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When used as a blog, WordPress’s home page shows a reverse chronological (most recent first) list of articles. Readers scroll through the list, clicking on posts they find interesting. But WordPress also has several other ways for users to find posts. Understanding how they work will help you provide a better experience and increase the likelihood that user will stick around to read more posts.

Aside from the home page, the most common way for a user to browse the posts on a WordPress site is the archive page. Different themes display content on the archive page in different ways, but the most common organizing principles are by date, by theme, and occasionally by tag. Archive pages organized by date don’t need much explaining: typically readers click on a month and are taken to a list of posts published in that month, a more compact version of the home page.

WordPress Taxonomies

Categories and tags deserve a little more explanation. Both are part of the taxonomy (naming) system that WordPress makes available. Categories are broad “sections” into which posts can be organized. A fashion blogger might have categories for articles called: “fashion shows”, “designer spotlights”, “fashion news,” and so on. Categories are broad themes and each post has one category. Categories show up in various places in the WordPress interface, most notably on archive pages and in navigation menus.

Tags are similar to categories: the major difference is that a post can have as many tags as the site owner wants. Tags are usually used to indicate more specific themes within a post. Our fashion blogger might have tags for “shoes”, “manolo blahniks”, “kitten heels”, and “everyday wear”. You’ll notice that all of these tags might be relevant to a single post in any of the categories discussed above.

Related Content

Yet another way for users to find content is through related content widgets. These are usually located at the bottom of a post and include links to other posts that might be interesting to the reader. If you want to include a related content widget in your posts, there are several excellent plugins that will do the job. The Jetpack plugin collection includes a related content module. If you don’t want to install Jetpack, WordPress Related Posts is a popular alternative.

WordPress Search

I’ve left the most obvious way to find content until last. WordPress includes a fairly powerful search box, which will help readers find specific content. While WordPress’ search functionality is adequate, many WordPress site owners choose to replace it with a more configurable alternative. Relevanssi is a plugin that replaces the default search box with a more capable tool that sorts results by relevance, can do fuzzy searching, and can display search suggestions similar to Google’s.

As you can see, WordPress provides a multitude of tools for helping readers discover content, but they require some input from bloggers. If you take the time to properly tag and categorize posts, the site’s archive pages, navigation, related posts, and search functionality will be much more effective.

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WordPress themes can make a big difference to the search engine optimization of a WordPress site. For the most part, any well-written theme is SEO-friendly, including the majority of free themes. In fact, some of the best-selling premium themes aren’t so great for SEO because they’re overloaded with features and offer poor performance.

Choosing a theme solely on its purported SEO capabilities isn’t wise. There are many other factors that should influence your choice of theme, but once you have settled on the ideal theme for your project, it’s sensible to consider whether it’s going to provide the best foundation for future search engine optimization.

Performance

As I have already implied, the performance of a WordPress site is taken into consideration by Google and other search engines. All else being equal, a faster site will rank better in search engine results than a slower site. Many factors contribute to site performance, including WordPress hosting, caching, and the use of a content distribution network, but the front-end provided by a theme can cause performance problems, especially if it’s poorly performance optimized and has excessive page weight.

Before you choose a theme, run its demo page through performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools to get a sense of how much attention its developer has paid to performance optimization.

Validity

Although code validity is less important than many other factors, it’s beneficial to choose a theme that is coded well and that is guaranteed to load properly on browsers and search crawlers. You shouldn’t expect perfection, but it’s worth taking the time to run themes through a code validator.

Mobile-Friendly

Mobile-friendliness is a key aspect of modern search engine optimization. Google will not rank pages in mobile search results if they aren’t optimized for mobile devices.

Any WordPress theme worth considering will include responsive design, but mobile friendliness includes more than basic responsive design: Flash should be avoided, typography should be of a reasonable size, and pages should not be overly large.

If you want to know whether a theme is mobile-friendly, check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Structured Data Support

Schema.org is a standard structured data format that can be used to give extra information to search engines about the content on a page. Rich snippets on search engine results pages depend on Schema.org markup and so does the display of items on many social media networks. The more information you can provide to Google, the better the display and ranking of your pages is likely to be. If you’re unsure whether a theme supports structured data, ask the developer.

It’s important to understand that although a theme contributes to SEO-friendliness, it’s one factor among many. A great theme is worthless if the hosting is slow or the WordPress back-end is improperly optimized. You may want to consider installing a caching plugin and an SEO plugin in addition to choosing an SEO-friendly WordPress theme. And, of course, you should opt for performance-optimized managed WordPress hosting.

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WordPress 4.9 has been released just in time for the holiday season. Continuing the tradition of naming WordPress releases after jazz musicians, WordPress 4.9 is codenamed Tipton for band leader Billy Tipton. Some WordPress users won’t find a lot to be excited about in WordPress 4.9, but there are some great new features for WordPress professionals, developers, and designers.

