How to Create a WordPress Landing Page That Converts

I wan na make money off this. I wan na sell a digital ebook. How do I do that? Yeah? That’s! Actually what We’re going to cover today How to actually make Money with your website by creating a landing Page here on The Journey So right now all I have is a blog. I mean what else do I need Yeah so to really actually Convert those visitors into leads which then becomes customers.

You have to create a landing page. A landing page is a specific Webpage on your site catered to one specific purpose. Now, what I’ll see a lot? Of people do is like say, you’re starting to Advertise your book most people will just send People to their homepage, There is so much chaos. Going on a homepage, there’s no clear: Direction, they don’t know where to go So with your landing page. You have one clear focus on your website and that’s To check out your ebook So you’re, the real Expert at this I mean: can you just show me how it’s done Yeah, let’s go ahead and Take you and the audience through a quick demo, Alright, so now that we’re sat down I’ll, take you through some of the plugins that I use to really Build those landing pages and get set up for success.

I did that before hand. So We didn’t have to go through the whole installation process, But I’m going to be using Elementor essential add-ons for Elementor and Gravity Forms There, the ones that are just There cause I like them So once you have those You’re going to ahead and just add a new page Cause – you want this Landing page to just be that just a landing page, specific To what you’re trying to do So, you talked about how you’re wanting to create your own ebook right Right.

So what kind of recipes Are going to be in those ebooks? I was thinking like taco recipes start with that one: Okay, a little taco Tuesday night Love tacos, of course, [ Nealey ]. I got it so we’ll just name it Taco Tuesday recipes And then we’re just going to Go ahead and publish that really quick and then Jump into Elementor, So Elementor is a visual Page builder, that you can use to build almost any type of website, so drap and drop – it’s all visual.

So we have this here Now what I usually Recommend for landing pages is actually to get rid. Of the navigation title, Its distracting [ Alex ], Okay, [ Nealey ], The whole Point of the landing page is to have one singular focus like you want these people Visiting your website visiting your landing page To do one specific thing: [ Alex ] Right as simple as possible: [ Nealey, ] Yeah. So in Elementor the bottom left go ahead.

And just chose the little settings wheel and go page Layout Elementor canvas, and it’s literally just going to be that a blank canvas for you. To do whatever you want So you’ve also got me. Some cool taco images we’re going to use a lot of that in this in this page here. So the cool thing about Elementor, especially for someone who brand new to building websites, is it Gives you some templates to use you don’t have to figure Out how to design yourself [ Alex ] Love templates, Highly recommended You don’t wan na spend all day just trying to Figure out how to design it just basic plug and play.

I really like the block. Section it’s kinda like Legos in a way right: [ Alex ], Okay, [ Nealey ], So you have like You can pick different categories like a hero. Image or call-to-action different things like that, Basically build your landing page, So we’re going to go! Category just chose hero Hero is basically that first thing you see when you get to a website. It’s usually nice and big and out there There’s lots of different Things you can use Now it’s going to show you Content that is not relevant to tacos at all, And that’s fine.

You can change it with your own images. [ Alex ], Okay, [ Nealey ], So which one Would you like to use [ Alex ]? I like this realism, one [ Nealey ], The realism. One that one says pro got ta have the pro license: [ Alex ], Okay, never mind. ( laughter, ) [ Alex ]: Let’s go with the cheaper option: [ Nealey ]. Alright, how about this one [ Alex ], Perfect [, Nealey, ], Cool [, Alex ], Looks nice and free [, Nealey ], We’ll make it like that one It’ll be like we did.

( laughing ) [ Nealey ], Alright, so obviously we don’t want 17 travel inventions. We need right now we’re Going to change that in a sec but instead of a plant Let’s make it your tacos,’cause, that is the pride and joy here Wan na make it all about your tacos,’cause. I’ve had them And they are fantastic, Alright cool, so you can either click this little guy at the top or right click edit section go to style, and then you can chose your image here.

[ Alex ] We’ve got some Great images of these tacos and their recipes [ Nealey ] Yeah, so which One would you like to use [ Alex ], Let’s go with the One with the lime showing [ Nealey ]. Alright, I dig it. I dig it. Ah man, it looks so good [ Alex ]. I know I’m so hungry Neal, [, Nealey, ], So a cool effect. You can do in Elementor is just have that fixed I really like to use that, especially with hero images, so that stays still as the content loads.

I probably want this bottom-center. Ah, look at that: [ Alex ], Perfect [, Nealey ], I’m hungry, Alright, so the call-to-action this on the hero image has To be very, very specific, so that first little bit is Really what you’re going to get out of the landing page, So, let’s brainstorm some ideas. So with this you really want it to be. What is what is your Visitor, what is that person going to get out of your recipe book? So I mean taco recipes.

To make your Tuesday better, Okay, taco recipes to Make your Tuesday better! I like it. I don’t need this travel thing, so I’m just going to right. Click and delete there Now you can add a little Bit of a description here, if you want, I typically recommend it We’re going to leave the Description out of it for now we don’t want to get too much into this really just about you learning how to make your landing page, But this button right, Here this call-to-action is super important, Not enough websites.

Basically tell the visitor exactly what to do Like you literally want To like yell it at them, do this now [ Alex ] Right and make it very clear, [ Nealey ]! So with this It’d be like “, buy, now” or “ download the book” things like that Specific action to do Download the book. If I can type Now cool And you can modify the Button, however, you want by going to just right click, the button go to style, and then you Can mess with the colors? What’s your favorite color [ Alex ], Let’s go with green [, Nealey ] Green, all right! Green is the color of money.

I dig it All right and then you Can mess with the hover? Obviously we don’t want green on green. That doesn’t make sense. And then there’s all sorts of cool hover, animations Let’s do grow and rotate so it does this cool little effect. [ Alex ], Oh fancy, [ Nealey ], Just like that, And let’s move on All right. So I threw this Together, really quick off camera, just for the sake of time, We talked you through Some of the most important elements for your landing page.

We went through our hero image already having that basic description. Of what they’re going to get out of it? A quick call-to-action, But the next part that I like To include in landing pages is really relating to The person’s problem – So I put here, are You struggling to find the perfect taco recipe, [ Alex ], Of course, [ Nealey ]. These people Have scoured the internet trying to find that perfect taco recipe they haven’t, found it until now, [ Alex ].

I have the answer: [ Nealey ], Then after you really relate to that person’s struggle. Talk About what they’re going to get out of it like right? Like they’re, not just getting a book, they’re Getting 15 taco recipes they’re getting article tutorials they’re, getting a happier Tuesday You’re, also including Coupons for ingredients, look at you you’re, so nice [ Alex ]. I know I know You’re welcome guys [ Nealey ] And then with The landing page as well add some time of social proof.

These are reviews whether on websites or people. Looking at it, I’ve added some reviews. From myself, Morgan and Sam talking about the best Tacos we’ve ever had Morgan’s like I want More recipes like this Sam’s, like hands-down Super hot fire recipes [ Alex ] Straight from The source you guys [ Nealey ] Straight from The source and then last but not least, your Main call-to-action towards the bottom.

Now with you just getting started, we just have a subscribe. Now to get your copy and then click subscribe for you at home if you’re Trying to sell something – this is a great portion. To put where basically you’re selling something [ Alex, ], Okay, [, Nealey, ] And what’s cool about this – is with Elementor. You can add. What’s called an anchor link, so this download the book Now say: we’ll do a CTA for the link can link to this.

So when someone clicks it Like cool download book now, they just go all the way down. And they can subscribe now to get the copy [ Alex ] Nice and easy [ Nealey ]. But with these landing pages it can be literally anywhere You’re directing people, whether it’s on social media, You have basically a post talking about this cool stuff, instead of sending them to the website. Your homepage, where It’s super distracting, send them to a landing page Same thing with Instagram Or maybe Google ads or Facebook ads or maybe Just talking to somebody, you have a clear direction: Of where to send them When they go there, they’re like cool, I only have one thing that I can do on this site and it’s to get your taco recipes Got ta, make it as easy as Possible for your customers Right, we get distracted.

