Launch Checklist

A good backup solution is the ultimate fail-safe against website problems.

Whether it’s a hack, malware, or just a plugin update gone wrong, having the proper backups in place can save you from a world of headaches.

A good backup is your best friend.

When something goes wrong with your website, having a backup that you can quickly deploy will solve your problem in most cases. Of course, you’ll want to keep plenty of backups so you can go back far enough to deploy a copy of your website from before the problem existed.

The downside is you’ll lose any content or updates you’ve done between the backup you deploy and today, but that’s often a much easier pill to swallow then losing everything.

Backup solutions can be found for free, and cloud storage space is cheap these days. For a few cents a day you can have peace of mind knowing the worst thing that can happen to your website is you have to revert it to an older version.

Automated backup solutions for WordPress.

As your first line of defense, your hosting company should be doing at least some form of backups on your websites. If they aren’t you might want to consider another host.

Sadly, while these server-side backups are common (and you’re likely already paying for it one way or another) they aren’t known to be the most reliable. That’s why it’s good to have those backups plus another off-site solution.

There are plenty of options inside the WordPress ecosystem, including: UpdraftPlus, ValtPress, BackupBuddy, WP Time Capsule, and many more.

Most backup plugins come with a standard set of features for free that allow you to store your backups in your own storage solution (like Google Drive or Dropbox).

Paid or premium plans to some of these backup solutions will also include the storage space as part of their offer.

Don’t forget to test your backups!

Seeing a long list of all your backups can provide you with a false sense of security. Those backups aren’t much help if they don’t work!

It’s important to regularly test your backups to ensure they can be deployed without any issue. It’s not uncommon to find problems restoring backups from some of the free solutions.

To test you can try deploying a backup to a staging site or ‘dummy’ install on your server.

Set a regular appointment with yourself to go through and manually check your backups to make sure they are working correctly.

Optimize the visibility of your website in the world’s largest search engine.

While your website doesn’t have to be connected to Search Console to appear in search results, connecting to this free service can speed up the process of getting index and provide you with useful insights as to how your website is performing in search.

How to setup Google Search Console

If it’s your first time using Search Console (formerly known as webmaster tools), head over to the Search Console website, and click the Start Now button.

Note: You’ll need to have a Google account (like Gmail) to proceed.

After you’ve logged in, you’ll be greeted with a Welcome screen (pictured below). You’ll put your domain in the “Domain” field on the left hand side.

From that point, Google will walk you through the process of verifying your domain. If you’ve already installed Google Analytics with the same account the verification process is much quicker.

What can I do with Search Console?

Inside search console you can submit URLs for indexing, submit your XML sitemap, and monitor your presence in search engines.

The ‘Performance’ tab in the menu on the left will show you what queries your website is ranking for, how many times people have seen it, your average position, and how many clicks you’ve received. All of this can be very useful data as you improve the SEO of your website.

Keep in mind that a brand new website won’t be getting many (if any!) views or clicks. Your best bet is to set this up as soon as you launch a website and give it time to start collecting data.

Additional resources

For additional information on how to setup and use Search Console, check out this great tutorial:

Google Analytics is a free, and powerful tool to see how users interact with your website.

You’ll want to start collecting data as soon as you possibly can, so having the analytics integration setup at launch is key.

How to install Google Analytics

The first thing you’ll need to install Google Analytics is to setup the analytics account from within Google Analytics’ dashboard. Visit analytics.google.com, sign into your account (you’ll need a Google/Gmail account for this) and follow the steps to setup a new property.

If you need step-by-step instructions on how to setup a property in Google Analytics, follow this tutorial provided by Google.

Once your property is setup, you’ll need to copy a short script (tracking code) that will go into the code on your website. The optimal place to install this code is in the <head> tag of your website. This way it fires on each page of your website.

You can refer to your theme’s documentation on how to add this type of code. Often theme developers will provide “hooks” where you can easily add this information.

If you’re feeling less techie, a plugin like MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin will help you connect your website without having to dig through code.

Testing your analytics

The easiest way to test your analytics is to use two browser windows (or tabs). In one, you’ll log into your Google Analytics account and go to the “realtime” report located on the left side of the screen.

From there you’ll be able to see any “live” traffic on your website.

In your second browser window, simply visit your website.

