The 3 Most Essential WordPress Features You Need To Be Using Today!

It's no surprise that WordPress is a great platform to build an online brand, identity and grow your website. After all, WordPress started out primarily as a blogging platform for you to create and grow a blog.

However, over the years WordPress has added so many features, some of which you might never use whilst others are so essential that you should be using them today to get the most out of the platform.

In this blog post, I'm going to tell you about some of these features and why you need to be using them today.

Firstly, What is WordPress used for?

You've probably heard of WordPress at some point or another even if you've never used the platform.

There are two types:

• wordpress.com
• wordpress.org

If you're creating a very quick site, one that you just want to upload a few photos and aren't serious about building website traffic, then wordpress.com is going to be the best for you.

But even though it might be the best for you, I'm going to tell you not to use wordpress.com even if it's the best.

Why?

Because wordpress.com are websites that you create from templates and are hosted by WordPress themselves, you could buy a domain name for a website and point it to your site, but ultimately you don't own the site.

The one you need to go with is WordPress.org and that's because it's a self hosted website by you, meaning you'll need to get some web hosting. I've covered everything you need to know about web hosting.

Check out the web hosting guide for more information on that topic.

Essential WordPress Features to start using today

Out of the hundreds of WordPress features that WordPress has to offer, some of these features are more vital for you to be looking at, here's just a few:

Distraction-free writing mode

Being able to write content for your users regardless of what niche you're in, whether you're selling beauty products online or offering some form of service is important right?

If you're not able to write content, build out pages and focus on getting into the flow of smashing out that content to help your SEO efforts all because of distractions from how many updates your WordPress site needs or a new update from a plugin.

This is why you should be utilising the distraction-free writing mode within WordPress, it's completely free to use and will help you focus on writing. It's built directly into the editor that comes with WordPress too.

Tell me where to find it

There's many settings, buttons and pages in WordPress, so that's why I'm going to tell you where to find it.

It's located in the TinyMCE editor on any page. Find the editor, and click the icon in the top right of the editor, WordPress keeps features like this very well hidden...

I'm assuming it's because they don't want you missing some important notification. But guess what?

Right now you need to focus on writing, publishing... writing and publishing again over and over again to be the best website in your niche.

CSS classes for your menus

CSS? What's that you might be asking, it's the term used for changing the styling of how elements on your website look.

And one element you've always wanted to change is your navigation menu right? Being able to access the various classes that WordPress puts on the menu by default.

In WordPress you can enable the custom CSS classes feature which will allow you to write custom code for styling the menu, without ever having to even exit the menu.

It's quick, simple, and will allow you to go deep into customising the design to just your liking

Tell me where to find it

In order to use the CSS classes option, you'll first need to turn it on from the Screen Options tab at the top of the menus screen.

Clicking on the tab will open up to display several checkboxes, Click onto the CSS Classes box under the Show Advanced Menu Properties section.

Category and Tags converter

As a new website and a new domain on the internet, your site will quickly grow over time and you'll likely need to have more control over the structure of your WordPress website.

You'll learn more about how to organise your site, and will hopefully discover different ways in which you can utilise your categories and tags to help users find related content.

Because of this, you may find yourself needing to convert the categories on your site into tags, or maybe the other way around.

By ensuring that you're showing relevant content to your users will mean you're in a better position to build trust and authority, and Google likes this.

This will help your content reach more people.

Tell me where to find it

The categories and tags converter feature is located within the Tools menu of WordPress. Find than and choose the Import option, you'll then be able to choose how you convert categories and tags

BEST WordPress Features - Round Up

When it comes to starting and growing a WordPress website you'll want to utilise as much of the platform as you can, but exploring too much, too quickly could result in you becoming increasingly distracted at growing your website.

Growing a website takes time and takes time to increase website traffic with SEO so that's why it's beneficial to start using the most essential features that WordPress has to offer, which include:

• Distraction-free writing mode - to help you write better, cleaner and relevant content for your users
• CSS classes for menus - to customise the styling of your menus to appeal more to your users
• Categories and tags converter - for when you're growing fast and need to present related content to your customers

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