I know I do all the time Yeah. You got about two seconds. If that, Let us know in the comments below what your favorite part of My new landing page was Yeah and I hope this Gets you super excited to start making your own landing pages like I said I used Elementor, but you can use whatever Page builder, you want to use, but while you’re adding those comments, if you got some value out of this article, make sure you like this article and subscribe to our blog, so you can get this content first.

This is The Journey We’ll see you next time,

---

 

Adding Physical and Digital Products to Your WordPress Site

The starting point is our WordPress Admin, Dashboard, Select Products and choose Add New from the menu: If this is your very First time, adding products after you installed WooCommerce you’ll see helpful tips along the way.

You won’t see them in this demo, because this isn’t my first product, but don’t worry I’ll, tell You what you need to know The first thing we wan na do Is give our product a name? This is what your customers Will see in your store We’re going to add our glow In the dark dog collar Now we need to enter A product description Describe your product in detail. You can use the formatting Bar here, if you want The next thing you wan na, do Is choose your product type Simple product is the most common and it’s used to showcase A single good or service Grouped products are for grouping several simple products into one.

You would use this to create a bundle, External or affiliate product lists and describes a product in your store, but the sale is made elsewhere. Variable is for more complex products, such as T-shirts with Multiple sizes or colors We’ll leave ours as simple product. If the product, your Adding is digital content like an ebook, PDF article or audio file check the Virtual box. These products don’t need shipping, so you’ll notice.

The Shipping option disappear If your virtual product is going to give the customer a downloadable file then make sure to check The Downloadable box Notice how more fields appear. This is where you would Add you downloadable file along with any extra details. We wan na make sure that Both boxes are unchecked because we want to add a physical product. Let’s give our product a price, Let’s charge $ 15 for our dog collar, We’re ready to add a short description.

This will appear below the Product name on the store: Now, let’s add an image, I’m going to use a stock photo, but I encourage you to use Your own product image, It’ll just take me a moment. To find the one I want There, we go. I like this one When you select an image complete the ATTACHMENT DETAILS, box Alt text is what readers use when they can’t see what an image is. The other fields help describe.

What the image is about, and it can even help with your SEO When you’re done click set product image. The next step is to enter product tags. You can enter your own or Choose from the most used tags Tags will make it easier for customers to find your products. This is where you can Assign product categories we’re going to skip it for now, but it’s as easy as choosing The add new category link, As you start to add, More and more products, it’s a good idea to do that as it helps keep your site organized Now.

We’re ready to preview our site. The glow in the dark collar, looks good but notice how the shop page Is inaccessible from our menu? Let’s go: publish our product, And then I’ll show you how to add the menu, if Yours is missing too, To go back to the product click edit product from the header. Let’s publish our product Now, let’s go add the Shop page to our menu From the left, pane choose Appearance and Menu, The left side shows the Pages that are available Check the Shop Page and click The Add to the Menu button Notice how the Shop Page now shows in the menu Options on the right: Let’s go back and check out our site, Go to the site name in the Upper left corner of the toolbar and choose Visit Site, The Shop page displays in the menu, Let’s go check it out And that’s how you add your Shop page to your menu Return to your Admin, Dashboard To continue making changes or adding new products, Thank you so much for showing Us how that is done, Darlene That was super helpful Anytime Emma and thanks For joining me today, My pleasure Darlene Stay safe and healthy

---

 

Tutorial on WordPress Theme Structure | GoDaddy

Your WordPress theme is the foundation for your website and builds each page of your site in blocks. Some of the common blocks included in themes are the header, the footer and the body. The header is basically everything at the Top of your website, It includes things like the site.

’ s! Title Tag line and the navigation bar, While the header on your home page may be unique. The header on most sub pages will typically have the same format and content across the website. Everything at the bottom of your website in this section is the footer. The footer includes stuff, like contact information, Directions: copyright info and links to social media, The footer typically carries across all the pages on your website and its format and content remain the same.

The area between the header and the footer On your web page is the body or content area. The content area can include text, graphics, links buttons – just about whatever you want, so it will vary from page to page across your website. If you need to edit the header or footer on your page, you use the Customizer tool To access and edit components in the header or footer. You can select from the Customizer menu on the left or click the corresponding Blue edit button on the screen, The Customizer tool is also where you ’ ll go.

If you want to change any of the global settings on your website stuff, like colors, fonts and navigation, menus to name a few Need to edit the content area of a page. If you ’ re already in the Customizer, just scroll down and click the blue edit icon in the content area of the page, You can also access it by clicking Page Builder. In the menu at the top of the screen, The Page Builder tool allows you to access And edit the content on your page Using this tool, you can quickly build out the content on each page without worrying, about formatting, Take a minute to open your GoDaddy WordPress website and review what you currently have in your header, footer and content area.

Do you want to make changes, Give it a try?

---

 

WordPress Ecommerce Hosting

We’ve combined our secure hosting platform and partners with whoo come the world’s leading e-commerce platform built on WordPress to offer you GoDaddy WordPress e-commerce, hosting optimized for website designers and developers quickly get them selling with a professional-looking wordpress store with key features.

They need repeat the process. So easy it’ll save you literally hours of work and frustration. Woocommerce works seamlessly with WordPress and with our easy onboarding experience, you can quickly set up your clients store in minutes to help grow their online sales. Choose templates specifically made for your clients, industry, preview, interactive functional sites at smartphone tablet and desktop breakpoints select popular blogs where your clients are selling and get pre-installed relevant features all this with over 40 premium.

Woocommerce extensions included with your subscription plan like product add-ons, add a personal touch like gift wrapping, color schemes or special messages. Woocommerce bookings make appointments and reservations in advance Luka more subscriptions. Let customers pay weekly monthly or annually with their subscription and more WooCommerce extensions. Dozens of plus, when it comes to maintenance and security, we gotcha Covered ssl certificate, automatically installed validated and renewed for the life of your plan, automatic daily, backups and malware scans, and it and tests without impacting your clients, live sites, speed, boosting CDN and PHP seven.

So there you have it everything you need to quickly set up your clients with a professional-looking ecommerce, friendly WordPress site, get them selling now with GoDaddy WordPress e-commerce, hosting

---

 

Install WordPress using cPanel | GoDaddy

That includes cPanel, Not sure what cPanel is or if you have it. If you bought a GoDaddy hosting plan for Linux – as opposed to a hosting plan for Windows – then you have cPanel, It is essentially a dashboard to help. You manage aspects of your hosting account, including files settings and applications like WordPress, To get to your cPanel dashboard sign in to your GoDaddy account and click My Products, [ click ] In your products list locate Web Hosting and then click Manage [ click.

]. You ’ ll, see a listing of all your hosting accounts and domain names. In this example, Jane has just one CaliforniaFlowerFarms.Com Notice. That’Cpanel’ appears under the Manage button. Click Manage to open cPanel, [ click ]. This is the cPanel dashboard. Now we can install WordPress Under Web Applications, click WordPress, [ click, ] Installatron opens to an Overview page about WordPress. You don.

’ t need to spend any time here. Unless you ’ d, like to learn more about WordPress, Let ’ s, keep going and click ‘ Install this application., ’ [ click ] The Installatron install wizard will guide you through the installation of WordPress. It provides instructions and helpful information about each field. Here are few important things to remember. First, in the Location section be sure the domain you want to install WordPress on appears in the Domain field.

In our example, Jane has only one domain, so it automatically appears in the Domain field. If Jane owned, other domains or had created sub domains, [ click ], they would appear in the drop down menu. [ click ] Next leave the Directory field empty. If you want to use WordPress as the website for the domain, you selected [ click ], Not sure what that means. Let ’ s say: Jane [, typing, ] types, “ blog, ” in the Directory field.

