WordPress is a very flexible content management system that you can improve your website in many ways. We are continuing our Tips and Tricks series with some additional bits of advice that might be helpful for your current or planned-to-do WordPress website.
Table of Contents
Custom homepage
By default, WordPress delivers the latest posts on the home page. While this might be nice for basic blogging, more advanced websites require more features on the home page. First, create a new page to fill up. Now you can simply go to Settings > Reading page on the WordPress admin dashboard and then select “A static page” for the “Front page displays” setting to change your home page.
Custom CSS codes
There are many themes for WordPress that might be suitable for you, but you would think “If only those borders had a little bit of radius and colored white instead of red.”. Well, you can do it easily by adding some simple CSS codes. First find the component you want to change on your website by inspecting it, then check for its CSS codes. After finding what you want to alter, go to Appearance > Customise, then paste the code under the “Additional CSS” section. Make your changes and see them live on the right-side panel. If the code does not work, try putting ” !important ” at the end before “ ; ” to override other codes related to that specific component.
Custom image sizes
The default image sizes in WordPress are generally not useful. You might want to add additional automatic-resizing options that will fit better on your front page. Go to the filesystem on your hosting to find the functions.php file under the themes folder, in the theme files. Customize and add the codes below to create additional image resizing options. Do not add too many options; since they will take up space in your storage.
add_image_size( 'sidebar-thumb', 120, 120, true ); // Hard Crop Mode
add_image_size( 'homepage-thumb', 220, 180 ); // Soft Crop Mode
add_image_size( 'singlepost-thumb', 590, 9999 ); // Unlimited Height ModeFurther compressing the images
JPG is a long-living image compression format but there are some better and newer ones as well. Use one of the WebP conversion plugins (we recommend WebP Express) to automatically create a WebP version of JPG and PNG files that will vastly reduce their sizes. This will improve the website performance, thus your SEO performance.
Link structure
Defining the link structure of your WordPress website is one of the first things you should do. Changing it later has a big potential to mess up all your website. When you start developing a new WordPress site, immediately go to the Settings > Permalinks page to customize your link structure.
Splitting posts into pages
While splitting posts into pages is one of the evilest things that news sites abuse, sometimes it is really necessary to divide long posts. You can simply put the ” <!–nextpage–> ” code in your posts’ “Text” code to divide your posts into some pages.
Run your website on your local PC
Working in a test environment before updating your website is always crucial. Many things might go wrong when you decide to change something on your website; your visitors will see them. You can do whatever you want if you run a copy of your website on your own computer. You can use MAMP to create a server on your PC that hosts your website to your local network. The first configuration of MAMP is a bit tricky but it is essential for developing WordPress websites.