How to get the most out of your blog

We have posted various tips that will show periodically in your admin dashboard. However, here are some things to remember:

It’s very important that you set up the ‘The GDPR Framework‘ plugin before your blog goes live. This sets out your privacy policy, terms, cookie policy and privacy tools. Once it’s activated, visit the plugin settings to activate the cookie acceptance box on your site. You could be subjected to heavy penalties if you don’t let your site visitors know that your site uses cookies. Your privacy policy is very important and you may need to do some serious research before you activate your site. The plugin can generate a basic policy for you, but you will need to adapt it to your own blog/needs/circumstances. Any blogs/sites created here that collects any personal information from site visitors/members will risk being deleted if it does not have detailed cookie and privacy policies.

• The more plugins you have activated, the slower your blog may be. Only activate the ones you really need.
• Certain themes can also potentially slow down your site. Try different ones to see which works best for you, but only have one activated at a time, for performance and security reasons.
• Some plugins and themes may not work well with each other. If something doesn’t seem to look or work right, you may need to experiment to find the conflict.
• Jetpack is automatically installed on all sites. Click here for more details. There is a known conflict between Jetpack and the Themify Builder plugin in that the likes buttons from Jetpack won’t work if the builder plugin is activated. Jetpack can be used freely with the option to upgrade for more features.
• It’s highly recommended that you use the ‘Easy WP SMTP‘ plugin. Our mail sending bandwidth is limited, and you can configure the plugin to use your Gmail, Hotmail, ISP or other mail settings to send mail from your blog. This may be more efficient than using our standard mail sending facility. It’s easy to configure, and your email provider/ISP should have SMTP settings available for you to use.
• If you have never used WordPress before, you may be fine using the new ‘block’ editor for creating posts, pages and widgets. However, for those who want a simpler/older method, you can activate the classic editor and widget plugins.
• Until your site is ready to go live, you can activate the ‘Coming Soon Page, Under Construction & Maintenance Mode‘ plugin. This means you won’t need to worry about your site being visited before it’s ready.
• WordPress doesn’t have a built-in way for comments to be edited by their authors. You can activate the ‘Simple Comment Editing‘ plugin that allows commenters to edit their comment for a certain time in case they want to amend/correct anything.
• If you are new to WordPress, you can activate the ‘Easy Blogging‘ plugin which will simplify your admin area until you are more used to it. Once you have activated the plugin, a link will show up in the top-right of your admin dashboard that says: ‘Activate easy mode‘. You can quickly switch back and forth between easy and standard.
• You should always have a way for your website visitors to contact you, especially if you are providing a service. This could be as simple as having a contact page with your email address, phone number, address etc., and/or you could activate the ‘Very Simple Contact Form‘ plugin.
• You can configure the SEO settings for each post and page you create. These are under the ‘SmartCrawl‘ settings beneath each post/page editor.
• You should post all images and downloads using off-site services. Your blog can hold a lot of text, but images and files will quickly eat up your space and bandwidth. The ‘Simple Image Upload‘ plugin allows you to upload images from under the editor on all pages and posts. These images are hosted remotely on postimages.org. You can also use remotely hosted featured images rather than uploading them.
• Using the ‘Screen Options‘ at the top-right of your admin panel allows you to select or deselect what appears on certain pages. These will be different on each page/section you visit.
• Although we have spam protection enabled for each blog, you may want to disable comments from unregistered users.

These are just a few hints and tips for new users. If you have any questions about how to use your new website, please contact us and we will do our best to help.