This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, the 13 year old web developer and programmer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.
Today I want to tell you some very simple tips to keep your WordPress site running smoothly and easy ways to keep readers coming back.
First you should always keep your site running well.
- Try to avoid things like “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon!” for pages or new site features.
- Keep everything organized.
- Set categories to divide your posts, don’t cram everything in one page and create multiple pages for more organization.
- Make everything obvious, don’t keep your visitors guessing where the Contact page is.
- Always make sure your site is actually fast and not keeping your visitors waiting at a white page, 6 seconds waiting is fine in life but online it’s like an eternity.
For more in depth help on speeding up your site take a look at my tutorial by clicking here (see there’s another hint, “by clicking here”, easy and simple).
Next keep your readers interested and intrigued about your content.
- Always post top quality content.
- Don’t post about your cat, new boyfriend/girlfriend, or that awesome YouTube video you saw recently.
- Short isn’t bad, sometimes short stories that are to the point are better than long lengthy stories full of unneeded details and side stories.
- Make your articles into a series, keep your readers guessing on what your next article is about, but don’t write enough information in one article or the post is basically obsolete.
- Stick to one niche in your blog. If your blog is about blogging tips, why are you posting about that new computer that just came out?
- If you have a lot to say, say it. Don’t just write the bare minimum as long as the content is relevant.
- Most readers simply scan anything you write, so adding pointless information (even if it somewhat pertains to the article) doesn’t help much.
For some more simple ways to keep your readers visit my tutorial by clicking here.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day! Also a big thanks to Kyle Eslick for having this awesome site.
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
Good tips Hayes.
You mentioned the two things I dislike the most when visiting a site: “Make everything obvious…” and “…not keeping your visitors waiting at a white page”.
A site I visited recently lost me as a subscriber because I couldn’t find the subscribe button. There was no RSS icon to be found anywhere on the home page. Not even a text link.
I use Firefox and could easily have clicked my live bookmarks button to get the job done, but I left frustrated.
Often times, as well, once a page has been loading with nothing displayed for several seconds, I simply move along to another site.
Again, good tips. I think you’ve embarked on a promising journey.
wauw, i don’t believe it if you’re age 13. Anyhow, great tips.
Great post. However, I disagree with one thing. You said:
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The wonderful thing about a blog is all of the search engine traffic it can bring over time. Using “click here” instead of relevant keywords could greatly impact it.
Use relevant keywords in your links, but then use appropriate CSS to keep links underlined and blue (like they are on here).
Thanks guys for the comments I really appreciate it, and yes I really am 13 =). If you guys need anything I’m here to help.
Is it better to use the more link or not? I personally use it and the text before it is just like the lead in a newspaper. The article itself comes after the link.
In most themes it doesn’t matter, but in some newspaper themes or maybe even magazine the more tag is already added automatically adds it in every post. So if you add a more tag it will break the theme.
Great post Hayes! Thanks for the valuable information you have shared here! Keep it up!
Thanks Aurlius, I really appreciate it =)