WordPress is known for its user-friendliness. You don’t need to have extensive technical coding skills to handle a WordPress Site. It comes with a lot of features, some of which are often overlooked.
This post will show you how to use some amazing WordPress features that are very handy for beginners.
You may have seen the screen options several times after logging into the admin panel. These options are meant for showing and hiding items in the admin area.
By checking the boxes, you can select the items that you want to see on the dashboard. “At a Glance” will let you have a look at the total number of pages, posts and comments on your website. By checking the “Activity” box, you will see details related to your recently published content and comments. If you have already installed and set up Yoast SEO the “Yoast SEO Overview” will show you the posts that have good SEO scores and those that have no focused keyword. With “Quick Draft”, you can see the recent posts that have been kept in draft mode and it will also let you quickly put new content in draft mode. Finally, the “Welcome Section” lets you edit the default front page, add pages and posts, manage widgets and menus, turn on and off the comments etc.
Generally, the visual editor is used to create hyperlinks on WordPress by the insertion of links into a pop-up. Most users don’t know that WordPress 4.5 has introduced an inline link editing visual editor through which you can insert a link just by pasting a hyperlinked text. WordPress will then automatically convert it into a link.
WordPress’s drag and drop widgets into the sidebar feature are very popular with its users. However, it’s not easy to do when using a laptop. Thus, WordPress has introduced the hidden accessibility mode for widgets that enables users to add widgets without dragging and dropping. You can activate the feature after clicking the on screen options button on the widgets page.
Most WordPress beginners rely on themes to create a WordPress website. But very often the theme doesn’t look the same after activating it. Most themes require you to buy a paid version to use the full features. Therefore, there’s an option to preview the theme live before activating it. Just hover over the theme and you will get the option. This gives you the chance to activate the theme only if the live preview displays the full version or it matches your requirements.
WordPress comes with basic image editing features like cropping, rotating and thumbnail options. You can also resize and flip images in horizontal and vertical directions. Right after selecting an image from the media library or from your computer, you get the editing options under the attachment details on the right hand.
Just click on edit image and you will get the below mentioned options.
This feature is really effective for tutorial type posts. If you have a long piece of content, you can simply divide it into multiple pages by adding a <!–nextpage–> tag to your post.
Make sure that you are using the text mode while pasting the tag. In the visual mode, you can press Alt+Shift+P by placing the cursor where you want a page break.
WordPress automatically embeds the content of a link from some popular sites like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram etc. Just paste a URL from one of these sites and WordPress will automatically embed it.
There’s a hidden master page in WordPress for all blog options. The option is hidden to restrict users from messing up the settings. Therefore, be careful before making any changes. To access the page, click the URL: http://example.com/wp-admin/options.php. Just replace example with your own domain name and you will have a list of many options.
Those are some of the amazing WordPress features that you should know about to better customize your website. Don’t just publish your content, customize it how you want it and truly make it your own!