WordPress will be installed on CaliforniaFlowerFarms.Com/blog and that will be the web address for the page or site she creates with WordPress. But then later Jane decides [ typing ]. She wants to build a full website for her business, [ typing ] and she wants the web address to be CaliforniaFlowerFarms.Com. She ’ ll need to either re-install WordPress On CaliforniaFlowerFarms.Com – or move or copy the WordPress installation to her CaliforniaFlowerFarms.

Com domain. Finally, in the Settings section you ’ ll, see that an Administrator, Username and Administrator Password are provided, Be sure to note them [, typing ] or change them to something you’ll. Remember When all the fields and options are set, the Way you want them. Click Install [ click, ] That ’ s it Now you can start creating with WordPress For help using WordPress click. The link in the details below this article

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AF121v_zhug

---

 

How to Speed up Your WordPress Site

How do I fix that That is such a common problem, but luckily that’s what We’re going to cover here on The Journey stay tuned, All right, so slow websites, Are just an epidemic online? The slower website is The quicker visitors are to just bounce and Never come back again, So it’s such a great topic.

That we’re covering today of how to optimize your site, speed Now really to start off, is Figuring out, what type of hosting do you have So Alex? What type of hosting do you have? I use just basic shared hosting. Okay, that’s super common. It’s a pretty inexpensive option for most small businesses, But with shared hosting means. You share their resources with everybody on that server, So less resources for You means less resources for your website, So we covered a article on the Different types of hosting you can check out right there, All right.

So next I Really need to understand why your site’s running so slow with a little site, speed test And really figure out. What’s Going on under the hood Yeah, let’s go diagnose that food coma: Let’s go check it out, All right Alex. So I have your website up here. Let’s go ahead and do One of my favorite tests using gtmetrix.Com. What you do is you just Copy the URL right here open up a new tab and go to Gtmetrix.

Com pretty simple And then go ahead and add the URL in and choose test your site. This will take. Maybe A moment or two depending on their queue and then How slow your website is And then it’s going to give you a test result basically of all the things That are good and bad with your site and in regards to speed One second, you said it was slow. Come on [, Alex ]. You only have People’s attention for so long All right! So if you’re Trying to get this even faster or if your site isn’t One second fast Alex there are lots of things on This page that can help you out in determining what might be an issue.

So if you see here, you Have served skilled images, leverage browser, caching and all these different things on here Now. This may not mean a Whole lot to you right now, but if you expand it, you Can go, what’s this mean And it’ll kinda give you a Little bite sized summary of what it is and then An option to read more There’s: lots of cool tabs on here as well, So “. Why slow”? It has more content! More suggestions for you, so you can figure out what You may want to update or adjust in your site.

I really like looking At the waterfall tests – and this basically shows a Waterfall of all the assets, loading on your site, [ Alex ]. So what does that mean? [ Nealey ], So you don’t have A lot of stuff going on So with, especially with WordPress and speeding it up. There are literally hundreds Of files being called to basically prepare your Site up for a visitor, It’s like making a burger, It’s not just one thing.

I get the bun and the mayo The meat everything else and serve it up Same thing with your site, So every single, basically Script has to load and it’s showing you how long That script is taking to load. So if you see one, that’s Taking just way too long – and you know that cool That that’s an issue Deciphering this, though It can be an absolute pain Like I’ve been doing this for a while. I don’t even like doing this part of it, So we’re going to go through Some plugins and stuff to help you out, but There’s timings on this tab and you can even see A article, if you sign up and create an account, it’s free to use And then history.

So if you can kinda Keep track of how long maybe day, one and maybe Like you have one second, but you start adding all Your plugins and content – Maybe now it’s like 17 seconds, then you actually have an issue. Not now with one second [ Alex ], So you can see when Things started going downhill, [, Nealey, ] Right, like what did I do So now when building your website the one of the first things you do like we talked about in One of our other articles is you go to and choose a theme.

First, Not all themes are created equal. There are free themes, There are premium themes What you really want to Do is try to find a theme. That’s super lightweight which Means it doesn’t have a lot of the add-ons and flare that some of the cool premium themes have, but you wan na make sure That they load fast Because at the end of the day, all that Flare may be for nothing if someone’s, not Actually going to visit your site So the less add-ons, the Quicker, the loading time Absolutely Got it Like you have the theme.

Hestia Hestia is pretty solid, super lightweight, not a lot of add-ons to it, So it makes it fast That one second load time like you had There’s Astra, there’s Genesis, there’s all sorts of like themes and Frameworks that you can use, But those are some of the Ones that we just had here So you mentioned before Plugins they can solve all my problems. Yes, and no Too many plugins can be an issue. So if you have like say 50 plugins, which I’ve seen on some sites, That might be a problem, So the very first one that I’r going to recommend, for you is a plugin called WP Smush, and it’s going to do exactly that.

It’s going to smush all Your images on your site so they’re not as big So to download it. You go To plugins and add new, then type in WP Smush you’re going to get some other results here. That’ll kind of go by keywords, But here is the Smush Image. Compression and Optimization Go ahead and install now And then click activate And then it’s there. So let me take you through Some of the settings since you do have to Activate some of them, So click on Smush directly.

It’s going to go ahead and Say: “: Hey Alex nice work, “ installing Smush hurray.” [ Alex ] Thank you. [ Nealey ] Go ahead and begin set up. I want it to automatically Optimize new uploads: I want a strip image data. I wannna enable lazy loading. A lazy loading is a cool New feature: WP Smush added, Essentially what that Does is you blog a lot, so you have a ton of posts So, instead of loading all the Images at once on your posts, it’ll only load, the ones The visitor actually sees all that really matters So that way, when the rest Are called or scroll to then they’ll load and Then it has less load on the actual server makes Your site running super fast [, Alex ], Got it [, Nealey ].

So next again and Then finish, setup wizard and it’s going to go through Basically, checking your images to see what else needs compressing And then it goes cool Alex You have four attachments that needs smushing: Let’s smush [ Alex ], Let’s smush [ Nealey, ] Smush it up And then it’ll just take a few seconds. We only have four images so It’s not going to take that long. If you have a ton of images.

You’ve been doing this a while it’ll, probably take a while The free version of WP Smush will do 50 at a time, So you’d basically do your first 50. Let that go then smush Again then smush again And then we’re done And then saved us 95.7 kilobytes. That might not seem like a lot. But it does in the long run All right so more plugins, You said plugins fix all your problems. [ Alex ] Right, [, Nealey ].

These ones are going to Hopefully fix your problems, The next one’s called Autoptimize. It’s like auto, optimize, smushed, So just type it Autoptimize enter. I didn’t spell that right. [ Alex ] Close enough [ Nealey ] Take two Nealey All right. Then it’s going to pop up here Same principle: install Now might take a moment and then you click activate Cool, almost always It’s going to take you back to the plugin screen.

This one makes it easy. You can just click settings. Right here to go to it, Then it’s going to give you A lot of information, so it’s going to not show you All the advanced settings, which is fine, It’s going to keep it nice and basic for you. If you are a little bit more experienced, you wan na check those out This little button at the Top will do that for you, But I just wan na optimize, JavaScript code, optimize, CSS, optimize, HTML And then save changes empty cache.

Now, once this happens, Basically, all of these scripts are going to get smushed, So there’s not that extra space on there Making them less file size makes them load a little bit quicker. [ Alex ], Okay, [ Nealey ] Onto more plugins. Let’s go ahead and plugin. Add new [ Alex ], All the plugins So have you ever heard? Of clearing your cache, Yes Cool, so the same thing: Goes with your website Browsers cache data, but so can a website.

So you can set up a caching Plugin on your site, So, instead of all those Scripts being called at once, it’ll condense it and basically Give you a copy of your site super quick to your visitors. There are lots of caching plugins and everyone has their preferred. I’r just going to kind of choose one here, but let’s go with W3 Total Cache. Why not? It was second in line So again, as always, install now and then activate when it wants to install and then you click activate Cool and then it’s right.

