WordPress how to Tweak Your Theme

Saturday, February 9th, 2013 at 1:55 PM

Tweak Your Theme

Once you’ve got your blog theme installed, most people are going to want to tweak it a little.
This might just be as simple as replacing the default images with those of your own (you just replace the original image files using your FTP program)

Install Some Essential Plugins

One of the great things about WordPress is the thousands of wordpress plugins that are available.
So – it makes sense to begin by installing some of the essential ones.

Akismet

Nearly every WordPress blog has Akismet installed – and it is one of the first plugins you should install on your blog. In a nutshell, Akismet helps to stop spam comments on your blog and saves you the hassle of manually deleting them all.
Spam is a real problem on blogs – and whilst this plugin doesn’t eradicate the problem completely it is generally pretty effective.

Online Backup For WordPress

A lot of work will go into your blog – so imagine waking up one day and losing it all – or accidentally deleting something crucial and finding your blog doesn’t work any more! It’s definitely not something you want to happen to you, so it makes sense to back up your blog regularly – and this little plugin makes it easy to do so.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin builds a sitemap of your blog and then submits it to Google. Quite simply a site map is a list or directory of all the pages and posts on your blog – and it makes it easier for search engines such as Google to crawl the pages and index your site faster.

All In One SEO Pack

This is a great tool for your blog. It allows you to customize the meta tags for each individual blog post, so you can optimize them for their keywords.

Aweber Web Form Plugin

Your blog is a great way to build a list. If you use Aweber (one of the most popular providers of email marketing solutions) then the above plugin makes it easy to install an opt-in box onto your blog.

Aweber Widget

This is by no means an exhaustive list but the plugins mentioned are a must have to get you started.