Within a few seconds you should see the number on your live report change from 0 to 1 (that’s you in the other tab!). This means that Google is now tracking activity on your website. To be sure, try navigating to another page and see if your analytics report shows you that the user has moved.

What should I be looking for in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics gives you enormous amounts of data to analyze how people are using your website. Sometimes it can just be too much!

But there are a few metrics that are universally important…

• Pageviews. Page views will tell you exactly how many views you’re getting on your pages (catchy name, right?). You an also measure unique page views which will show you how many individual users looked at a page (vs those who might have looked at a page multiple times.
• Source. Where is your traffic coming from? The Acquisition tab will help you monitor how people are finding your site: organic search, direct, email referral, or social. This helps you determine which marketing efforts are driving the most traffic.
• Bounce rate. Bounce rate is measuring how many people land in your site and view a single page without taking any further action. In most cases you want to see your bounce rate to be low… However, some pages (like landing pages with no menu) will naturally have a higher bounce rate— and that’s okay.
• Locations. Location data helps you understand where your audience is at on the map. You can view which countries, states, and even cities are visiting your website.
• Devices. Mobile viewing has quickly become the most popular way for people to browse websites— but that’s not the case 100% of the time. Google Analytics will help you understand what devices are visiting your website so you can optimize for them.
• Site Content. Which pages are most popular on your website? Viewing your Site Content data will help you understand what content on your website is most popular. This is great for measuring how changes might increase (or decrease!) visits to a specific page (or pages).
• Conversions. Google Analytics allows you to setup ‘Goals’, which often are some sort of conversion metric (like a sale or sign up). You can give your goals monetary value and see how well your conversions are performing at a glance.
• Demographics. Demographic data isn’t on by default, but if you opt in you can view information like gender, age, and interest of your visitors.

Make sure to connect your Analytics and Search Console accounts

Google provides both their Analytics software as well as the Search Console. Both of these are highly valuable on their own, but when integrated together you can get much more interesting data that communicates between the two platforms. Here’s a tutorial on how to connect the two platforms.

WordPress’ built-in feature to keep your website from showing up in search.

Never in the history of websites has one tiny checkbox caused so many “oh shit” moments.

Inside your dashboard, under ‘Settings’ > ‘Reading’ there lives a small checkbox labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. When checked, bots/crawlers/spiders will be turned away from indexing your website.

This is a great feature while your website is under development (and you don’t want it to be found) but forgetting to uncheck this once you go live can cause quite the embarrassment.

It’s always best to double (if not triple) check this box is unticked once you’re website is ready for its big debut.

An XML sitemap is a digital roadmap to tell search engines where to find your pages.

Eventually, by clicking every link on your website, Google (and other search engines) can put together their own map, but creating an XML sitemap provides all that data to search engines up front. This makes your indexing process much more simple (and quicker!).

What does an XML sitemap look like?

The designer inside you won’t be very excited— the XML sitemap is a pretty simple table with text providing the URL of each of your pages (and posts) as well as the last modified date.

While it might not be much to look at, your sitemap gives search engines the exact coordinates of all of your webpages, which is extremely valuable in getting your pages indexed (so they can be shown in search results).

How to create an XML sitemap

Creating an XML sitemap is as easy as installing an SEO plugin (like Yoast, SEOPress, or RankMath to name a few). If you already use an SEO plugin, reference your plugins documentation to find out how to enable your sitemap (often, this is done by default).

If you’re unsure if your sitemap already exists, try typing in your domain to the omnibar, followed by ‘/sitemap.xml’ or ‘sitemaps.xml’. If your sitemap already exists, it will likely be in one of those two places.

I have a sitemap, now what?

After your sitemap is created, you’ll want to let the search engines know it’s there. Your sitemap can be submitted to Google through Search Console, or with Bing through Webmaster Tools. You should get some sort of validation after submitting your sitemap that the search engine has it, but it might take a few days before they crawl the whole thing.

Over time, search engines will continue to reference your sitemap to crawl your site more efficiently. This is key for a website that regularly publishes new content they want available via search quickly.

Some people choose to link to their sitemap in their website’s footer, but as long as your sitemap has been indexed it isn’t necessary. It’s unlikely visitors will get much use out of an XML sitemap, and implementing proper navigation will create the best user experience.

Your open graph data determines the link preview shown on social media.