Here, on the left hand, side, We’ve got performance, Go ahead and just click that Now this shows a ton of Options to go through, We don’t have the time today. To go through all of those You can kinda check them out Every plugin. It usually has Some type of documentation or a website to go and learn more So you don’t have to be super overwhelmed. But I wan na set up page cache and it looks like it’s Already done for me: [ Alex ], Perfect [, Nealey ] Perfect.

So now, when Visitors come to your site, it’s not going to take as long to load. You already had a one. Second Load time so you’re fine, but if your site’s Loading a little bit slow. This definitely helps Well, thanks for all The helpful information – Hopefully my website is super fast. Now I guarantee it is (, laughs, ), Absolutely well. Let us Know in the comments below How fast was your website? When you did that speed test Yeah – and this is a great Foundation for getting your site a little bit faster, There’s always so much you can do and we’ll probably cover It in later articles, but if you got some Value out of this article make sure you smash that, like button, Let us know Subscribe to our blog, so You can get these articles first.

This is The Journey We’ll see you next time,

---

 

10 WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without

Numero uno And the last thing you wan na be doing is spending hours and hours. Trying to maintain your website, so that’s where WordPress and WordPress plugins come in, We don’t recommend you install every single one that we talk about, See what’s best for you and Your website and your business All right, so you Are a WordPress master, so what are some of your Favorite plugins for design Yeah, so I definitely have my favorites my go to for all things.

But if you wan na just stick with using The Gutenberg editor, the new WordPress editor in WordPress, highly recommend CoBlocks. It just basically adds Just extra functionality to designing a site, But my favorite favorite favorite, go to design. Plugin is Elementor. It’s super visual. It helps me just be on the actual website and Make my edits from there I’m a visual person. I don’t Like the back end too much, I like to kinda see what I’m Doing so, it definitely helps All right, so the next Category of plugins are optimization, so these are things that make your site run better, faster, all good things, Stronger, What is your top one Stronger, ( laughing )? So there’s lots of things you can do when it comes to optimizing.

Your site right So one of my favorites and it’s become super popular by WPMU DEV is WP Smush Smush Smush. Now what this plugin does is exactly what the title says: it smushes Compresses your images on your website, so they’re, not as big.’Cause. Not everybody has lightning fast internet speeds at home, so all that stuff they have to download Makes your site kinda, slow And site speed is one of the most important things that you should be optimizing for on your site, because it’s an important factor for Google on whether it’s going to rank your website.

But Even more importantly, it affects your users If your website is taking forever to load five 10 15 seconds, because You have these massive images They’re headin’ out, So this plugin saves the Day makes them small, but does not affect the quality Yes, and to really pair with WP Smush is having some sort of Lazy Load, plugin Lazy Load by WP Rocket Is a plugin you can use It’s free and basically, what Lazy Load does? Is it only loads? The images that the visitor can see? So that means all the Other images on your page, your browser, doesn’t have To load it right away, so it makes your site even faster Yeah.

So if you’re, a fashion, blogger and you’re talking about your favorite top ten spring outfits – and you just have just this massive photo – Shoot and you love it and all those images are super important’cause. You have product Links that you’re linking to You, don’t want to waste. A whole bunch of time loading a hundred images all at once, And so what this will do, just when the user is Looking at the three images it loads, those as they scroll down it just loads, the next ones, Just pop pop pop pop pop.

It’s really cool, it looks nice too. It looks fancy it’s like ooh Yeah like little fade in effect, And it’s super easy to use. Literally, you go to the plugin settings. You click a couple. Check boxes hit submit and that’s all you have to do All right, so more image, optimization Images, as you know, super important. So a kinda new-ish technology like a dot, WebP format, Basically, what that is is just a different type of image format Kind of for the web, So it takes images and basically reduces up to 25 % in size With the same quality, So their plugin called WebP Express that you can use to convert your JPEG’s.

Your PNG’s to that dot, WebP extension And what that does is it should hopefully help your site load that much faster’cause, there’s less to load Awesome. Now this technology Is a little bit newer so test it out? Maybe On like a staging site, maybe not your production site to make sure everything works.’Cause. There is a lot of Rewrites and redirects that need to happen to Basically, make this plugin work, Nice And another really cool Optimization plugin is called Autoptimize, That’s auto optimize smush’em together and that’s actually what it does.

Is it smushes your code on the back-end, So you know majority of them time, you’re not going into The back end of your code, but your website is made up of code And then that is translated to your users. But that code takes up. Space and that space takes up page load time right, so what Autoptimize does is it takes all the spaces within your code and just smushes them all together, so you can load.

Super duper super fast Yeah, that’s what we do, [ Both ] Smush And last but not least, When it comes to optimization plugins that are our favorites is a plugin called WP Disable. Now what this does is it’s going to disable the different functions inside of WordPress, that maybe you don’t actually need on your website? It’s all the extra bloat that Is just there with WordPress? It’s not for you! You just go ahead and disable with a couple clicks of a button and you’re good Your site loads, a little bit faster.

That extra stuff isn’t There and we all win So the next section of Plugins are security plugins, And these are so important because you don’t want your site getting affected with Malware or getting hacked so tell me about one of your Favorite security, plugins Yeah, so one of my favorites really to harden the WordPress itself, because WordPress is super popular covers over a third of the internet and the last thing we wan na do is have a site be hacked Redirected to malicious things, then your brand is just destroyed, So these plugins should help With some of that security, The first plugin that I Really recommend is Sucuri, It looks like security It’s just a WordPress hardening plugin.

It’s going to do a lot of stuff! On the backend, for you, All you have to do is do a Couple of clicks of a button and click save and it Does everything for you to really harden WordPress itself Awesome and if you Wan na learn a little more about what to do if or When your site gets hacked, we have an awesome article. Right here all about it so check it out And the other plugin I Just can’t live without is Really Simple: SSL Especially for first time users or beginners, or people that just don’t wan na even deal with it like myself, What it does is, after you have an SSL installed on your website with WordPress.

It doesn’t do the redirect for you. So, even though you have the SSL there, your site still shows Http colon slash, slash No good. This plugin, you activate It and it’s there and it’s going to add all The redirect scripts do all the things in the back end And then your site’s secure. You have that https, you Have that lock symbol that no longer says not secure? Google now loves you, your Rankings are getting boosted all with just a click of a button.

It really helps me out just save time.,’Cause. I don’t wan na go in the code and set up those redirects Go into the back of the database, go into the files and Find all the http links this makes your life so much easier and it’s super quick to use. So our next category of plugins are plugins that help You get found online And the number one plugin this probably is my top plugin. She never stops talking about it.

It is Yoast SEO. So basically SEO is one Of the most important things that you should be doing, if you have a website but No one is finding you It’s because your website is not optimized for search engines And what Yoast SEO does is It makes some of the back end technical things very easy. It optimizes your site in a way that Google can find it. It creates certain things like robots.Txt files and site maps, But then it makes it really easy for you to edit your on Site work and content.

So that’s the two parts of SEO. You have your on site: And your off site, work And Yoast SEO helps you Do everything on site So easy so awesome? I really Can’t talk about it enough, I love it. I’r a super fan, So the great thing about Yoast SEO is that it again it helps You with your on site and your keywords to make Sure that the content that you’re writing on your pages or your blog posts are Targeted and are written in a way that Google is Going to rank those pages, So let’s say for my website: There’s a new movie trailer that came out for a movie that everyone’s really excited about it.

Will help me and guide me as I’m writing that letting me know that hey this blog post is too short. You don’t have the keyword in your title. It will just give me all the tips And then it will rank it on a scale. So that way, I know these are the things that I need to do to give my article. The best chance of ranking Super cool makes it very easy for SEO novices or SEO experts Yeah. I love the little check box that way.

