Easy Tips for WordPress Beginners to Get Started in 2017

WordPress makes it possible for regular folks like you and me to set up and manage our own blogs and websites. We’re so excited when we see our own WordPress Dashboard for the first time. And we hurry to put out our first post to replace the standard Hello World first post from WordPress.

But wait, there are many built-in WordPress features that you should get familiar with. They can make your blogging life easy and delightful. Take time to browse through the many options in the menu on the left, the screen options at the top, the options within the Editor and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much you’ve overlooked. So let’s devote this post to discovering the many not-so-apparent options that we can begin to use in our daily WordPress lives.

Let’s get started,

Managing Posts Effortlessly on WordPress

The right corner of the Post Editor is a blessing for bloggers. It helps you manage your posts better in many ways,

• To schedule posts to appear on selected dates, explore the Publish option. This allows you to choose  the exact date and time for publishing your post.


• You can also mark the post for review by clicking Pending Review, particularly convenient for a multi author blog.

• The Visibility option controls the viewing of content by others. The default setting for this option is Public, which means the whole world can view the post.  But you can restrict viewing to a selected few by making it password protected or enabling the private option.


• By default, your latest posts appear on top of the page in WordPress. What if you want an evergreen post or one that’s targeted at first timers, to occupy that slot instead ? You can do so by resetting the options under Visibility. Enable the Sticky option for the post, and it will appear and remain on the top of your posts until you disable the sticky option.


• As a blogger you’ll know how many revisions a post goes through before it appears for public viewing. It may start as a small scrap or note, and grow over time into a full fledged article, running through many versions in between. If you want to access any of the versions, for whatever reason, just look under Revisions in the Post editor. If you cannot see it right away, enable the setting in Screen Options. By adding a small bit of code in the wp-config.php file (see further down), you can also limit the number of post revisions.

Crafting Content

Bloggers spend a fair amount of time in the Post Editor. And there are a number of options within the Editor that help to streamline your work. These handy options in the Visual Editor can make typing content easier,

• Distraction Free writing : See the fairly large “X” like button just below ‘Text’ in the image below ? Clicking on it causes the side panels and headers to disappear, leaving you a clutter free area to write on. When you click on it again, the original screen is restored.

• The Toolbar Toggle : Also called the Kitchen Sink, is the square button in the upper row of the Toolbar. On clicking, it opens up a second row of options below.


• Keyboard shortcuts : After opening the second row of options using the Toolbar Toggle look for the “?” symbol. Clicking on it will display a set of shortcuts built into the editor in a popup. For Example Alt+Shift+2 will give you
  Heading 2. But before you start using these shortcuts, you’ll need enable keyboard shortcuts in your user profile. The shortcuts are enabled on a per user basis.


• Read More : Another feature useful for creating posts is Read More. This creates a short excerpt which you can place opposite your post thumbnail in the blog main page. It garners more attention than a post title and looks stylish on social media. Look for the feature in the Post Editor, place your cursor at the place where you want the excerpt to end and then click on the icon.

Markdown syntax for faster formatting

To use HTML while writing posts, we have to switch to the Text Editor. However, we often prefer to work within the Visual Editor while creating posts. The Markdown syntax helps us to do some HTML formatting without moving out from the Visual Editor.

Markdown is simple markup language that converts plain text to HTML code. Special characters like asterix, underscores and dashes are used, and this is automatically converted into HTML. Earlier versions of WordPress allowed the option of enabling Markdown Syntax under Settings > Writing. But with WordPress 4.3, similar functions are included in the Visual Editor. The syntax functionality is limited in WordPress, and for full Markdown support you’ll need a plugin.

You can watch a demo on editor enhancements here.

Linking

The flow of writing is often disrupted when we have to pause and link some text. Earlier, we had to highlight the text to be linked, open a popup by clicking on the Link icon and paste the URL. The newer versions of WordPress support inline linking. After highlighting the text to be linked, click on the Link icon, and paste the URL in the small box that opens. The highlighted text is linked automatically, and you have to move out of Visual Editor only to copy the URL of the required link.



You can also directly paste URLs to embed videos and tweets without needing to copy embed codes. WordPress recognizes a number of websites from where content can be sourced.

