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At Digital Culture NYC, we love WordPress. That much is obvious in everything we do. But one of our favorite things to do for clients is helping them find applications of WordPress they may not know about. Things that make their day at work a little more pleasant. Things that make the site easier to faster, more secure and/or easier to use. So today, here’s a rundown of all of the items we’d want you to know about.
You can break these down into things that make your website perform better, things that make it easier to publish
Accessibility
Make sure you site is up to speed, accessibility-wise. How to get started? First, peruse Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
An easy way to make your site more accessible is to ensure that all images have alt text, which is the descriptive text that help screen readers “see” what’s in the picture. As a bonus, alt text will also help you with SEO.
Speed
Check your website’s speed by going here. You’ll get a set of recommendations for optimizing your site’s speed. A common culprit is image size…
Image Optimization
If you use a lot of images, consider optimizing your images (a fancy way of saying make the file size smaller). WP Smush is an easy to implement plugin that will reduce image size and should ultimately help your site to load faster.
SEO Plugins
SEO is a large and complicated topic, but adding an SEO plugin to your site can be a simple way to do a better job of registering with users in search. Yoast SEO is a good plugin to get started with.
SSL Cert
Does your site have an SSL certificate? If not, run, don’t walk to your host to set up a free one. It’s an important security measure, and it will help your performance in search.
WordPress Multisite
Many of the companies we work with run more than one company or division through a multitude of different websites. WordPress multisite is a terrific solution for if you want to be able to run all of those sites from one dashboard, with one login. While the sites can look completely different, they will all share the same plugins.
Gutenberg and Blocks
This past year, WordPress rolled out a radical rethinking of its editing interface, called Gutenberg. Because we’ve been using WordPress for a decade, the switch to a new style was not exactly welcome. But the great thing about the new editor is that it looks at content as blocks, and it comes with a whole range of block styles built in. So if you are new to Gutenberg, take a little time to explore what you can do with blocks, from buttons to styling.
How We Can Help
If you’re interested in making the switch to WordPress (or making your WordPress site work even better), let’s talk.
