WordPress Article Picks 2/21/2022

To kick off this weekly feature post, I’d like to give a quick intro and tell you want you can expect each week. I’ve been designing and building websites for over 20 years and have been creating engaging websites with WordPress for over half of my career. I absolutely love the power and versatility of the platform and enjoy sharing my knowledge and expertise with my team and others.

While WordPress is easy to pick up, it can be difficult to master, and there are so many ways to build with the platform. And since WordPress is so popular (over 40% of all sites are powered by WordPress), there is a lot of noise – making it difficult to find articles and resources that are truly useful.

That’s where my weekly top picks comes in – I want to help cut through the noise and give you useful articles to help you as you create your first WordPress site, manage it, and promote your organization online.

• 48 Free Websites to List Your Business (Intermediate)
  After you build your website, you need to promote it. An easy way to improve your online visibility is to add online business profiles and citations that put your business information on the web, pointing back to your website. These sites are all free but it will take some time to add your information to each site. As a bare minimum, make sure that your Google My Business and Yelp For Business profiles are dialed in.
• How Much Does It Really Cost to Build a WordPress Website? (Beginner)
  Even if you’re building your own WordPress website DIY style, there are still costs that you should be planning for. While I don’t fully agree with every recommended plugin and service in this article, this is a great summary with lots of valuable information.
• Steps for planning your WordPress website (Beginner)
  Speaking of planning, this article walks you through everything you should figure out before building your WordPress website. A little planning up front can save you tons of time in the long run.
• How to Schedule Posts in WordPress (3 Easy Methods) (Intermediate)
  If you have time-sensitive content, or you follow a content schedule (like I do with this site), being able to schedule your posts, pages, and products is crucial to your business. Baked into WordPress, you can easily schedule your content but there’s also plugins to give your content schedule an extra boost.
• Make Your WordPress Site Load Faster: Why You Need To And How (Advanced)
  The page speed for most WordPress websites can be greatly improved by installing a good caching plugin, optimizing your media, and using a CDN. This article goes into these 3 upgrades that you can make to your website today, and gives you additional tips as well.