WordPress now powers more than over a third of all websites, making it the largest website builder in the world.

While we prefer GroovePages over WordPress, a lot of our clients still have WordPress Websites or woud prefer WordPress themselves.

WordPress is easy to use and very popular, and it is also considered to be the best content management system for SEO.

If you want to leverage the power of WordPress for your website, you need to keep up with the latest tips to be able to optimize your website. If you don’t follow these tips your website might fall behind in terms of rankings, user-friendliness, and trust.

5 WordPress Tips

1. Pick An SEO-Friendly Theme

One of the attractions of WordPress is its abundance of the many high-quality free and paid website themes you can use. The number of attractive and functional themes can be hard to choose from. However, there is one differentiating quality that you should factor in when vetting potential themes for your WordPress site.

This is SEO-friendliness. When browsing through the WordPress themes, you will see that many themes sport an “S E O-friendly” tag.

Make sure that the theme you choose has this tag, as well as the following performance functions:

A. That it is a Mobile Responsive Design

One of the main points of an S E O-friendly theme is mobile responsiveness (just a fancy way of saying the site will look great on all devices). This is a must-have in today’s smartphone era. With visitors browsing your site from desktops, smartphones, and tablets, it’s essential that your site’s theme can reformat itself to suit any device.

Mobile is becoming the largest category of browsing, accounting for more than 50% of website traffic on Google. Thanks to this, it is a good idea to run your site through Google’s Mobile‐friendly Test tool to make sure it performs well on mobile devices.

B, Lightweight-ness
The other crucial theme attribute that influences SEO is how lightweight a theme is. As page loading speed is an impactful ranking factor, your site must load as fast as it possibly can.

One of the keys to a lightning-fast page load speed is to have a lightweight website theme. You want a theme that will load fast and that does not need a lot of plug-ins to operate. Some themes come with pre-installed plugins that can bog down page speed significantly.

This is one of the reasons we prefer GroovePages because it does not require plug-ins.

And if you are wondering how your site is performing with its current theme, contact us for a website audit.

2. Create Clean Permalinks

Another top WordPress tip moving into 2021 is the creation of clean permalinks.

Permalinks are the permanent links that you see when you access a webpage. When creating pages and posts on WordPress, you will see a box in the top section of the editing page. In this box, you can input the permalink that you want for your new page or post. We know this as the URL.

When creating these links, it’s important that you make them clean and simple. A clean, simple permalink is much more user-friendly than a long, number filled one that is confusing to look at.

For example, “https://otherwebsitedesign.company/669669/about” is much less user-friendly than “https://spiderwebdesign.company/about”.

Besides being easy on the eye, and easy to understand, clean permalinks are also more trustable. Strange permalinks, that are long, and random-looking often look suspicious to internet users. A page that has a complicated, strange string of numbers, letters, and symbols as its link, might make you wonder if you are landing on a scam site or a spammy URL.

At Spider Web Design our WordPress experts manage every aspect of your WordPress website, so you can focus on growing your business. Check out our comprehensive WordPress care plans on our website. We can save you hours of work and a lot of worry every month. Oh, and no need to worry about the latest tips – we’ve got you covered!

3. Get an SSL Certificate

Another way to increase trust on your WordPress site is to get an SSL certificate. Have you ever browsed a page and seen a small green padlock displayed in front of the page URL?

If so, this site has an SSL certificate. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a layer of coding that encrypts the connection between browsers and webpages, thereby protecting the user. If you have an SSL certificate for your site, this will also change your URL from http.yoursite.com to https.yoursite.com.

Having an SSL certificate indicates to users that your site has a secure connection, and this can increase trust and number of pages viewed, and decrease bounce rates.

Besides this, Google has been prioritizing site security for users and has been adapting its algorithm accordingly. Now, Google is favoring sites with an https URL over sites that don’t. Additionally, websites without an SSL certificate can show up with a red warning sign on Google. This alerts users to the fact that they are browsing an unsecured site, and can inspire quick distrust.

4. Optimize Your Site Speed

According to Google, people browsing will leave your page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

So obviously, it is essential that you optimize your WordPress site for speed. Some of the ways in which you can maximize page speed include:

Choose a lightweight theme

• Choose a responsive theme
• Optimize images for web
• Reduce redirects
• Utilize browser caching
• Improve server response time

5. Optimize for Voice Search

Thanks to the popularity of voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, people are increasingly using voice search to browse the web. In fact, more than 20% of Google inqueries are voice search.

There are a number of things you can do to optimize your site for voice search.

Everything from making sure to use conversational language in your content, to getting your local Google My Business listing up to date, to optimizing your site so that it loads super fast. If you want to find out more, the good folks over at DigitalPapercuts.com have a nice aservice that can help you to optimize your website.

We hope these tips help get your website off to a great start. If you struggle to manage your WordPress website or just need a little help with a one-off problem, drop us a line.

We’re WordPress experts and love helping other WordPress users get the most out of their websites!