Nowadays, the easiest thing you can do is launching your own blog. Platforms like WordPress allows you to create website with as low as few dollars per month. However, when you look at the websites on the internet, not all websites are successful. 90% of the bloggers close or leave the site unattended in first three years of time. If you are planning to launch your blog, here are the top 10 effective habits you should follow to become a successful WordPress blogger.
Related: 200+ Free WordPress tutorials for beginners.
Before Reading
Well, there are certain pre-requisites to become a blogger. This is essential; no matter you use WordPress or other platform to publish your site. Finding a suitable niche, focusing on content building and waiting patiently are kind of prerequisites for any blogger. Most importantly, you should not fall prey into following type catchy traps by looking into someone’s website:
- Be your own boss
- Quit 9 to 6 job and start blogging
- Earn 10K per month with affiliate marketing
- Become a blog scientist
Not all these worthless stuffs will fit your need and approach. On other hand, there are many websites backed and funded by investors. It is not possible for an individual blogger to invest millions of dollars for starting a blog. Therefore, understand the ground reality and focus on your strength to build your blog instead of trying to replicate someone else. Checkout 5 essential tips for successful blogging before you try to manage WordPress blog.
10 Effective Habits of Successful WordPress Bloggers
- No content stealing
- Play around with local installation
- Keep the stuff up-to-date
- Less plugins and minimalist theme
- Periodic content update
- Regular backups
- Focus on user experience
- Using premium stuffs
- Content recycling
- Being part of community
Let us discuss each topic in detail.
1. No Content Stealing
The foremost important thing is to be honest. Do not try to reprocess or steal content from other websites. Well, there are no real penalty for stealing content from other sites. However, you cannot do this for 10 years in your life. If you plan to hire freelancers, make sure to check the plagiarism before publishing content. In case, something missed in publishing and you find it later, do not hesitate to take down the content.
Utter untruth in WordPress world is to say, “30 minutes guides to launch WordPress blog” or “5 minutes WordPress installation”. Yes, you can launch the blog in 30 minutes or install WordPress in 5 minutes – that is true. However, you will get a skeleton blog and the next thing you will understand is – “Content is King”. In order to create a king content, you need to spend years of time and investment. Therefore, do not steal someone’s years of hard work.
2. Play Around with Local Installation
WordPress is complex to work and manage. It needs plenty of time in setting up the site. The best way to practice is having your own development or local environment. We strongly recommend having your own laptop / computer for managing your content locally. There are applications like MAMP, WAMP and Local by Flywheel that allows you to install WordPress on your computer and manage the settings.
On other hand, you should always have a staging site replicating your original site. You can have this on the server or better to have it on your computer. Make sure, you test and deploy any changes in the staging or local site before doing it in the live server. This will help to save plenty of time in avoiding breaking your live website and running with troubleshooting mode.
3. Keep the Stuff Up-to-date
WordPress is a software application. Similar to any other IT software, you have to update the application in order to protect from hackers. When you look at the statistics from official WordPress.org site, more than 70% of WordPress website uses outdated version. These websites are the target for hackers. You should update PHP, theme, plugin and core WordPress to the latest version.
Again, ensure to test in local server before deploying the changes in production setup.
4. Less Plugins and Minimalist Theme
There is a popular proverb say – “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. 90% of commercial themes offer unlimited features under single theme. You may not need all these features, especially when kicking off a new blog as an individual. In addition, these themes work with heavy shortcodes relying on page builder plugins and use plenty of JavaScript that will slow down your website. Later it will become impossible for switching the theme. Therefore, choose a minimal theme that caters your need instead of looking into beautiful glittering themes.
Plugins are double-edged swords. Unlike single theme on a site, WordPress supports unlimited plugins on single installation. Many bloggers install 40 to 50 plugins on a blog hosted on shared server. This will slow down your blog, create conflicts when updating and break functionalities on the site. Ensure to limit your plugins to less than 20 and choose good quality plugins for your need. Even quality plugins like Yoast SEO, WooCommerce or W3 Total Cache plugins will create problems on shared hosting server.
You can install the plugin on local site and check the backend database tables to understand how the plugin works. For example, WooCommerce will create more than 30 tables in database. It will also add order tracking and store analytics in WordPress admin panel. If you need online store, ensure to host your site on VPS or dedicated WooCommerce hosting server instead of using shared server.
5. Periodic Content Update
Google loves blogs that publish quality content regularly. WordPress blog will create many stuffs when you publish a blog posts. It will add the post in site’s RSS feed, category’s RSS feed, category archives, tag archives, author archive, date archives, etc. There are many syndication platforms use these feeds and provide customized content to their users. Therefore, periodically publishing content will keep your site alive and increase search engine and user engagement.
6. Regular Backups
Many people tell you one side of the story that WordPress is most popular powers more than 30% websites on the web. They will not tell other part of story – hackers attack millions of WordPress sites on daily basis. The popularity also comes with a problem to be secure all times.
Disaster can struck any time, even if you are careful. The best way to recover is having a daily backup of your site. You can rely on hosting company, purchase a backup plugin or do the backup yourself. It is also a good practice to keep a local site with your backup so that it is easy to test plugins and themes.
7. Focus on User Experience
Do not build your blog for Google rather focus on user experience. Google updates the algorithm thousands of time every year making it impossible to build a blog based on current search result pages. Over the period, usefulness of your content to users will decide the status your blog rather than Google search.
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8. Using Premium Stuffs
Remember the proverb – “There is no free lunch”. All those free themes and plugins will cost you heavily when you need a support or customization. Yes, it is unavoidable to use free plugins like Yoast SEO as it caters the need of simple blog. However, keep your expectation that any update in the plugin may break your site and you need to look for the solution on your own.
Keeping this in mind, we strongly recommend choosing a premium theme. This will help you to get quick support from theme developer and resolve the plugin conflicts.
9. Content Recycling and Maintenance
Recycling blog posts is not required for a new blog. We run this blog for almost a decade and have 2K+ blog posts under different categories. It is not possible to keep all content up to date at all point of time. Therefore, for us it is essential to update and recycle the content to avoid bad user experience.
In addition to content maintenance, you have to do multiple maintenance tasks for running a WordPress blog. Cleaning up spam comments, deleting junk database content and updating theme/plugin/PHP/WordPress core are regular maintenance tasks of a WordPress blogger.
10. Being Part of Community
Finally yet importantly – being part of WordPress community is important to get the latest ongoing updates. You can either do this as a habit or plan for participating in WordPress events nearer to you. It is also a good idea to share your WordPress ideas and thoughts on your own blog. This will help WordPress grow further as a free and open source content management system.
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