I hate it when I launch a new website and share it online only to find out that the title isn’t set properly and it’s just pulling in a random image from the page. You can fix this by setting the correct Open Graph (OG) data right inside WordPress— it’s easy!

Look great on social media

Social media is a great way to drive traffic to your website, but when you share a link, you’ll want it to look like a great page to visit. You can do this by setting appropriate titles, descriptions, and (most importantly) the right image.

This is done by setting the correct open graph data, which we’ll cover below.

Setting your open graph data

Most SEO plugins come with this functionality, which you can see here as shown in the SEOPress plugin:

Here you can enter the data you want to be shared on Facebook. This is the most important section as most social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter) will adopt the Facebook settings if their own aren’t present.

The ideal ratio for your image is 1.91:1, but keep in mind that when your URL is shared in comments it will be shown in a 1:1 ratio so try to keep any vital information inside of a square in the middle of your image.

By default, social media will take your default page title and featured image if open graph data is not set. If there is no open graph data, and no featured image, typically the first image on your webpage will be used.

Using the Facebook Debugger tool

To test what your page(s) will look like when shared on Facebook you can use the Facebook Debugger tool.

You’ll need to be logged into Facebook first, then visit the Sharing Debugger.

Pop your URL into the search field, and hit the ‘debug’ button.

In the next screen you’ll see the results of your test, including the Link Preview.

Here you’ll see the image, title, and description Facebook will show when previewing a link to your website. In the example above, we set all those things manually using our SEO plugin.

Note: If you’re not seeing the changes you made reflected in the Facebook debugger tool, sometimes you have to hit the “scrape again” button 2 or 3 times to get Facebook to manually fetch new information. Also, make sure that you clear your cache after you make any changes.

HTML validation provides quality assurance that your HTML is free from syntax errors.

Before you make your website public for both users and crawlers, you’ll want to make sure there are no hidden issues in your HTML files that provide the structure for your website.

What is HTML validation for?

HTML validation tests comb through your website looking for syntax errors like extra spaces, omitted quotation marks, or tags that weren’t properly closed. These issues can cause your website to function incorrectly, or even cause visible issues.

The process of validating HTML by hand is tedious and repetitive, however there are great tools freely available that can help automate this process for you and bring any errors to your attention.

An easy HTML validation tool

W3.org provides a validator tool that is as easy as inputting your website address.

Once you pop in your domain and hit “check”, the validation scan begins working giving you a list of ‘Warnings’ and ‘Errors’.

Each item listed on your report will tell you where the error was found, and why they’ve flagged it as an error.

How to fix HTML validation errors

If you use the W3C validation tool, many of the errors will link to articles that discuss the error in more detail. Because of the long list of errors that can occur, this article can not go into detail about each one.

Start by focusing on the items listed as “errors” (shown in red) first, as those could be causing the most amount of issues.

Don’t be alarmed to find validation issues, even large, popular websites (like Wikipedia) have errors. You’ll likely need to work with a developer to fix all the issues you find.

Accessibility refers to the ability for all people, regardless of disability type, to use your website effectively.

As time has gone one, the importance of accessibility has exploded— in some cases even leading to lawsuits due to inaccessible websites.

How to test your website’s accessibility

It’s important to know that website accessibility is a spectrum, not a binary test. There are hundreds of factors that go into how accessible your website is— but there’s no denying the more accessible it is, the more widely used it can be.

W3 provides a great introduction to accessibility, which for the sake of this article we’ll point you there for more information on what determines accessibility and the different standards.

For now, let’s talk about an easy way you can test: the Wave web accessibility evaluation tool.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to test accessibility, that provides easy instructions on what improvements you can make, there’s no better free test on the market.

Once you landing on the testing tool page, pop in your URL and hit the arrow to begin the test.

In the following screen you’ll see your website on the right hand side, along with results from the test in the left hand column. Each test will have an indicator on your website with some great tooltips that will tell you what you’ve done right, or what you need to improve.

Don’t let the number of tips on the page overwhelm you, they are extremely helpful in giving you guidance on each and every asset on your page.

Focus on the errors first, then the alerts. You’ll likely find that many of these suggestions can be implemented easily and quickly.

Keep in mind that you’re not testing your entire website, just the specific URL you entered in the search field. You’ll want to test all of your key pages to make sure you’re not overlooking any issues that could be easily fixed.

