Have no fear, the nine best WordPress hacks are here to help you achieve maximum site operating levels.
Guess what? You’re probably spending way too much time on your website.
Make life easier and use WordPress hacks to streamline SEO strategy, mobile optimization, and even your website design theme.
What are WordPress hacks? These are tricks and tips (and sometimes programs!) that allow you to spend less time on development and maintenance.
Some of our favorite programs help with overall ease of development, optimizing images, backups, and SEO strategy and keyword research.
However, it is important to first address what kind of WordPress hacks you will need to be familiar with to successfully run the ultimate website. A website that isn’t mobile-friendly or takes too long to load won’t stand a chance on the world wide web.
SEO Strategy
We can’t stress enough how important having a strong SEO strategy is. Consider this your #1 WordPress hack.
What is the ultimate goal here? To get people who are interested in your brand to your website and potentially gain new customers.
New to SEO? Check out this SEO Beginner’s Guide for tips on how to get started.
Optimization
If you are running a website that is delivering new content with rich images, you will eventually need to optimize your website.
According to Google’s research, 53% of consumers will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. The industry average is roughly 7-10 seconds for complete load time.
Don’t forget mobile optimization! Did you know that Google is now judging all search engine ranking by how well it is optimized for mobile?
Protection
Protect your website from hackers by keeping your information encrypted. There are several WordPress plugins and code editors that can help keep your site protected. Wordfence security is a great plugin for monitoring your website for attacks daily.
Without further ado, here are the six WordPress hacks that have gotten us out of a pinch.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Seriously, we love this plugin.
Yoast SEO will analyze your blog posts according to your specified keyword and give you suggestions on how to improve optimization. It also analyzes your Readability score which is a huge factor in getting ranked for Google.
When you’ve satisfied the SEO requirements, both Keyword and Readability scores will turn green.
Pro Tip: Find out which keywords you’re ranking for and how to optimize your keyword strategy with these SEO research tools.
WP Smush
WP Smush is a great tool for optimizing images. Install and activate your WordPress browser and let WP Smush do the rest! It will take all images uploaded onto your website and compress them into a manageable size.
WPSmush also allows you to customize your sizes for each photo type, so your thumbnails can have different restrictions that your featured images.
This will do wonders for your storage capacity and will help keep your site running as quickly as possible. Optimizing images can save more than 1GB of space on your website’s hard drive.
Backup Buddy
Backup Buddy is one of the simplest tools to use for protecting your precious cargo (aka your website). Download the plugin, create a backup, and Backup Buddy will save and restore any time you need it.
Dealing with a backup disaster? This company can help you recover lost files and manage your file storage so it never happens again.
These next WordPress hacks are completed without having to download anything! Most of them are program usage hacks, but there are few that require editing a bit of code in your .php files.
Warning: Editing your website code can result in dangerous consequences if entered incorrectly! Pro tip: Save your original code into a text editor before beginning to modify any code.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts is one of the simplest WordPress hacks on this list, but perhaps the most effective. WordPress has tons of keyboard shortcuts will save you from having to stop typing to find the correct button.
When you get the hang of using the “hotkeys”, you’ll be able to fly through your writing process.
Just hit CTRL + letter on Windows or COMMAND + letter on Mac to use the following hacks
C = copy
V = paste
X = cut
Y = redo
Z = undo
A = select all
B = bold
U = underline
K = Insert/Edit Link
1 – 6 = Heading Style
Use Auto Embeds
Don’t want to mess with all that embed code?
WordPress has teamed up with 28 streaming programs such as Youtube or SoundCloud for auto embedding into your post.
That’s right, drop a link and you are all set! For those of you that have had to troubleshoot embed codes over and over, this is a welcome change!
Here’s the full list of programs that offer auto-embed for WordPress:
Animoto – video
Blip – video
CollegeHumor – video
DailyMotion – video
EmbedArticles – various
Flickr – images
FunnyOrDie.com – video
Hulu – video
Imgur – images
Instagram – images
iShare – articles
ISSUU – documents
Meetup.com – various
Mixcloud – music
Photobucket – images
PollDaddy – polls/surveys
Rdio – music
Revision3 – TV
Scribd – documents
SlideShare – presentations
SmugMug – images
Soundcloud – music
Spotify – music
TED – video
Twitter – social media
Vimeo – video
WordPress.tv – video
YouTube – video
Quick Edit
The Quick Edit function for editing bulk posts on your website will help keep your site running smoothly. With Quick Edit you can highlight multiple articles and change categories, authors, add tags, and change status from draft to published.
Quick Edit also allows you to add comments, mark posts as sticky, and change publish dates.
This allows you to keep your articles organized and properly categorized and tagged for SEO.
Need More WordPress Hacks?
WordPress is the ultimate tool for guiding beginners and customizing your website to function for you. There are many resources for learning more about how to streamline your process and make your website run faster, smoother, and be more user-friendly.
Don’t know where to begin? Check out these steps for designing a WordPress website with no experience.
Search through our variety of themes and start building a custom website today.