WordPress is a major player in the blog and website development software choices for personal and professional use. An estimated third of all websites on the Internet has been built using WordPress, thanks to its user-friendly design and accessibility by the public. The need to have a background in coding is a thing of the past because the platform’s easy-to-use features make it a breeze for anyone to set up a website, although design and development are still better left to the professionals when it comes to creating websites for businesses.
Whether you’re interested in WordPress web design as a hobby or you work on the platform professionally, here a few quick tips to help boost traffic to your WordPress site. STATIC PERMALINK STRUCTURE
- When considering WordPress web design, one of the first things visitors will see when they search for your site is the URL, also known as a permalink. Often long and nonsensical, the permalinks generated by WordPress can be clunky and off-putting to look at, which has the potential to deter visitors from clicking on your page. However, the platform makes it easy to change the appearance of these permalinks from a jumbled mess of letters and words to a neat, descriptive like http://sample.com/title-of-post.
- OPTIMISE FOR SPEED
It’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if your images are causing your website to load slowly, visitors will back click before they ever get a glimpse of the picture. Speed is one of the factors that can help or hinder your website’s ranking. Google penalizes slower-loading pages and pushes them to the back of search results.
You can optimise your images for the web by compressing them with plugins like WP Smush or by installing a lazy loader, which produces a low-quality, fuzzy version of the picture to keep visitors around while it loads, instead of looking at a blank section of the screen.
- USE KEYWORDS STRATEGICALLY
Search engines work by crawling the web, searching for content that is relevant to the question you have typed in the search bar. Search engine optimised (SEO) content is created by people who understand the way browsers function and present their content in a way that is easy for bots to quickly recognize and collect. An easy way to make sure these crawlers see your page is to use keywords strategically in prominent places such as the title of your page and the header.
Posts should be broken up into distinct sections to make it easier for visitors to find the exact piece of information they’re looking for as well as to improve readability for search engines. Another great WordPress SEO tip is to make sure you only have one title (H1) per post, and any other sections use header tags (H2, H3, etc.) to ensure that you are not competing with your own website for keyword ranking.
- USE MOBILE-FRIENDLY THEMES
One of the features that make WordPress such a popular platform is the fact that it generates updates based on shifts in web design technology automatically so you don’t have to worry about it. Almost half of the world’s web searching is conducting on mobile devices, and Google shows preferential treatment to websites that are mobile-friendly so you need to be sure that your page will load and format itself to fit the parameters of different screens. Luckily, WordPress makes this easy by highlighting website themes that are already optimised for mobile devices. - MAKE YOUR POSTS SHAREABLE
Social media is one of the fastest ways to display your brand to an audience and gain the attention of followers, but if your website is not optimised for shareability, your traffic and overall visibility will be low.
There are plenty of plugins and design features on WordPress that makes it easy to add social media buttons for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and any other platform connected to your company. You can also streamline the social media posting process by scheduling posts in advance. With post scheduling technology, you never have to worry about inconsistent interaction or missing the opportunity to share an important update.
Take advantage of all the wonderful, convenient features WordPress offers to help market your website effectively. Create a beautiful, professionally designed website that will have visitors flocking to your page with the help of our highly skilled team at Digital Innovations.