Even if you aren’t interested in the new features we’re about to discuss, you should update WordPress unless you have a compelling reason not to. Alongside new features and improvements, WordPress 4.9 brings several security enhancements, including the mandatory sending of confirmation emails for account email address changes.

Theme Previews

One of the most useful additions for WordPress users is theme previews within the Customizer: users can search through thousands of themes and see previews without leaving the Customizer.

Painless Customizer Collaboration

Over the last few releases, the Customizer has evolved from a tool I never used to an essential part of my WordPress workflow. WordPress 4.9 continues the trend with developer- and designer-focused user experience enhancements.

My favorite 4.9 update is the ability to draft and schedule customizations. I’ll often make changes in the Customizer that I don’t want to apply immediately. Sometimes I’d like to work on changes over a few sessions, rather than all at once. In the past, this sort of workflow has been awkward, but with the addition of drafts and scheduling to the Customizer, it’s possible to save customizations and schedule them to go live at a time of my choosing — just like WordPress posts.

A consequence of the ability to save customization drafts is that we can now share those drafts via a URL. That can be a huge time-saver. Designers and WordPress professionals often need approval from clients before going live, and we’re constantly collaborating with other professionals. Design Preview links makes it a breeze to share and collaborate on customizations.

On-Site Developer Features

You probably find yourself tweaking CSS files or HTML code within WordPress, especially following the introduction of the Custom HTML widget. That gets a lot easier and less error prone now that WordPress includes decent syntax highlighting and error checking. Botched CSS and HTML edits are responsible for many a white screen of death, a problem that will be substantially reduced by WordPress’s new error checking. WordPress developers will receive a warning if they try to save faulty code.

Many of the coding improvements are possible because of the integration of the CodeMirror code editor into WordPress’s CSS and HTML editing functionality. CodeMirror is a sophisticated JavaScript text editor that provides syntax highlighting, linting, and auto-completion.

As always, you can download the most recent version of WordPress from WordPress.org or update your existing WordPress site from the WordPress Dashboard.

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After a couple of weeks of rumors, Google announced that it will add an ad-blocker to the Chrome web browser next year. Chrome is the most popular browser on the web with a market share of over 60%, and the introduction of always-on, activated-by-default ad-blocking will have a substantial impact on the advertising and publishing industry.

Publishers have—perhaps surprisingly—greeted Google’s announcement with cautious enthusiasm, because the company doesn’t intend to block all advertising, only the most user-hostile and unpleasant advertising.

Although Google has its fingers in many pies, by far the biggest chunk of its revenue comes from advertising, many billions of dollars per year. So why would Google want to give users an ad-blocker?

“In dialogue with the Coalition [For Better Ads] and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.”

No one denies the advertising and web publishing industry has a problem. Everywhere we turn, intrusive advertising competes for our attention and degrades our experience of the web. Some of that advertising goes beyond annoying and poses a real security risk to web users. Malvertising, malware delivered via advertising, has been growing in prominence over the last couple of years, affecting the readership of publishers of all sizes. In short, the web advertising industry is a mess. Market pressures and declining advertising revenues force some publishers and networks to go over the top with advertising, but that’s not a persuasive argument to the average web user.

Content creators, publishers, web hosting providers, and the rest of the multi-billion-dollar online economy depends on advertising, but the advertising industry has destroyed the goodwill of the people on whose attention it depends to generate revenue.

Users block advertising in greater numbers than ever before, aided by a growing — and not entirely trustworthy — ad-blocking industry and companies like Apple that care more about user experiences than publishers’ bottom lines.

Google Chrome’s forthcoming ad-blocker is intended to stem the movement of users towards full-scale and undiscriminating blocking of all advertising. Installing an ad-blocker usually means all ads are blocked. Users can whitelist sites they consider valuable, but only a tiny proportion ever do.

Google is grasping the nettle and introducing an ad-blocker that will remove the worst advertising from the web in the hope that it will prevent users from pursuing the nuclear option of blocking all advertising.

What counts as bad advertising? The Coalition For Better Ads has introduced some guidelines about what it considers unacceptable. You should take a look at the guidelines to see what Google and the Coalition For Better Advertising considers bad, but it’s really just common sense. Anything that blocks users’ access to content or provides a particularly negative web experience is considered an unacceptable ad, including ads that distract, interrupt, or clutter web pages.

If you’re wondering whether the advertising on your sites fits the bill, you can use the Ad Experience Report to get an idea of how Chrome’s ad-blocker will affect what your visitors see.