Additional Resources

Here are a few more resources if you’re wanting to learn more about accessibility standards on the web:

Building Accessible Websites — The Admin Bar podcast, with Heather Gray

How People with Disabilities Use the Web — by W3.org

Website Accessibility & the Law — by Search Engine Journal

Caching stores temporary copies of your website to help it load faster and reduce server load.

During any kind of development work, you’ll want to have all caching turned off so that you are always seeing the most recent changes. Once your website is approved and ready to go live, you can activate your caching to improve speed and performance.

WinningWP sums this up nicely:

If I ask you what the result of 5 x 3 is, you’ll know the answer is 15. You didn’t need to calculate it, you’ve done this multiplication so many times in your life that you no longer need to — you simply remember the result without having to do any mental processing. Well, that’s kind of how caching works.

Websites are generally viewed hundreds, thousands, or sometimes even millions of times per month. Normally, each time a browser requests a web page, the server has to do a bunch of complex (and time consuming) calculations. It retrieves the latest posts, generates the header and footer, finds your site’s sidebar widgets, and so on. However, in many cases, the result of all these calculations will be exactly the same. Wouldn’t it be great, then, if we could simply make the server remember the final result, instead of processing each request separately? This’s exactly what caching does!

What is Website Caching and Why is it so Important? – WinningWP

How do I add caching to my website?

One of the more popular ways to add caching to your WordPress website is through a caching plugin.

There are tons of caching solutions inside the WordPress ecosystem, including WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Autoptimize, and Breeze (popular with people hosting on Cloudways).

Unfortunately, answering the question “which one should I use?” gets to be a little complex. Each caching solution, and caching in general, comes with some trade-offs. Some caching plugins might work better with your stack than others, or you just might feel more comfortable with one over the other.

Your best bet is to try a few, test their performance, and ensure that they are not affecting your website in an adverse way.

The other thing you need to consider is your hosting environment. Some hosts, like Kinsta, provide all the caching you need at a sever-level so there is no need for a plugin. Cloudways, for instance, provides both a plugin and server-side caching.

Never forget your cache!

Caching is notorious for causing issues.

Not seeing the latest update you made? Probably because of caching!

Something stopped working that was fine a minute ago? Check your cache!

Seeing different versions of your website from different machines? Yep, that’d be the cache!

When you implement a caching solution, you’ll need to be aware of it at all times and make sure to manually flush it any time you make changes to your website. It can take a little getting used to, but the benefits in speed and performance are generally worth the headache— especially once you find a caching solution you’re comfortable with.

Do I have to use caching?

No, you aren’t forced to use caching, and in some cases (on very small, lightweight websites) I’ve actually seen better results without it. It’s a good idea to test your website’s loading time and performance both with and without caching. You can use speed tests like GTMetrix or Pingdom to test your loading time and run several tests with and without caching to make a determination.

Speed tests aren’t everything though. Take the time to view the website manually and see how fast it feels as you use it. If caching isn’t giving you a noticeable boost in performance, it may not be worth the trade off.

Ensure that your website works on the most popular web browsers.

We all have our favorite browser… but the users of our new website could be using just about any browser on the market. Each browser handles things like CSS and scripts a little bit differently, so it’s important that you test your website across multiple browsers to spot any issues before you go live.

The Google Chrome browser accounts for about 62% of the browser market, making it the most important one to test.

After Chrome (in terms of popularity) you have Safari, Firefox, Samsung Internet (mobile), Opera, and Microsoft Edge. Any other browsers take up less than 1% of market share and tend to be less important to test on.

Testing browser compatibility manually

The most effective (and least expensive!) way to test your browser compatibility is to simply do it manually. It’s a good idea to have a copy of all the major browsers installed on your computer for testing purposes.

You don’t have to get extremely scientific to perform a decent test. Simply visit the site just like a user would, click on buttons, test popups, examine hover effects and animations, and most importantly check any submission forms.

It’s also important to look to ensure your colors and fonts are rendering properly.

Software Testing Help provides as a cross-browser testing checklist that may come in handy if you are diving in a little bit deeper:

1) CSS validation
2) HTML or XHTML validation
3) Page validations with and without JavaScript enabled
4) Ajax and JQeury functionality
5) Font size validation
6) Page layout in different resolutions
7) All images and alignment
8 ) Header and footer sections
9) Page content alignment to center, LHS or RHS
10) Page styles
11) Date formats
12) Special characters with HTML character encoding
13) Page zoom-in and zoom-out functionality

In most cases, testing manually is sufficient for a small business website. However, if you have a mission-critical website that needs to be put through every test, you can pay for automated testing services, which we’ll talk about next.

