Weekly Articles for WordPress Admins – Monday 10/17/2022

Welcome back, or if this is your first time here, let me give you a quick intro: I share 5 topics each week that will help you (as a WordPress admin) how to build, grow, and market your website. This week, my first topic is on Google Analytics (GA), specifically GA4 since the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) will be going away in 2023. GA is the most popular and free way to track your site traffic and other metrics – it’s extremely powerful but there’s lots to learn.

I’ll also cover 4 other topics as well so strap in and let’s go!

This week’s 5 WordPress topics:

• Google Analytics 4 Tutorial for Beginners (Intermediate)
  Whether you are new to Google Analytics or are moving from the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you should read this article from start to finish and then bookmark it (or just come back to this site). To get the most out of GA4, you should also use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to set up the right events for your website. Out of the box, GA4 and GTM give you most of the metrics that you would need but you can also create custom events within GTM and then set those up as events and conversions within Google Analytics. With GA4, you can set it up to track what’s important to your site and your business. Also check out this article for a more out-of-the-box approach The Ultimate Guide to GA4 in WordPress for Beginners.
• How To Create And Submit A WordPress Image Sitemap (Beginner)
  2 weeks ago I shared an article on how to drive more traffic through Google Image Search, a huge potential source of traffic for your site. After you rename the filenames for your images, you should create an image sitemap to let Google and other search engines know about your images. You can use a simple WordPress plugin to generate this for you, or you can use one of the popular SEO plugins, which includes image sitemaps along with their other features. Here’s instructions on how to create your image sitemap with Yoast, All in One SEO, and SEO Press.
• How to Rename Images in WordPress After Uploading Them (Beginner)
  When you take a picture, your camera or phone will give it a default filename, like DSC0012.jpg or IMG2342.jpg. Before you upload that image to your website, you should rename it to something descriptive, or with search engine keywords. For example, if the image is about renaming your image filenames, you should name your file something like “rename-image-filenames.jpg”. After you upload your images to WordPress, there’s not an easy way to rename them unless you install the Phoenix Media Rename plugin. For additional info that also includes how to replace your media, read How to Rename Images and Media Files in WordPress.
• How to Create a Client Portal in WordPress (Intermediate)
  Do you need to share documents, news, files, videos, or other information with your clients but want to do it in a secure way? A client portal may be the perfect solution that allows you to put resources into a members-only area of your site that requires a login to access. A good way to do this is with a membership plugin like MemberPress. This article will show you how to use MemberPress to create a member dashboard and lock down content but there are many other membership plugins that would also work.
• WordPress vs Drupal – Which One is Better in 2022? (Pros and Cons) (Intermediate)
  Of course this is a WordPress-focused website but it’s always good to keep an eye on the options. Drupal was actually started before WordPress (2000 vs 2003) but WordPress powers over 43% of all websites while Drupal only powers 2.3% of websites. In general, Drupal handles data and customization better but WordPress can do most of what Drupal can but with more ease and support. This is an interesting article that will give you a good overview of both content management systems.

Even though I’ve been building sites for over 20 years, I’m still learning new things every week – that’s the challenge and the enjoyment of this industry.

Were these topics useful to you? If there’s specific topics that you’d like me to cover, drop me a line!

Photo by Todd Diemer on Unsplash

[weekly_email_signup]