in order to learn them. Plan on spending some serious time with the more advanced ones, but you’ll be amazed by the end results.

Make a Child Theme as Soon as Possible

In the more advanced stages of your blogging enterprise, you’ll likely want to make customizations to your WordPress theme itself. Though one may tinker with the official, hardwired code, it’s not recommended.

The solution is to make a WordPress child theme. This is essentially a set of rules that override the CSS and javascript settings that lodge inside the main theme files: You can play with them without having to worry about corrupting your initial files.

Learn to Inspect Pages

If you’re using Chrome as a browser, an amazing tool that you should learn to use is the “inspect” option. With a single right click, you’ll have access to all the code on any web page.

The first time you do this, your eyes are going to cross and it will look like alien gibberish. But with some studiousness and Google searching to guide you, many of the features of potential blogging websites will open to you.

Do Your SEO Simultaneously with Content Generation

A final tip for advance bloggers is: always keep up with SEO details as you do your initial content generation (that is, article writing). It’s much more difficult to go back later and fix titles, snippets, and excerpts, as well as override settings for either text or images, so you’d be smart to have your SEO plugins remind you of this textual value while you’re going through the process the first time.