Automated browser testing

There are many products on the market that will perform browser compatibility tests for you. BrowserStack offers this service for $29/mo, while Lambdatest has a limited free plan and paid plans starting at just $15/mo.

With automated testing services you’ll be able to cover much more ground quickly— Giving you the ability to not only test different browsers, but different computers and combinations as well.

Google provides a free tool to tell you if your website is mobile friendly.

And since you’ll likely want your website to rank high in Google’s search results, you’re going to want to make sure you website passes the test. Being ‘mobile-friendly’ is a ranking factor Google takes into consideration when determining how to rank your website.

How to test your website

Testing your website with Google’s mobile-friendly test is easy! Just head over to the Google test and drop your URL in the search bar and hit ‘Test URL’.

It will only take a few seconds and Google will give you the results, giving you either a passing or failing grade.

If your website does not pass Google’s test, they will provide you with some specifics on what needs to change in order to pass. Click the ‘View Details’ button located at the top left to get the full list of results.

Keep in mind, Google is not testing our entire website, just the URL you entered. You might want to test all of your key pages to make sure they all make the cut.

Testing your website across multiple screen sizes will help you catch possible errors in layout and user experience.

With so many different screen sizes and resolutions on the market today it can be nearly impossible to design for every possible scenario… but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!

How to test responsiveness

While there are plenty of tools on the market to test your website at different resolutions, I’ve almost always found testing by hand to be most effective.

If you have different desktop/laptop computers, you can test from all available. If you have a tablet and/or mobile phone you can test layouts from those too just by visiting the website on those devices.

While that doesn’t account for every possible scenario, it will give you a first-hand impression of how your site looks and behaves on different devices.

If you like to take that testing further, you can try something like What is My Screen Resolution, which will give you the option to test at virtually and size screen under the sun.

Here are a few things to keep in mind while you’re testing on different devices:

• Do my menus behave properly as the screen size decreases?
• Do clickable elements still appear ‘clickable’ when there is no hover state (touchscreen devices)?
• Is the text too large or too small?
• Are clickable elements too close together to easily tap to click?
• Do multi-row columns stack in the right order?
• When the screen size is small, is there any horizontal scrolling (there shouldn’t be)?

Additional responsive testing resources

Software testing help has a massive article on the topic if you’d like to go more in-depth.

Responsive Design Checker is a quick and easy way to test on various per-defined sizes.

Google’s mobile friendly test will give you a passing or failing grade with some (albeit confusing) instructions on what to fix.

Your robots.txt file tells web crawlers if they are allowed to crawl your website or not.

During the development of your website, you likely turned off any options for indexing your website so Google (and other search engines) wouldn’t index it before you were ready.

People will most often do this from the WordPress dashboard under ‘Settings’, ‘Reading’, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site’.

Of course, you’ll want that off when it’s time to launch your website, and testing what you robot.txt file says will tell you if you’re still blocking or not.

How can I see my robots.txt file?

The easiest way to get to your robots.txt file is to type in your root domain into the address bar, followed by ‘/robots.txt’. Here’s what a typical robots.txt file looks like for reference:

How do I edit my robots.txt file?

You have a couple of ways of editing your robots.txt if you need to.

First is with your SEO plugin.

Most SEO plugins (free and paid) allow you to edit your robots.txt in an easy way right from your WordPress dashboard. If you can’t find it in your plugin, try searching your SEO plugin’s documentation.

The other option is to go in and edit the file in your hosting file manager or via FTP.

If you are comfortable, you can jump into the files on your server and open and edit the robots.txt file by hand. The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of your domain.

What should be in my robots.txt file?

This ultimately depends on what you want to have indexed on your website and what you do not.

Here’s a brief understanding of how the robots.txt file works (using the example from above).

The ‘User-agent:’ line in the example is marked with an asterisk (*), saying that the following rules apply to any crawlers.

The ‘Disallow:’ line is telling the user agent to not visit ‘/wp-admin/’ so that it does not crawl the back-end of your website.