It’s kinda like a little progress like cool, I’m almost There I’m almost there cool, I nailed it So now. You’ve done everything to optimize your site for search engines, but it’s really important. That you’re tracking, where all that traffic is coming in and different sources, And yes, Google Analytics is so important, but it’s another dashboard on another site you have to log in to So that’s where Google Analytics Dashboard comes in it takes it.

Into your WordPress site, so it’s all there very easy Yeah and it’s the first page. You see when you log in so you log into your site and there’s the little graph saying what are your top posts? What’s not working what is, And you can kinda dig in deeper directly on your site without having to go to Google Analytics And what’s cool about it? Is these plugins will actually give you the information that you really care about? Inside your dashboard,.

‘Cause Google Analytics is A lot it’s overwhelming, sometimes some of the Things don’t make sense. These plugins help just a little bit So the next plugin I Love because it helps other users all over the Internet find your content, It’s called NextScripts Social Poster And basically, what it does anytime, you post a new blog post. It automatically pushes it out to all of your social networks. There’s a giant list.

And you can choose to do all of’em or some of them. So if you have followers that follow you only on Twitter or people, That are only on Facebook or what not you can just go anytime. You hit publish for one of your articles, poof off it goes, and the really cool thing is you can edit your individual captions for Twitter. You could have A different one for Facebook, obviously there’s different Character lengths And so that way the users On each of those platforms are getting a really unique experience, It’s really cool it.

Saves you a lot of time. You spent a lot of time on this post. The last thing you want it do is just to fall on deaf ears, so this gives you a chance to spread it out. The World so they can find it Absolutely, and I Don’t recommend enabling this plugin, while you’re developing a website, because you might throw out a bunch of posts that Should not have got out All right now with the Internet being so global as it is and being able to get a visitor from literally anywhere in the world.

That means some of those users might be speaking a different language, And I know I only know English. So I can’t go and translate everything, But there are translating Plugins, like Weglot and Polylang that go in and automatically translate your website for you. You can go and make edits afterwards if the automatic one didn’t work as well, But it’s definitely helpful to really reach that global audience and Expand your business online, That’s awesome! Another plugin that I absolutely love is called Pretty Links, And it does just that it makes your links and your URL’s nice and Pretty and bite size.

So let’s say that I’m on a podcast or on my YouTube blog And I wan na direct people to my podcast page Basically, what it will do is take my big long link. And all they have to do is type in my website. Name, backslash podcast, and it will go straight to that page. It’s easy for your users to remember, because they’re not going to Remember this big long link, And so you can create Little bite sized links that redirect to your main one Yeah, that’s super important and especially with WordPress If you create a post it’ll, do like my post I’ll List ten ways to optimize your site: it’ll be 10-Ways-To-Optimize-Your-Site And havin’, to tell someone that, especially in a quick forum like article or just talking, to’em, is awful They’re going to type it wrong.

They’re not going to remember They’re going to give up Yes, so those quick little bite size like just slash, podcast or slash optimize, Slash 10 tips, 10 tips, whatever it you wan na do it makes it easier just to say is my domain.Com, slash, 10 tips And then they’re there Off you go Another plugin that I love If you are using AdSense or even any sort of ad Platform to monetize your site is called Quick Adsense, And what I love is that sometimes, when you have your AdSense code, it can be kind of confusing On where to put the code, and then you have to Put it in this section and then I want it to Appear here here and here – Let’s be honest – I’ve Totally crashed my site by going in and trying to do that myself.

That’s where Quick Adsense comes in. Basically Quick Adsense does All of that work for you and all you do is you check boxes of. I want an ad to appear before my post. I want an ad to appear after my post. I want one to appear on my side, bar Whatever you get to pick and Boom, it appears right there, So speaking of possibly Breaking your website there’s a plugin called Wp File Manager, and it does just that Gives you a file manager.

Inside of WordPress, So instead of having to go via FTP’s Using a third party, Program like FileZilla, you basically can manage all of your files in the back end directly. In your dashboard super quick super easy, And this one is just super cool just to give your visitors that next level of customer service There’s a site and plugin called Tawk.To Tawk.To. Basically, it’s a free chat software. You can put it on your website.

There’s a mobile app Too, so you can actually respond to visitors on your website directly from your phone That’s cool And give’em those quick answers that quick customer Service that’ll potentially boost sales, boost, customer service, boost retention, boost loyalty And it’s a free, plugin I highly recommend it to any really brick and Mortar type, business Or someone that’s constantly On their website, anyways its definitely helpful Yeah.

If users are coming to your website and they’re asking you quick questions, they’re, probably people who are interested in potentially buying Your product or service, So if they know that they’re Getting a response right away, and it’s from the business owner or someone who works for the business. That gives a lot of confidence that this business is on top of it and they probably end up buying from you.

The last WordPress plugin that we cannot live without is call WooCommerce. I love WooCommerce.’Cause, if you’re already using WordPress for your website, you Don’t wan na have to send your users to another shop platform that gives’em a Different user experience WooCommerce allows you To have that e-commerce functionality within WordPress, It’s slick, it’s simple, it’s awesome, Tell us a little more Yeah, so it obviously will Give you that e-commerce ability, but it makes just managing your e-commerce store That much simpler right, So you have an order management area, so you can manage customer orders.

You can respond to customers. Directly in WooCommerce itself Can set up shipping rates. You can set up taxes, you can set up advance taxonomies, you can set up advance attributes. So if you want certain products to have blue shirt, large And then some engraving or whatever else you wan na Have on your product, you have the ability to Do so with WooCommerce Does literally everything for you. There are some extra premium features you can always get at WooCommerce.

Com and there are tons of third party plugins. You can use to add onto the Functionality of WooCommerce Just go to plugins, add New search, WooCommerce and there’s going to be Tons of different things to make WooCommerce even better All right guys, I hope You liked the WordPress plugins that we cannot live without They’re amazing. Now let us Know in the comments below what your favorite WordPress plugin is, I’m interested I’ll be Down in the comments, takin’ notes, because — We’re going to add’em to our own sites Yup And while you’re there make sure you smash that like button, if you got some value outta this and hey subscribe to our blog and ring that bell.

So you Get these episodes first: This is The Journey We’ll see you next time,

---

 

The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Dashboard

I mean I see all these things up on my WordPress dashboard. I Have no idea what they mean I just kind of ignore them Yeah and you’re, not alone. Well, let me give you And the audience at home a little crash course on The WordPress dashboard here on “ The Journey.” So I’ll be honest. The first Time I was in WordPress too, the dashboard was just overwhelming.

There are so many options. On the left hand side at the top, and then you go through there and there’s even more of a Rabbit hole to go through Exactly And like most people, Especially you at home, if you’re just getting started, We go with what we know We go to how to add a page And how to make posts [ Alex ] Right. We don’t really touch much else. We might have a developer, do all of it, but it’s really important to understand some of the aspects.

So you Can really manage it yourself In the event that something happens you don’t have to rely. On someone else to go and make some quick fixes, So are you up for my little crash course in the WordPress dashboard? Yes, please Cool. Let’s go check it out, So I’m going to take you through some of the most important elements With WordPress. The sky is the limit of all the options that you have, but we’ll kind of take it step by step to go over the most important parts.

So, let’s go through Posts since that’s what you’re most comfortable with The Post is where you Can go and add different blog type posts to your website super popular with blogs. Let me show you the page editor So right here we have basically a Default little page editor Add a title. Does exactly that can add your title title of the blog post Then right here is What was pretty new with WordPress 5.

0 and up it’s Called The Gutenberg Editor, So what this did is made The whole editing experience a lot easier, especially For first time users, It was named Gutenberg After the Gutenberg Press kind of like the printing block, what not Kind of the same principle, You had different little printing blocks of content on your website. So if you hit the plus right here and search through it, all you can start typing.

