8 Essential Wordpress Tips For Nigerian Beginners

Did you know that your WordPress site can perform essential tasks such as; schedule page/blog posts for the future? Manage multiple blog contributors, embed videos & tweets, and move your blog posts from front page to another page on your site? If you haven’t used this list of cool features, you aren’t getting the most out of WordPress.

I hope you learn a thing or two from this article as you read further.

1. Schedule Posts: In wordpress, you can schedule posts to go live at a particular time and date, so you don’t need to be at your computer (or even awake) when the post go live. Here’s how to schedule your blog/page posts.

In the WordPress dashboard, go to the “add new post or new page” icon on the side bar. Write the post you wish to schedule.

In the top-right of the page, look for a box titled “Publish,” where you’ll find an option that reads “Publish immediately.”

Click the blue “Edit” text next to “Publish immediately” and choose the month, date, year and time you want your post to be published. Remember to use military time (3:00 p.m. would be 15:00).

Click the gray “OK” button.

The “Publish immediately” text should now change to “Schedule for,” with whatever date and time you have chosen.

If you’re ready to go, click the blue “Schedule” button (formerly “Publish”). Your post is set to go.

2. Customize Your Page and Blog Post URLs (SEO): WordPress automatically creates URLs for your pages or posts, but sometimes you’ll need to adjust. Here are the most common instances you’ll want to change URLs.

Your page or post URL contains special characters like %, &, $, “, or *. These characters make it difficult for search engines to read and can be problematic for browsers, potentially preventing some of your pages from loading.

Your post or page title is really long and contains words not optimized for search. For example, if we write a post called “Top 10 Digital Media Blog Posts of 2012 from @CarolineWabara,” WordPress may automatically generate this URL: “top-10-digital-media-blog-posts-of-2012-from-carolinewabara.” Search engines prefer shorter URLs, so it’s worth removing words that won’t help the posts or page’s ranking. Search engines also prefer that high-ranking keywords appear at the beginning of URLs. In the example above, if we want to rank for the phrase “top-10-digital-media-blog-posts-of-2012-from-carolinewabara” we may want to adjust the URL to read “2012-digital-media-blog-posts”. If you notice that your new page or post URL doesn’t match one of the two cases listed above, here’s how to change it.

In the WordPress backend, go to the Edit screen for the post or page you wish to edit.
Just below the title, click the gray “Edit” button next to the permalink. If instead of “Edit,” you see a button that says “Change Permalinks,” Click that button and click the “Post name” radio button on the “Permalink Settings” page. Then click the blue “Save Changes” button. Go back to the post or page you wish to edit and you should see the “Edit” button.
When you click “Edit,”, the URL will change to a text box, ready for you to alter. Remove special characters and any words that could hurt your search engine rankings. That means generic words like “a,” “or,” “from,” “and,” “of,” “in” and “the.” As mentioned above, we might change phrase “top-10-digital-media-blog-posts-of-2012-from-carolinewabara” to “2012-digital-media-blog-posts”. Make sure you also separate each word with a dash (-).
Click the gray “OK” button.
Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save your changes.

Note: it’s not good practice to change permalinks after the post or page has already been published. Once your page or post is live, people might share it, link to it, email it or even write it down. WordPress usually excels at forwarding links, but it isn’t always 100% effective, and forwarding can hurt your search rankings.

3. Embed Media (Videos, Tweets, and Presentations): WordPress allows you to embed your YouTube videos, SlideShare Presentations, and tweets within your blog posts with ease. Here’s how to do it.

Go to your YouTube Video of choice, grab the embed code,
Go to your wordpress dashboard, click on new post or page, change the edit setting from visual to text,
Paste your YouTube video embed code, click post, and visit the page or post to see your video live on your page.
You can do the same with your SlideShare presentation and tweets.

4. Upload PDF EBook: Apart from uploading photos to your page and blog posts, WordPress allows you to upload your ebook and creates a download link for you to share paste on your page and share with your readers. Here’s how:

Make sure your PDF eBook is below 10MB.
Go to “Media” on your wordpress dashboard, click on “add media” and upload your ebook.
Once you’ve finished uploading, copy the downlink that’s been generated for you and paste it on the page or blog post of your choice.
That’s it!

5. Change Blog Post Authors: If you have so many guest bloggers writing for your blog like mashable, here’s how you can customize the blog post’s author name to show the contributor’s name instead of your username as the author.

Go to Edit screen for the blog post that need an author change.
In the top-right of the page, click the “Screen Options” tab and a list of options will drop down.
Check the box that says “Author.” A new box on the page should display, titled “Author” and containing a drop-down box to choose the author of the post.
Select the author from the drop-down list. If he/she isn’t listed, you may need to add him or her as a user.
Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save the post under the new author.

6. Customize Your Blog (Move Blog Posts from Front Page to another Page): Do you display your blog page on your home (front) page? Don’t you wish you could move it from the home page to another page on your wordpress site using www.yoursite.com/blog? Well, wordpress has made it easy for you via the customize button.

7. Re-Arrange Your WordPress Pages To Your Order Of Preference: By default, wordpress arranges your page according to alphabet (i.e. HOME, ABOUT US, BLOG, CONTACT US, SERVICES, PORTFOLIO, etc.), but you can re-order or move your wordpress pages to your taste (i.e. HOME, ABOUT US, SERVICES, PORTFOLIO, BLOG, CONTACT US, etc.). Here’s how.

Go to the particular page already published.
Click “edit page,” then look to your right-hand side for “order” change the default number zero to 1, 2 or 9, depending on the number of pages you have and the exact arrangement you want your pages to be placed.
Click “publish” and view your pages on your front page.
That’s it!

8. Create Drop-down Page Menu: WordPress allows you to create drop-down page menus such as this: https://carolinewabara.com/guidebooks/digital-marketing-ebook/

All you need to do is to create a sub-page under a parent page. Here’s how:

Go to the page you want to place under a “parent page such as https://carolinewabara.com/guidebooks.”
Click “edit page”, go to your right-hand side under “page attributes”