The ‘Allow:’ line in the example is making one exception for a specific URL after the ‘/wp-admin/’ that we just told it not to visit.

Some plugins or features of your website might add more lines of code than the one in this example, but typically you are safe to use this (which comes standard in WordPress):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

If you want to restrict certain pages from indexing, you can list them after the ‘Disallow:’ line. However, this is most commonly done using your SEO plugin by giving a specific page a ‘no-index’ tag).

Privacy policies are required on most websites by international, federal, state, and local laws.

Did you realize that most websites are required to have a legal policy that explains what it does with visitors information? It’s true! If you do as little as install Google Analytics or have a contact form on your website, you are required (by law) to have a privacy policy. Both of these scenarios (and dozens more) constitute collecting PII, or personally identifiable information.

Here’s a video by Termageddon (the people who provide our policies) about how the laws work.

The author of this article is not a lawyer, and this information does not provide legal advice. For any legal advice, please contact your attorney.

How do I get a privacy policy?

You have a few options when it comes to getting a legitimate privacy policy.

1. Hire an attorney to draft up your policy for you.
2. Use a policy generator.

Hiring a privacy attorney

Hiring a privacy attorney will be the most effective way of getting the best privacy policy in place for your website. They can assess your individual needs and provide you with a legal document you can place on your website. Most attorney’s will stand by their work and offer some sort of protection.

The downside to this approach is the expense. It could cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to draft your policy. Beyond that, any time you make significant changes to your website that affect your policy, or laws change regarding privacy on the internet, you’ll have to go back to your lawyer to have it revised.

Use a policy generator

Because of the cost involved, most small business websites opt for using a policy generator instead of hiring an attorney. Since its inception, I’ve been using Termageddon for all my privacy policies and terms of use documents.

They provide a robust generator that will walk you through answering all the questions that produce the right policy for your website. In the end, you’ll be provided with a short code you place on your website that will display your privacy policy and give Termageddon the ability to automatically updated the policy for you as the laws change.

If you are searching for alternatives, Iubenda and Termly offer the same type of service (but I have not used it).

A simple copyright notice lets visitors know your work is protected by copyright laws.

Let’s start this article by pointing out the fact that I am not a lawyer. For any legal advice, you’ll need to contact your attorney, not rely on some random website. This information is not legal advice.

Okay, with that out of the way, onto the copyright notice.

There is some arguments that a copyright notice isn’t necessary today, but it’s still generally accepted as best practice. If nothing else, it’s a simple thing to implement, looks official, and can’t hurt.

What should I put in my copyright notice?

Standard practice is to add the copyright symbol (©), the name of the company, and the years of publication (a span from the first year the website was online to the most recent year new work has been published on the site.

As an example, your copyright notice might look something like this:

© John’s Fudge Factory 2015-2020

Some themes will give you a shortcode for the current year (something like “[current-year]”) that will automatically update when the new year comes around. It’s always a good idea to keep the last date as the current year unless the website has gone completely dormant. If you can find a way to automate updating the year, it will save you from having to go back and update it with a hangover on January 1st.

Appropriately sized and compressed images improve loading time, user experience, and SEO.

No one likes a slow website, not even Google! Images, and other media, often account for much of the load time on a website. Optimizing your images is one of the easiest ways to speed up your website. A lightweight website gives users a better experience, and websites that load fast are favored by search engines.

How to optimize images

This topic can actually get pretty in-depth, but for the purposes of this article we’re just going to look at this question from a high level. There are two things you need to do when adding images to your website:

1. Make sure the image is the appropriate dimensions for the largest size it will ever been seen on your website
2. Compress the images using your choice software

Sizing your images

Using a graphics program you can scale your image to the largest size it will be displayed on your website (typically the desktop layout as opposed to mobile or tablet sizes). By sizing the photo to the appropriate size, you wont have to add extra code that will resize and/or crop the images during loading (some page builders will do this automatically).

If your image is never going to be more than 700px wide on the screen, then there’s no reason the file should be 800px wide.

Image compression

There are hundreds of plugins and online services that will compress your images for you (both free and paid). In most cases (unless you have a very high volume of images) the free solutions should be all you need.

If you want to use a plugin try ShortPixel or Smush. Both are available for free in the WordPress repository and have a great reputation. Either solution will scan your media library and compress the images you’ve already uploaded as well as compress any new images you upload after the plugins are activated.