Or a little shortcut you do slash and then it’ll Give you that little quick list? So if you want to start with Image, you can do that here or you can just start typing Now. On the right hand, side Under the Document tab, this is some of the Different elements of Post Most people – don’t even look at this, which is why I want to Show you just in case,’cause. I know you’re here a Lot but it’s good to know So you can set basically When you want this post to publish, you can set a featured image, that’ll show up right on top of the blog post itself, Whether it’s like on your Blog post Overview page or on blog single post itself, You could set up an Excerpt if you want a specific excerpt there.

There is Discussion if you Want to allow comments or not And then Post Attributes, Some templates have different, basically styles of how you want the page. Maybe you want this blog Post to have a right sidebar, Some of the themes have that, Maybe you want it left or not at all, And this theme has its own Separate section for sidebar, So that’s Post in a nutshell, Really it’s all about just writing content, whether its article content or blog content, like a blog post with words And then when you’re Done you can publish it, you can preview it.

You Can do all the good stuff [ Alex ] Good, to know All right, so that was really Post. But let me take a step back and show you really the overview of WordPress and really the structure. So the left hand menu is going to be. Basically, all your different Settings and functions that you do on the WordPress site, like your Posts, Media Pages Comments all that good stuff. The top usually has a Quick link to your website, You can see some comments.

Quick links to add a new post and then usually plugins will start to add their own little widgets up. Here just for quick access And then there’s Screen Options in the top right, where some pages you can add, and remove different content, if you Don’t wan na see it there just by checking the box And then, if you’re stuck there is help. Basically, this goes to The WordPress codex There’s lots of different Help articles and blog posts around WordPress to Help those newbies out [, Alex ], Okay, and I see Pages, what is that for [ Nealey ]? You really have stuck To Post, have you (, laughs, ) [, Alex ].

I really have [ Nealey ]. Yes, you have. You have a Privacy Policy and a Sample Page, So let me tell you about Pages: It’s got the same format. As a blog post itself, As you see here, we have The title and the content, But this is really like: Creating a home page or an about page or a contact page, These are actual pages on the Site that aren’t blog posts, [ Alex ], Okay, I’ve been wanting to create an About Me page [, Nealey ] Yeah.

So you would do About Me. You would add your stuff. Maybe you have an image here, I’m going to pretend this is a picture of you. I’r a burger (, both laughing ), [, Nealey, ], (, laughs, ), Burger And then you’d. Add your Bio and all that good stuff and any other elements that you want on this website here, Then when you’re done, you would Publish, Publish Then you’d view the page. Obviously it’s just going to be a big picture of a burger and some random text.

That about sums me up, That’s about it! So that’s a page! I would highly recommend You have something especially an About Me: Page, a Contact Us page You’re, a blog, so you Don’t really need to have any services unless you go That route in the long run All right so next up on Our list is Appearance menu, So the Appearance menu has A lot of different stuff around really the style of your website. What I would like to do, especially on a brand new website build, is find a new theme, I’m one of those people that tries not to stick with the same Theme on every website, which is not the normal I would usually recommend, is find anything that you love and stick with it, Make it easy on yourself.

I don’t like making on easy myself, but when you go to Themes you can see some of the featured themes. You can go to popular and Kind of just scroll through – and there is literally hundreds And hundreds of themes, The power of WordPress is It’s an open source platform, which means anyone and Everyone can contribute to it. So if I actually knew how to code, I can make my own theme and add it to the WordPress repository and literally anyone can use it.

It’s all open source, it’s free to use, so you really just go through and if you like a theme, you can install it absolutely free here And then moving on to Customize. This is basically how most Themes, let you customize the look and feel of your site, So it’ll actually give you A preview of your website how it looks We got Alex, Eats Food, All My Adventures and all your reviews so far And then, on the left hand, Side, you can kind of just go through each of the Options and see what they are, So you have general settings what typography you want to use and with this your customize May not look the same as this.

It really depends on the theme you use Actually most themes. Will use the Customize, but some themes may have A separate theme options It’ll usually be somewhere Around here for theme options, It really just depends on The theme that you’ve chosen It’s kind of the good and Bad thing with WordPress, like anyone, can make a theme, but anyone can make a theme their way. So you have to end up learning.

Their way of the theme – Okay, Next up, we have Widgets Widgets, are basically the Things on your sidebar like right now I see you Have Search and Recent Posts, which is pretty common For a blog like you, But you have a Subscribe option. You have a WooCommerce Sidebar. If you ever wanted to sell stuff, You have a Very Top Bar And your theme gives you a lot different widgets options and sidebars To use just super helpful, You can add so much to it or just random text.

Whatever you want really All right so next up, we have menus. Okay, I’ve used that before That’s where I setup the link to my homepage and my menu bar Perfect yep. As you see you have the Home link here, You can add any more Pages like your About Me that we just created with A picture of your burger ( Alex laughs ), It’s basically you it’s Your new profile photo, It adds right there, You can go ahead and Save Menu.

You can create multiple menus. Depending on your theme, This one gives the option to have your Primary Menu at the top of your page, also one for your Footer Menu and then a Very Top Bar Menu. But basically it’s just your links on the top of the menu bar And then I told you a little bit about plugins. Recently right, Yeah plugins solve everything right Literally everything. So I do see here. You have lots of plugins installed About nine seven are active, but those plugins, let you basically add extra functionality onto WordPress WordPress by itself pretty solid, but these plugins make it even better Again open source.

So there’s tons of plugins to choose from Say you wanted to. I don’t know, add a slider on your website. You can go to Plugins, Add New [ Alex ] And what’s a slider [ Nealey ]. So you see Those websites that have the content there and It’ll just slide through and have different piece of content. [ Alex ] Right. So that’s basically what that is. So if I search slider, I can’t type today ( laughs ).

If I search slider Basically, it will give me different: plugins that’ll Help me create those sliders Like there is a Video Slider here Slide Anything then you Can easily install it Literally just search Whatever your looking for and it’s a search engine, if you will It’ll search WordPress and give you all the responses based On that search result And then you’d choose Install Now and then Activate and then it’s there And again with plugins Every plugin is different, so you have to learn their settings, but it’s not too difficult Cool, All right Alex.

So, are you going to have any other users on your website or is it just going to be you I’ll be the only contributor, but I do want to get some Subscribers on this website Perfect, so the user section Basically lets you manage all the users on your website. I see here. Your name is rt1xrx [ Alex ]. That’s me: [ Nealey ] Probably should change that, but you can also set up different users, so if you ever did want to have, maybe a web developer manage It or things like that or if you want to have Your people to subscribe, they can setup their own Profiles on your website and be subscribers Okay, [ Nealey ], All that is managed right here And then let me take you through some of the different user levels, because there are a few to choose from Now say you wanted to have Different users on your website, but maybe you don’t want Them to have all the power [ Alex ] Right, [, Nealey ], That’s the power of WordPress, There’s different user roles.

That they can use and set up Like by default. There is a Subscriber they can basically adjust. Edit, their profile and add comments to your website And then there’s Contributors Who can contribute to your website make their own blog post? There’s Authors kind Of the same principle, Each of these levels have Different permission sets Now Administrator, basically has the same amount of access that You have as a site owner So only give someone Access as an administrator, if you absolutely trust them, Or if they absolutely have to [ Alex ], So don’t give my Subscribers administrator access, [, Nealey ] Highly, wouldn’t recommend that [ Alex ] Good to know [ Nealey ]’Cause.

They Can literally just destroy your whole site with a click of a button Yeah Real bad And the next up, let’s move on to Tools Now with Tools, there’s not a whole lot that you will have to really do here. The biggest use that people use with Tools are the import and export So say your coming from wordpress.Com on to your own self-hosted WordPress site. You can use the Export Feature on wordpress.Com to export all of your content to a file and then come down here.

To Tools and then Import and then import your WordPress file and add all your content Making it so that transition Is nice and smooth All right? So let’s talk about Settings Now there is a lot of different Options under Settings, We’ll kind of break them down one by one, So General Settings This is going to let you set your Site Title and your Tagline. I see here, it’s perfect, You have Alex Eats Food and All my adventures for the tagline, the WordPress address.