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JSON Feed is a new feed format that provides the same functionality as RSS, but without asking developers to tangle with the complexities of XML, the format underlying both RSS and Atom. The creators of JSON Feed have released a WordPress plugin, which makes it simple to add a JSON Feed to an existing WordPress site.

The JSON Feed WordPress plugin isn’t in the official WordPress plugin repository yet, but it’s easy enough to install from its GitHub repository. If you want to take JSON Feed for a spin on your WordPress site, go to the GitHub repository in your browser, and click on the green “Clone or download” button. Choose “Download ZIP”, and then drop the resulting folder into your WordPress site’s /wp-content/plugins folder. Next, activate the plugin as you would with any other plugin. You should now have a JSON Feed available at http://yourdomain/feed/json.

Feeds have been central to blogging since its earliest days. The adoption and development of RSS was heavily influenced by the first bloggers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although social media streams like Twitter have supplanted RSS feeds for many users, they’re still an important part of blogging — not to mention being vital to podcasting. WordPress sites generate RSS feeds for posts by default, and many of the most engaged blog readers are heavy users of RSS.

But RSS has a problem. The decision to base RSS on XML makes it more complicated to implement than it should be. As anyone who has tried to build an RSS reader knows, that complexity causes no end of headaches. Non-standard and subtly broken feeds are everywhere, and RSS readers have to be able to handle a huge number of edge cases. Because of the prominence of social media streams and the challenge of implementing RSS properly, many publishers and developers don’t make the effort.

JSON Feed, which was created by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons, who created NetNewsWire, one of the earliest popular newsreaders, is intended to provide an alternative feed format without the headaches associated with RSS.

JSON is a lightweight data interchange format and it’s hugely popular. Originally developed for use with JavaScript, JSON is now a de facto standard for data exchange and APIs. Every programming language used on the web includes a JSON parser. Those of you who follow the WordPress world will be aware that the new WordPress REST API delivers data in JSON. Most importantly, the JSON Feed format is simple enough that correct implementation isn’t likely to be a problem.

JSON Feed is an excellent addition to the feed ecosystem, and it will hopefully see wide adoption. Many prominent feed readers have already integrated JSON Feed support, including Feedbin, Newblur, and Inoreader. However, if you choose to offer a JSON Feed on your site, don’t disable RSS. It’ll be a long time before the majority of services and applications that consume feeds adopt the JSON Feed format, if ever, so most sites will want to use both formats simultaneously for the foreseeable future.

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If you’re anything like me, you’re full of ideas for projects you’d love to work on if only you had the time. I’m a writer, and I have no end of ideas for essays, blog articles, and books I’d like to write. Most of us are the same; whether it’s writing, photography, music, podcasting, art, or any of an unlimited variety of creative projects, we have an idea that we’d love to share with the world, but our daily responsibilities get in the way and we just can’t find the time.

But, as I’ve learned, it almost certainly doesn’t take as long as you think to create something worth sharing. A couple of hours a week is probably enough, if you have access to the right tools. For me, WordPress is that tool. WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, and it’s the perfect platform for publishing your content. I prefer WordPress to social media networks like Facebook because, although I share on Facebook too, everything I publish lives on a site that I control.

Get Up-And-Running In No Time At All

The idea of setting up a website may seem daunting, but in reality you can be up and running with a WordPress site in a couple of minutes. The best WordPress hosting companies install and configure WordPress for you, and all you’ll have to do is choose a theme and start publishing.

Choose From Thousands Of Designs

Speaking of themes, WordPress provides a rich variety of designs so that you can choose the perfect look for your side project. There are thousands of high-quality free themes available in the official repository, and, if you don’t mind spending a few dollars, thousands more premium themes.

WordPress Can Make Your Vision A Reality

WordPress is modular and extensible. In simple terms that means developers have created thousands of plugins to add functionality to your WordPress site. In fact, if you can think of it, there’s probably a plugin for it. Take a look at the official WordPress plugin repository and search for something you’d like to do with your side project — you’re almost certain to find a plugin that will make it that much easier.

Plugins aren’t just about making WordPress easier to use; they also provide a wide range of extra functionality for the content management system, including plugins for SEO and eCommerce.

WordPress Is Fast And Secure

There are two secrets to ensuring that WordPress fulfills its potential as a fast and secure content management system.

First, choose a WordPress hosting provider that cares about performance. The best managed hosting providers invest in networks and servers that make the most of WordPress’s performance capabilities.

Second, make sure you keep your WordPress site up-to-date. The majority of security problems that WordPress site owners have are due to outdated plugins or WordPress installations. Updating is simple: most of the time it happens automatically, and for major updates, all you have to do is press a button.

If you have a side project that you’ve been putting off because you’re worried about the complexity of creating a website, try WordPress. You’ll be up-and-running with a beautiful, feature-rich website in no time at all.

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