If you want to compress before you upload (and not add another plugin), Optimizilla is a great choice. Their free service allows you to upload and optimize up to 20 images at a time and gives you some fine-grain controls over how much compression you want to add.

As you can see in the image below, Optimizilla was able to reduce this file’s size by 60% (from 20kb to 7.8KB) without any noticeable quality loss.

Saving just over 12kb on this one image won’t mean much, but if you’re able to reduce all of your images by 60% that could add up to a lot of savings!

If you change a page’s URL, a redirection will send traffic from the old address to the new automatically.

This is particularly crucial if you’re doing a website redesign and have made changes to the permalinks or re-worded some of the URLs in the process. Without redirects, people who find your old URL (through links, or search engine results) will ended up on a 404 page (“page not found”). A redirection simply points visitors to the right place.

An easy redirect solution in WordPress

There are several ways you can go about creating redirects, including editing your .htaccess file, the Redirection plugin is free in the WordPress repository and works like a charm.

Once you install and activate the Redirection plugin, all you’ll need is a list of your “old” URLs and the “new” URLs you want to point them to.

A great way to keep track of this, especially on a large site that has many redirects, is by creating a spreadsheet. In ‘column a’ put in the relative URL from the “old” URL (a relative URL is everything after your TLD), and in ‘column b’ put the full URL of where you want the user to be redirected to.

Using the Redirection plugin, you can import a CSV file of all of your redirects from your spreadsheet, or simply enter them in one-by-one.

For a full tutorial, check out this video from WPBeginner:

In an effort to provide the best user experience, it’s best practice to link your logo (in your header) back to the homepage of your website.

Most website users have picked up on the fact that the logo will typically take them back to the homepage. This small detail goes a long way in helping users understand how to navigate your website and gives them a quick and easy way to orient themselves.

How to link your header to your homepage

Most themes will provide this functionality by default, so if you’ve used your theme to setup your website’s header, before you do anything just test to see if clicking your logo takes you to your homepage. Chances are, it’s already done for you.

If you’ve used your theme to create your header, but it is not linking to your homepage, you’ll need to refer to your theme’s documentation or request support from your theme developer directly.

If you’ve used something outside of your theme to create your header (like a page builder) you’ll likely have to do this manually.

To make this edit, open up your header inside of your page builder. Click the image widget you’ve used for your logo, and link it to the root domain of your website, or simply put a forward slash (/) where the link goes. Both methods will link the image back to your website’s homepage.

Your favicon is a small image that displays next to your website title in the browser.

What this tiny image lacks in size it makes up for in putting a nice polish on your website, helping visitors distinguish your website from the other tabs they have open in their browser.

Where do I set my favicon?

Most WordPress themes will give you the option to set your favicon (sometimes labeled ‘site icon’) inside of the customizer.

Open the customizer from your WordPress dashboard by hovering over ‘Appearance’, then click on ‘Customize’— which will open up the WordPress customizer.

From there, look for ‘Site Identity’, which is the most common place to find the settings for your favicon in most themes.

In this website’s theme, GeneratePress, the favicon is labeled ‘Site Icon’. This is where you will upload your favicon image.

Creating your favicon file

Typically, companies will use their logo, or icon for their website’s favicon. While an .ico file can be used, more commonly people use a simple .png file.

Note: .jpg or .gif files will also work, but .png is preferred since it retains and transparency.

You’ll want to set your image up as a perfect square, the recommended size is 512px both in height and width.

Be sure to run this file through an image optimization service (I often use Optimizilla) before you upload it. You want to make sure to compress this file heavily, as you don’t want such a tiny detail to add extra load time to your page.

But wait, there’s more!

Besides showing up in your browser tab, your favicon will also appear when your website is bookmarked, or saved to someone’s smartphone as a shortcut. It’s a small detail, but it goes a long way towards making your website polished and complete.

WP Beginner provides a more in-depth tutorial on how to create and set a favicon if you need more advice.

Your website’s title and tagline serve as a brief description of your website that can be both displayed visually and in your website’s code.

Where do I find my title & tagline settings?

The easiest way to get to your title and tagline settings is from the WordPress dashboard. From there, hover over ‘Settings’, then click ‘General’. The first two fields are for setting your title and tagline (respectively).

What should my title and tagline be?

