5 easy ways to improve your WordPress website all by yourself

WordPress is used on more than 60 million websites around the world and for good reason. It is easy to use, good for SEO out of the box and with the massive amount of plugins available, is highly customisable allowing you to use WordPress for pretty much any kind of website.

Whether you setup your WordPress website yourself or got a good web developer to build it for you, there could be some easy and quick ways for you to make some improvements at no extra cost. From speeding up your site to fixing security issues, we will run through the top five ways below.

1. Speed up your WordPress Website

If your website doesn’t load fast, especially on mobile, you will lose visitors and potential customers so it is so important to try and speed up your website if you can. You can do this in a variety of ways:

Check your hosting. Your current web hosting might not be quick enough, especially if your website has increased in visitor numbers and size. Go with a reputable company and invest in a decent specification server. Don’t go with the cheapest if you can help it.

Make sure all images on your website are being compressed correctly. You shouldn’t be serving the same high quality images that desktop users see when they visit your website on a mobile device for example. A good plugin to use is ‘Smush’

Install Gzip compression and caching. This will ensure all pages and files on your site are compressed before the user sees them meaning they will load faster. A good plugin for this is ‘W3 Total Cache’

2. Harden your WordPress website’s security

As WordPress is one of the most used website platforms on the planet, it is prone to misuse and hackers. This is why it’s so important to secure your WordPress website to keep your site safe. Luckily a bunch of free plugins make this a breeze, the best one being ‘Wordfence’. Just follow the setups after installation and you will be safe in no time!

3. Improve your SEO and google rankings

SEO is a major plus point for any WordPress site as it is generally pretty good at getting at least basic rankings in Google without much work. To help Google find your website even better, install a plugin such as ‘Yoast SEO’. We use it on all of our sites to allow basic SEO configuration and optimisation. It’s super simple to use and you can get some pretty good results, even by just following the basics. If you get stuck, there are loads of articles on Google too. We might write one in the future to help you further.

4. Tweak your website’s content

You can improve your website substantially by tweaking the content. It might be that you want to condense an extra long page into smaller, easier to read chunks. Or convert a bulleted list into a handy shareable infographic. Or you might want to go and take a new set of photos for your website to show off some new products or services. Whatever you do, reinvesting in your sites content will usually always end up improving your website.

5. Start gathering data

If you aren’t already, start collecting data on your users. This can be done in a variety of ways. You might want to simply keep a note of visitors names and email addresses so you can send them a newsletter every month or so. For this, you could simply add a form to the bottom of your website or your contact page. You might additionally want further information on the user so to help them decide whether to fill in that longer form, perhaps offer them something in return like a free download or promo code for your service. There is always Google Analytics too which you can setup yourself then use a plugin to enable it on your website. This will help you gather more advanced data of your users such as their location, what device they used to visit your website and how often they visit.

These are just five simple ways you can start improving your WordPress website today. For more help and support we offer a range of services to take your website to the next level. We can help create new content with our copywriting, photography and video services along with redesigning your website and building new pages.

Just get in touch now by emailing hello@debut.studio or calling 07882 791689