Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Resources for Beginners

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Are you brand new to WordPress? Or considering moving to WordPress but not sure if you’ll be able to get the hang of using it? Don’t worry! Today’s post is all about resources for WordPress newbies.

First is the user manual – WordPress doesn’t come with one, but there’s a great alternative in Easy WP Guide. It’s free, it gets updated frequently (unlike a real book) and is easy to read and use. Just don’t print it – it’s big and it updates too often to make that worth your while.

Next is a post about common mistakes made by WordPress beginners (and plenty of experienced users too). The biggest two: forgetting to update, which opens your site up to all kinds of security and functionality problems, and not using a child theme. If you ever decide to edit the theme, always always always make a child theme. Never make changes to an original theme.

Just because your new site may be starting small doesn’t mean it won’t be a target for hackers and other malicious threats. Adding a security plugin is a smart (and necessary) move to help keep your site safe. Here’s a review of some of the top WordPress security plugins out there right now. I’m currently using iThemes Security Pro on my clients’ sites, but other good choices are Sucuri and Wordfence. I would stay away from the SiteLock service from painful personal experience.

If yours is a business website, you will most likely be doing SEO (search engine optimization) for it. I recommend using the extremely popular and useful Yoast SEO plugin and referring to this thorough guide to WordPress SEO.

Last but not least, if you want your site to grow and become more easily findable in search, you’ll want to start a blog. That can be a big undertaking. Fortunately, the excellent website ProBlogger has a handy collection of many tips on how to blog that can be a great resource for bloggers (at any level).

That concludes our collection of resources for WordPress beginners. As always, please feel free to contact me about any of these topics if you need help, or just post a comment below.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.