Top 5 WordPress Best Practices for Editors. Prove Your Skills and Get Certified.

According to data from W3Techs, WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet in 2022. This is an increase from 39.5% in 2021. That means that two out of every five websites use WordPress making it by far the world’s most popular content management system.

In this article we reflect on 5 WordPress Element Best Practices for Editors and include some great reference links where you can learn more about these key topics:

Categories and Tags

WordPress manages content by grouping it with taxonomies. You can add more taxonomies, but the default taxonomies are the WordPress Category and Tag. When used correctly, both can greatly improve the user experience and SEO of your blog.

A category is a WordPress taxonomy used to sort your content. They work as a list of topics or table of contents which help improve your websites organization and navigation. By default, WordPress category is “Uncategorized”. The category that’s automatically assigned to any post if you don’t select a category when you publish a post. Fortunately, you can create as many categories as you want. You can also select a new default category. For example, if you are an academic institution you may want to setup pre-defined categories like academics, admissions, sports, learning resources, student life, community partnerships, etc. The Uncategorized category can’t be deleted, but it can be renamed which is recommended.

A tag is another type of WordPress taxonomy, but it works differently than the WordPress category where the category is used for large topics and tags for smaller descriptive terms. A tag can be any word or phrase you want, always use the main keywords that best describe your post and it’s always a good idea to use more than one tag per post. For example, if you’re writing a post about school admissions, you could use tags such as transcripts, tuition, application, test scores, testing, etc.

Learn more about categories and tags here: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/wordpress/wordpress-categories-tags

Managing Posts and Pages

WordPress Posts are used by admins and users to interact with your website. A Post is the dynamic principal element or content of a blog, used to create writings, compositions, or discussions. Managing Posts can be a lot of work but having good taxonomies and tag structures can help.

Don’t let content increase the load speed of your website. Site speed is literally the holy grail of any website. When you add images and videos to your Posts or Pages, make sure to reduce the file size.

Another best practice when creating your next Post or Page is to consider enabling comments, at least for some pages. It’s a great way for your readers to interact with you and your content but remember to manage your comments through your WordPress Admin.

WordPress Pages are used for static content. For example, the About Us or Contact page. These Pages are rarely altered. Pages don’t use tags and categories; it doesn’t include date and author details and comments are disabled. WordPress Pages are like the foundation of your website. Pages can also drive conversions and generate leads. The primary purpose of a Landing Page is to get users to perform an action like subscribe to a newsletter, download an e-book, or purchase a product. It is essential to include a strong title or headline, have quality images, engaging content and clear call to action elements when creating a landing page but most importantly, use search engine-friendly permalinks. Generally, it’s best practice to use the Post (title or headline) name as the permalink.

Using Post and Page Builders

Page builders are a crucial addition for your WordPress site especially if you’re aiming to grab the attention of a target audience surrounded by a ton of competition. If you want to avoid the cookie-cutter look or designing a website from scratch in HTML and CSS, then consider page builders instead.

With simple drag-and-drop tools you can save a lot of time and still create simple layouts with style. Even after the arrival of the intuitive Gutenberg block editor, WordPress page builders can offer far more flexibility over your WordPress designs.

When searching for a professional drag-and-drop WordPress page builder you should consider the following:

1. Does it offer a frontend editing interface?
2. Does it offer an ergonomic user interface?
3. Avoid plugin lock-in effect, if the plugin crashes for some reason the content should still be there.
4. Does it offer reliable speed (loading live site pages) and performance.
5. Is it a theme-agnostic, can you use the page builder with different themes?
6. Does it offer mobile-friendly and cross-browser compatibility?

Learn more about page builders here: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/wordpress-page-builders-expectations/

Managing Your Media Library

Poor media library management can ruin your site’s user experience (UX), slowing loading times and increasing bounce rates. Mango-wp share some great tips for managing your WordPress site’s media more effectively including:

1. Organizing your media into folders, but you’ll need a plugin for this.
2. Add categories or tags to your media so you can easily sort and filter through your media without requiring them to be in specific folders.
3. Clear the clutter and remove unwanted media.
4. Remove or optimize large media files.
5. Rename your media files for better SEO and nicer filesystem.

Customize Your Profile and Screen Options

Your profile is the information you’d like to be shown along with your name when you comment on WordPress.com sites. You can update your profile, photo, links and see how your profile displays by navigating to the My Profile page. It’s important to note that the information is publicly accessible by anyone on the internet so be sure to only share information that you are comfortable sharing with everyone (regardless of whether your site is set to private or not).

Screen Options is a fly down menu button located on the top right corner of some pages in your WordPress admin area. When clicked, Screen Options menu shows options to configure the view of that page in your admin area. It usually contains check boxes so you can show and hide different sections of an admin screen. This can help you declutter your workspace. For example, you could choose to hide the discussion meta box, category selector, or custom fields from the post edit screen if you don’t use them that often.

Prove Your Skills and Get WordPress Certified

WordPress is simple, powerful, and free. More than a CMS, it’s a full application framework that can do virtually everything. It’s no wonder WordPress skills are hot and in demand. From middle-school to high class modern professionals, this technology is worth learning and a skill worth validating! Attainment of the Knowledge Pillars WordPress Certified Editor certification proves the competency of the candidate at an industry standard-level and the readiness to enter the job market. Hiring managers can use this certification as a means of justifying the recruitment, as well as an index for the placement of a job seeker in a job. If you’re exploring a career in journalism, multi-media, writing, blogging, designing, marketing or maybe you want to be an entrepreneur, the WordPress Certified Editor certification can help you:

• Stand out from the crowd and meet the requirements of a job or improve your college application.
• Improve your CV or freelance portfolio.
• Test your knowledge to see how good you are.
• Learn new skills and increase your earnings.
• Gain trust and creditability.

Knowledge Pillars will soon release the WordPress Certified Editor Professional Development Program. If you’re interested in learning how to prepare yourself and your students for this exam request more information from our team today.