Typically websites will set the name of their website, or the name of their company as the title. As you can see in the screenshot below, our website title is set to ‘Docket WP’, the name of our company.

Your tagline should be a brief explanation that tells people what your website is about, or its purpose for existing online. Keep in mind, this should be a short description, no need to go into detail here.

Where your title and tagline live

If you set your title and tagline, but don’t see it being displayed anywhere on the front end of your website, don’t be alarmed. Depending on your theme, these settings might not be visible from the front end— that’s okay, you’ll still want to set them anyway.

Some themes set the title and tagline to be displayed in your header or in the tab of your browser. These settings can be overridden, and some themes turn off their visibility by default.

Even though you might not see your title and tagline (and there are other ways to override it), it’s important that you have one set. Bots, like the Google Bot, will see this information in the code of your website and it will help them understand what your website is about.

SEO plugins can help simplify the SEO process, and give you step by step instructions to set foundational SEO elements about your website.

Do I need an SEO plugin?

Technically, you don’t have to use an SEO plugin, but it sure does make life easier. Besides, there are plenty of great free options on the market, so there isn’t any added cost involved.

By using an SEO plugin you can apply the appropriate markup that will improve your rankings in search engines and drive more traffic to your website. SEO plugins make this easy for even a beginner to configure.

What SEO plugin should I choose?

While there are many SEO plugins in the repository, it’s usually best advised to stick with one of the popular ones. They will give you the most options, the ability to import or export data, and be the most user friendly.

Some of the most popular plugins include: Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, and The SEO Framework.

Like many things in the WordPress ecosystem, which SEO plugin you choose comes down to your personal needs and taste. If it’s your first time working with an SEO plugin, try a few of the free versions out and see which one feels most comfortable to you.

Getting started with an SEO plugin

There are plenty of free options for SEO plugins inside the WordPress repository. From the dashboard of your website hover over ‘Plugins’ then click ‘Add New’. Do a search for one of the SEO plugins listed above (or any other you might want to try), then install and activate the plugin.

After you install and activate your chosen SEO plugin, most will provide you with a Setup Wizard that will get you started with the basic information, like: company name, contact information, social media channels, etc.

Beyond the basic setup, the companies listed above have plenty of documentation that will go more in-depth with all the settings you can apply using an SEO plugin, including: page titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and even Schema.

Do I need to pay for an SEO plugin?

This decision is up to you, ultimately. Many SEO plugins have both a free and a paid-for version. Typically some of the more advanced (and powerful!) features are locked away in the premium versions.

The price for premium SEO plugins can vary pretty dramatically, but in my experience the price does not directly correlate with the quality.

Rank Math, for example, has exploded in popularity starting in 2019— only offering a free version. Even though there is no paid option, the free plugin offers most (if not all) of the features of a premium SEO plugin.

More information on SEO plugins

Keep in mind a SEO plugin does not guarantee any results. It’s simply a tool that will help you apply some SEO techniques. Beyond needed some basic understand of SEO best practices, there are other factors that affect SEO that a SEO plugin doesn’t address (like page speed, content quality, traffic, etc.)

Ahrefs provides a very detailed list on 15 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. Be sure to also search on YouTube where you can find loads of tutorials on the subject.

Your permalinks (or “permanent links”) determine how the URLs are structured on your pages and posts.

How to set Your permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard hover over ‘Settings’, then click ‘Permalinks’.

From there select the appropriate setting and press ‘Save Changes’.

What permalink setting should I use?

WordPress gives you several options on how to set your permalinks:

• Plain
• Day and name
• Month and name
• Numeric
• Post name
• Custom structure

In most cases, the “Post Name” option is most appropriate, which will put the name of your page or post in the URL (this can be overridden on a case-by-case basis within an individual post page or post under the “Permalink” option).

Using “Post Name” is good for both humans, and SEO, as it will more clearly state what the URL is. 

For example, if your about us page is called “About Us”, a typical URL for that would be www.yourdomain.com/about-us/.

Warning about permalinks

You’ll want to decide on your permalink structure before your website is live. Once your URLs are indexed, changing your permalinks could severely damage your SEO and break links pointing to your website. 

Want to know more about Permalinks?

The purpose of this article was to give you a general understanding of permalinks. If you want to learn more, visit WordPress.org’s article: Using Permalinks.