Internal links encourage a visitor to stay longer on your site, and reduce bounce rate. Searching within your site for content is easier with the Edit Link button.

Quick Edits

To make quick edits to a draft, open the Quick Edit option that appears under each post in the All Posts page of your website. From here you can make changes to title, slug, category, author. You can also restrict viewing, password protect or make it sticky from here.



Close Comments – the flip side of being a popular blog is that your Comments section can get overburdened. If you want to close comments on a per post basis, you can do so under Quick Edit. Alternatively, you can close comments by going to Settings > Discussions.

Screen Options

On the top right of every screen on your WordPress website, you’ll see the Screen options button. This feature helps to customize the dashboard and every other screen to suit your own working style. It allows you to control what options and elements should appear on each screen.



If you like to dig into WordPress a little more, click on the Help button which appears at the top right corner on every screen. The dropdown menu that opens explains the chief aspects of each screen. Not only that, each dropdown menu item is linked to the official WordPress documentation.

Press This

Press This is a handy tool for writers. It lets you “grab bits of the web and create new posts with ease” while reading on the net. It’s essentially a browser extension that you need to install. And whenever you find something interesting, you can share it on your WordPress site.



Access this option under Tools > Available Tools. When you see something you like on the web, click on the Press This in your browser and paste it in the popup that opens. Edit it and save, or publish directly.

Create Media Playlists

Just as you would create a gallery using images in your media library, you can create audio / video playlists using media files available in your media library. These playlists can then be embedded in your posts.



First upload your media files Media > Upload New Media.  Then click Add Media  > Create Audio Playlist  and select the audio files from the Media Library and click Create New Playlist. This will allow you to edit the playlist settings to show artist name, images and to show the tracklist. Next, click on Insert Audio Playlist and you can see the audio playlist in your post.



Similarly, you can create a video playlist.

Logout Everywhere

Your WordPress site can be accessed from anywhere and from multiple devices. It may often happen that you forget to logout of your site after working on it. If you remember that when you’re away from your device, you can access your site from any other device and logout.



You can enable this security enhancing feature under Profile > Account Management > Sessions.

Permalinks

The default URLs in WordPress are unwieldy and not good for SEO too. Luckily, there’s an option to change the default URL at Settings > Permalinks.



You can choose from 4 standard options or use custom URLs. But you should know that using the post name in the URL may count for organic ranking.

Small Bits of Code that Add Features

Enjoy greater convenience by using small bits of code to add some minor features that can save you time.

Page Break – To break a long post into many pages, insert the following code in the Text Editor at the exact point that you want the page to break. You can repeat it as many times as you want to break it into multiple pages. (This can help you display more ads.)

<!--nextpage-->

Adjust Auto Save Interval – To avoid loss of your most recent work due to connectivity or any other reason, you may want to autosave more frequently. This code will help you adjust the frequency of your autosaves, just open up your wp-config.php file too add the following.

define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 240 );

Database Maintenance – While you have the wp-config.php file open, there are two minor functions to help optimize your database that can be implemented with small bits of code. One is to regularly empty out trash after a specified number of days (change the 30 to any interval, or enter false if you want to stop it completely).

define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 30 );

And another to limit the number of revisions to a post that can be saved, beyond which the earlier versions will be deleted.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 );

Other Features

• Media Editing – Adjust default media size, so images are automatically saved by WordPress in the size that you need. Settings > Media > Insert Media > Edit Image. Some basic image editing can happen inside the Image Editor – rotating, cropping, flipping, scaling.


• Replace the default ‘Uncategorized‘ that appears with all your posts. Go to Posts > Categories and pick a new default category.


• Favicon – For a user who opens multiple tabs on a single screen, a favicon will help identify the tabs and help to switch from one to another easily. It’s the small symbol found in the address bar by which you can identify a site. Appearance > Customizer > Site identity and pick an image from your media library to serve as a site icon or favicon.

And That’s It

That’s my list of options to make it immensely easy to work around inside WordPress.

Let’s not rush into loading our websites with plugins before we check out the in-built tools for the same functions. Adding more plugins can be a drag on speed and quite unnecessary when there is an option within your existing WordPress install. Just move about within your WordPress screen and explore all menu items and icons one at a time. You’ll probably find many more that I missed out. If you do stumble upon anything useful, do let us know in the comments below.