Url and site address URL. Basically, if you want to Change your domain name at any point or update it. Maybe you don’t want the Www, you would do so here For most people. I wouldn’t Recommend changing this’cause: it can break your website. I’ve done it myself quite a few times highly, wouldn’t recommend it, But you can down here. There’s different things: If you wan na update your Email Address, I see it’s something super random.

You probably want to update that ( laughs, ) Membership. Anyone can register. So if you do want subscribers on your site, make sure you check this box. If you don’t, if maybe your Just a small business site, you probably don’t want anyone. To register on your site leave that unchecked And then you have some date and time formats here on General, All right, so we’re Going to skip over Writing and just go into the Reading settings, This one is super important.

If you don’t want your Page to just be a blog, Maybe you created a brand new home page. That’s super tailored to Your foodie experience or your business you set that here, So you would choose a static homepage. You’d choose About Me, We’re going to pretend that’s! Your Homepage (, laughs, ) And then your Post page We’ll make that Sample So now your blog’s actually On the Sample Page – and your Homepage is actually the About Me – that’s going to show up [ Alex ], Okay, [ Nealey ] Blog posts to show at most So on your blog page.

Now your new one. It’s only going to show 10 posts and then there’s going to be a Read More that they can choose there As always Save Changes. If you don’t none of that stuff stays and you have to go back later on Moving on to Discussion Real quick here, just Discussion goes over different comment settings You can go through and check the list of what you want and what you don’t want And then Last but not Least on the Settings, one that I really wanted to Talk about are Permalinks.

What are permalinks Permalinks are basically Just a fancy way of saying the stuff that comes after Your domain and the URL So by default, WordPress makes it plain so it would be. Maybe your blog post is alexeatsfood.Com/. P=123 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. [ Alex ], Nope [, Nealey ]. It’s definitely not pretty. It’s kind of ugly (, Alex laughs ). So you have different options: Depending on your style, Maybe if you do post all the time you maybe want that day and name or month and name in that URL there For the most part, most small businesses will just use the post name, It’s the one I recommend usually, But if you Want to make it really custom, you can actually add your own down here.

So maybe I want the Category to show up first and then the post name, I would click those buttons and then save So now. If I go to one of your blog posts, it’s alexeatsfood.Com/recipes/ And then the blog title [ Alex ] Okay, It makes it a little Prettier and better for SEO All right. So that’s the overview of the WordPress dashboard, but there’s really another Portion of WordPress that I really want to Talk to all of you about and those are WordPress updates like core plugins and themes Now Alex.

How often do you update those Well, I did update them yesterday’cause. I knew we were making this article, but before that it was Probably about a year: Okay, that’s that’s, not good ( laughs, ) Yeah! So these plugins themes, And just WordPress in general has updates that they do For performance issues for security issues and Just new features too, so its super important to Constantly update these I’ll, probably check on your site at least once every, maybe one or two weeks to see if there’s there.

‘Cause. If there is like A massive vulnerability with a plugin and they sent out an update, and you did not update that the bad people out there Go and check sites see that you have that Older version of the plugin, then they know cool that Plugin is exploitable. Now I can get into your Site and I’ve hacked it and then it’s a whole other deal that you don’t wan na deal with. Okay I’ll definitely do a better job.

Yeah so make sure you just Check on this every so often There are lots of tools out there that do auto updates for you. Maybe your hosting provider might Definitely something to check out All right cool ( upbeat music ), So now I can start taking full advantage of every part of my WordPress dashboard. Let us know in the comments down below what kind of articles you Wan na see in the future Yeah and while your there make sure you smash that like button as always, if you got some value out, Of this and you’re now a WordPress expert Subscribe to our blog, so you can get these articles first.

This is “ The Journey..” We’ll see you next time.

---

 

WordPress Design Tips for Beginners

For your website right So when someone comes To visit your website, what are some things? That you want them to do For me. The most important thing is: they need to find all of our fresh new content on the homepage, So we have a lot of Content coming out daily, whether it’s interviews or news articles, So I want them to be able to find that and easily find the thing. That’s most relevant to them Right.

So just kinda Go down the rabbit hole of all your content. Getting the freshest first Yep And then possibly find oh cool. Here’s a related article, [, Morgan, ], Yep, yep, And then here’s another article, So that’s super important Yeah, You have a plan for your visitors, So same thing with you. When you want someone to visit your site, is it just to get information about you? Is it to call you? Is it to contact you? Is it to buy your product Whatever it is? You wan na have an idea of what that is going forward so that way, when you develop your website, that is priority number one, whether you’re designing the site or you have someone designing it for you, Okay, so I have a homepage but other than that.

What other Pages are important to have So homepage. Definitely important. If you don’t have a homepage, you don’t really have a website, so that’s kind of important, But other than that. You Want an About Us page, you want to talk about yourself and really talk about how You you help the visitor, the consumer, the customer right, The About Us, usually in typical fashion. Here’s the company’s history.

[, Morgan, ] Yeah, A lot of people may not care about that With your About page. Have it really about how you help them a Little bit of your history but more important how you help them Have a Products and Services page to really showcase what you do Have a Contact page, because that’s super important. For people to contact you And then lastly, a Testimonials page People love that social proof. You can pull reviews from Like Yelp, Google, My Business Facebook, wherever you’ve got a review plug it on the website.

And really show people that you are who you say, you are Yeah and with those Pages people are either finding you through social Or just going to Google and finding you that way, and so these are the Pages that they wan na do and they’re doing their due diligence. They wan na know who you Are why you’re an expert? What other people say about you? What product and services you offer so yeah having those Main ones are perfect All right so now another thing to really keep in mind with designing your website is you want to keep it simple And what I see a lot? Of first time, people do is they’ll, go in, they have like paragraphs and paragraphs Of their content, They wan na have everything there, Literally everything So they throw everything on their website and it’s Just a giant block of text, that’s super hard to read and I know us millennials don’t really like to Read we like to skim so it’s really tough to Understand where to go, Don’t be afraid of that white space That negative space that Basically has nothing, it helps people just see better, It helps out eyes, breathe and relax cause we’re not straining Yeah Right Yeah, What’s some other things to really keep in mind with the website? I think once you start Putting ads on your site is to limit the number of ads.

Obviously you want to Monetize your website, but if it’s just bombarding you with ads, it’s a really poor user experience. I know that I’ll find A recipe on Pinterest I’ll click on it and It’s just bombarded with ad ad ad ad, where I just say It’s the worst I don’t want to make this casserole anymore and I’m done Those clickbait-type articles right, Yep, You’re on social media, you click on it. Then it Gives you like a paragraph and I go onto page two and there’s a bunch of ads and it’s like 17 Pages for what could’ve been like half a page, Yeah, Going back to the purpose of your website, the reason you have a website is cause you’re, hoping to turn these users into clients or paying customers.

So if you have too many Conflicting messages they’re just going to go away; And you’re leaving customers sending them away because You have too much going on Absolutely and I think The as a beginner designer or whatever you’re doing, I would shy away from using ads in the first place. Until you’re established, Like you said, it’s About the user experience and if the first thing they See is just a bunch of ads they’re not going to trust you and they’re, not loyal to you.

Yet to understand like okay cool they have ads, I Already love their content, I love them. Let me help them out and maybe I’ll look at these ads, but if you’re not there, Yet shy away from them, And now, with the website too, you also don’t wan na Have just super random, conflicting colors, It stresses out the Eyes, like a yellow text on white background, just doesn’t work. You really wan na stick to Kind of your brand colors there’s a lot of cool little like complementary color wheel.

Calculators out there online just do a quick, Google search and it’ll show you cool Plug in your primary color and it’ll give you some Complementary colors that look good. That’s not Going to be too overwhelming for the end user on your site, Because if you frustrate them, And stress out their eyes: they’re never coming back Now. I know with your website. You have a ton of content, so lots of experience there.

