WordPress is by now most recognized blogging platform and CMS (Content Management System), used by large number of developers. Those more experienced with WordPress knows exactly what to do with it and how to optimize it, in order to get the most of it’s resources, and how to make your site look better.

Cases where blogs of some well known bloggers are not quite optimized are not rare. Bloggers do what bloggers are supposed to do – to write. Their developers and webmasters are the ones who are supposed to do the work “under the hood” or even to only advise.

In order to make some contribution to this problem, we have gathered a list of couple of tips on how to make your blog a batter place, more pleasant for work.

Writing Settings

First of all, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Writing.

Under those options you can make some very useful changes. Many bloggers never even click click this option and as a result the get unpleasant working environment. If this part of the settings is unfamiliar to you too, here is the screenshot of it – study it and it be of use to you:

Change the Size of Writing Box

By default, the size of the writing box (the place where you type the text of your post) is only 10 lines. You must agree that this is very small space for normal work. Luckily, there’s an option with which you can change the size of the writing box to, let’s say, 20 lines. This is very useful for blogs that have many editors.

The screenshot shows the 10 lines writing box. Increase it to at least 20-25 lines.

Formatting Options

In Writing Settings options, WordPress offers two nice options:

• Convert emoticons like 🙂 and 😛 to graphics on display
• WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically

The first option is pretty clear and it offers whether to convert text smiles to graphical ones, or no.

The second option should be turned on, as it will fix HTML code errors. Let WordPress to control your code. It’s the system based on this code and it’s very useful that code you have inserted is valid. This option is of great help to those unfamiliar with coding.

Change Default Category Base Name

Default category in WordPress is “uncategorized”. You can change this name in whatever you want in order to make it more clear to your readers. The best is to assign some SEO friendly name to it. You can also choose some other category as default category. It’s up to you.

Remote Publishing

If you are using some external editor (not WordPress built-in version) to write your posts, than you must enable XML-RPC remote publishing option. If you are writing from inside WordPress dashboard, this option can be disabled.

You can also use post via e-mail option if you want to send posts to WordPress in form of an email. This option is useful while you’re on a trip or simply want to skip signing in to your admin account.

Update “Update Services”

When on a Writing Settings page, you’ll notice that WordPress notifies some some services (ex. Ping-O-Matic) after you publish or update some post. You can add more services to this list and increase your blog’s presence. There’s a nice list created by Vladimir Prelovac that can help you with this. On the other hand, to much pinging is not good, either. To control this automatically, you can use MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin.

Reading Settings

To access this page’s options, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Reading. You’ll see some option which controls the front-end of your blog. You can choose how many posts will be listed (the default is 10). If your theme doesn’t support post excerpts, than you might want to lower this number.

If, however, you want to modify your theme to support and show post excerpts instead of full post, AdriaHost with that.

Permalinks Settings

By default, WordPress uses generic permalinks with numbers and question marks in it. This is not very useful when doing SEO optimization for your blog.

Luckily, WordPress also allows you to use custom permalink structure, and this is something you must use. It will help your readers to easily identify blog category, tags, etc. and it’s useful for positioning your blog in various search engines.

Bad permalink structure example – avoid it:

http://example.com/example/?p=123

Good permalink structure – use it:

http://example.com/how-to-write-a-post

If you are not familiar with these options, you can get in touch with us and will cover it for you.

Discussion Settings

There are a lot of settings here which can be used to control the way of comments and discussion on your blog. You can enable or disable pingbacks and trackbacks, turn off comments completely, separate number of comments into pages, choose the way of how comments will be sorted etc.

An important option is whether you want comments to be automatically published upon submition, or you want them approved first.

Here you can take part in comments moderation – block unwanted words, ban IP addresses and user accounts, etc. This is useful when fighting SPAM.

Beside those we mentioned, there are number of options you should inspect.

Use WordPress Tags

According to WordPress Codex, every post should have at least one tag assigned to it. This is important if you want multiple posts published under one group or one keyword or topic.

Tags are useful for SEO optimization of your blog. If you’re using some tags multiple times, you SEO rank will be higher.

WordPress guru, Vladimir Prelovac, has an excellent article on how to improve Improve Search Engine Placement with Tags.

If you happen to have any questions about WordPress optimizion, please contact us. You can also write some tips on how you optimized your blog.