What are some best practices when it comes to content with designing your website. First off, you want Content that is relevant to you and your business And your audience, If you are a dog, groomer and You are writing about plumbing. Then people coming to Your website are not going to find that helpful and They’re going to go away So make sure that whatever your audience is coming to you for You’re writing content that you like, and you Can use Google Analytics or just ask your audience what They want to hear from you and you can start writing.

More content about that, so it’s more in line with What they’re looking for, but then also you wan na make Sure that it’s consumable, You can’t just have This giant block of text, because you wan na put everything in there. I won’t read it. No one’s going to read it, so it’s as simple as trimming it down to the core message, but if that content is really important, then Just hit that return bar and add some spaces, so that way, it’s nice and easy on the eyes Right.

It’s not an essay When you were in high school, You wan na break it up. Even if the paragraph is not the perfect form make it easy for the visitor to read. Have nice bolded Headlines or bullet points, or quote boxes, break up that content Make your English teacher mad. Okay, Just make it nice and pretty Yes, we’re going to get Some angry angry emails, but with the website itself, Too, you really wan na think about the structure.

Of the content, as well, especially on the main pages, the blog posts and things like that – definitely have to have structure, but so does like say your homepage. Now you don’t want that. Block of text in your hero, So the hero of a website, is basically that first little banner Header area that you see it usually has some type of text saying here’s how I help you a call-to-action and a nice image on The background, usually Images with your website: They have to match your brand.

You can’t just throw out If you’re a dog groomer some plumbing stuff cause That doesn’t make sense. It’s weird What about corny photos Like corny stock photos? I mean, if you don’t, have any photos. I would say that corny Photos are maybe better than a blurry photo from your phone. It’s true But maybe it’s time to invest in a photo shoot, so you can get really Nice, high-quality content and images that really show and display what your brand and your Products and services are Absolutely My two cents, A professional photographer Will definitely elevate you, especially if you’re a brick-and-mortar having someone coming to your place and take super quality.

Photos that way anyone can actually see it is great Worth the investment And now, if you have To use stock photos you don’t always have to Use the super corny ones, there are some free Resources that I like to use when I’m designing websites for clients, so pexels.Com is probably my favorite one and then unsplash.Com Is also a solid option, Basically photographers Are going on there uploading some of their Best work to get exposure and they’re giving away for free, which is super, awesome and helpful.

You can donate to them if You really like their stuff, but it really elevates your website, so it has some beautiful imagery, especially when it’s on-brand Okay, this is awesome, but what else do I need for my website Right? So with your Website you really want that purpose of it right and we talked about what Is the goal of the website? Part of that goal is Having a call-to-action and not just one call To action up in the hero, you want multiple call-to-actions throughout, So a call-to-action Is a usually a button or a link of some sort that says, learn more get now buy this product Subscribe to my email list.

Yes, Something basically telling The user to take action So again you wan na Have in the hero image, but you also wan na, have it Throughout the website itself, at the end of blog posts, I really like to have it at the top of the navigation bar upper right, just because the way that People’s eyes kind of travel around the website, It’s usually in a Z formation, so they’ll start at the top left, which usually your logo they’ll, move over and have the navigation, but then have a call-to-action right there and then they’ll, kinda scroll down, they’ll, see other content And to the right they’ll Kind of finish off, and especially if that menu Bar kind of scrolls down that call-to-action is Always there for them to see and use and take that action.

Nice Nealey pro tip guys take notes Alright. So now another Aspect of your website when designing is truly have Some sort of social share if you can say that five times fast Social share social share, Social share social share social share, woo got it. I’r impressed Pretty good She’s kind of the best So now, with the social share. I know what you’re thinking right, like that’s, not design, But design is every single Part of your website – and you really need to be Designing with purpose So how is social share? I can only say it one times fast.

How has that really changed your website? Well, for our website. We want people to. We do a lot of blog posts, news articles we wan na share our interviews and so having those buttons at the end of every article is crucial because we will have Article that will go viral and that’s really the goal. If you’re writing content, that is a blog post or whatnot, you want, as many people To see it as possible, so having that option that At the end of the article, they can just click and share it to their favorite.

Social network is key. If you don’t have it you’re missing out on potential new viewers and new users who can find you and your Business and your content With social shares, it can be on, like the left side bar of Like your blog page, you can have it in the widget Area on your right side bar, you can have at the bottom of a blog post. Usually people have it in Either the header or the footer, The more places you can Add it to your website without it being overwhelming the better You wan na, make this as easy as possible for someone to really love your content.

Wan na share it with the world Now another aspect that you Really wan na keep in mind and a lot of again a lot Of people don’t think this as designing the website. Is planning for SEO SEO is all about the website design and what you put into it. What are some things to keep in mind when really designing for SEO Yeah? So you have this Website you want it to be found, and there are certain Things that you have to do when building and designing your website so that way, Google and Other search engines can actually find and read your website.

[ Nealey ] Right So the first one is your source code. There is certain ways that you need to structure your website, so that way the crawlers can find it. An example. Are the image alt tags? Google is not a human It doesn’t really know what your images are. About it’s a robot right, Yep And so you have to go in and put text to describe hey. This is a picture of a dog being groomed. So that way, Google Knows that this picture this website is relevant.

For those search terms, So again, this all goes around. You have to structure your website in a way that Google wants But then also your content, you have to have your key words in there, that’s relevant to you and your business so where you’re located Yes, What your products and Services are your business name, make sure all of that is found in the content of your website, cause that all helps with your SEO And if you want even more Of a deep dive about SEO click this article right here and we can go into it even more Now super important When designing your website is to make sure that It is mobile friendly, Everyone has a mobile phone.

Gone are the days of the early 2000s when literally everyone Was on a desktop Yeah now, not only does Everyone have a mobile phone or a tablet that they’re Using to look at your website, but all the different phones Have different dimensions So all the screens are Different sizes and there’s just a lot so having a mobile, responsive, Site solves for that And most WordPress themes Have some sort of responsiveness that’ll make it look good? No Matter what device you’re using almost all website builders do as well, so you wan na make sure You keep that in mind, cause over half of Searches on search engines are coming through mobile and if your site is not mobile, optimized you make me zoom.

Oh the worst. I am never coming to your website or doing Business with you ever And lastly, you wan na make sure it works, no matter what browser people are on. I know some browsers have Some funky different settings right. So what might look good in Chrome may not look good in Internet Explorer if you’re still using Internet Explorer Edge. Edge Edge now Or if you’re, using Internet Explorer upgrade to Edge Firefox, make sure just test it out.

Just download the browsers. Really quick, go to the website. Go to different pages. You wan na QA these things to make sure that you’re not putting someone else’s experience down because they happen to Have a favorite browser, So these are all really great tips, but where do I go to find What’s new and modern and to see what other people In my industry are doing with their websites, Do you have any tips or ideas Yeah? I have lots of suggestions here.

I know designing website, especially when it’s not your forte or something you do everyday. It’s hard to really get Those design juices flowing So sometimes it’s good To see just inspiration check out other websites and you can go online and just start searching random. Websites, if you want, but I have two recommendations – that these sites really just Highlight kind of the best of the best, The first one is awwwards.

Com and the second one is behance.Com. Now both have all sorts of just graphical design-type aspects, but they do have website just examples and basically sites of the day that you can kinda check out And start picking apart, like cool. I really love this feature or I really like how this looks and mold it into your own site Kind of take the best of everything and make your own Alright Nealey. Thank you so much.

Those were fantastic tips. On how to get started with WordPress, I think if you follow those you’re going to have a killer website Absolutely and you helped out a lot which has helped me so I don’t have to come up with as much content. What can I say, But let us know your favorite Tip in the comments below and while you’re there Smash that like button and subscribe to this blog, so you get all these episodes first.

This is The Journey We’ll see you next time,

---