6 Best WordPress Slider Plugins – Performance + Quality (Compared)

Are you looking to add a slider in your WordPress site? There are dozens of WordPress slider plugins on the market that you can use.

However, not all slider plugins are created equal. Most of them load too many scripts which slow down your website.

In this article, we will compare the top WordPress slider plugins based on their speed, ease of use, and overall features. The goal is to find the best WordPress slider plugin in terms of performance and quality.

The Problem With WordPress Sliders

Most WordPress sliders are slow. If it is not properly coded, a slider can significantly increase your page load time. If you do not have a good WordPress hosting service, then your server may respond even slower than normal.

The other problem with WordPress slider plugins is ease of use. Most of them are bloated and come with a learning curve for beginners.

Last but not least, you want to make sure that your WordPress slider is mobile responsive. A lot of them are not.

So how do you go through hundreds of slider plugins and check for all of this? Well, you don’t have to. We did the research for you and below are our results for the best WordPress slider.

The Contenders for Best WordPress Slider Plugin

For the sake of this article, we chose the top and highly recommended WordPress slider plugins. While doing our research, we noticed that these slider plugins were among the most used and recommended.

• Soliloquy
• MetaSlider
• Smart Slider 3
• Slider by Nivo
• Slide Anything
• Master Slider

We decided to run some simple tests and see how each one of them performs. The criteria we are looking for is speed, ease-of-use, features, and compatibility.

Ready, let’s get started.

Speed – Which is the Fastest WordPress Slide Plugin?

The #1 problem with sliders is that they could slow down your website. Performance and speed not only affect user experience, but they also have a significant impact on SEO.

This is why slider speed is on the top of our comparison. We want to see which is the fastest slider plugin and then we will compare their features to see if the performance impact can be justified.

To find this out, we installed each slider plugin on a demo WordPress site. We uploaded the same images to create a slider. We didn’t change any other settings and embedded the slider on a blank WordPress page.

After that, we used Pingdom speed testing tool to run the test. Following are the results of our test for each slider plugin.

Slider Plugin	Page Load time	Requests	Page size
Soliloquy	860 ms	22	679 KB
MetaSlider	863 ms	25	229 KB
Smart Slider 3	865 ms	19	382 KB
Slider by Nivo	928 ms	16	306 KB
Slide Anything	866 ms	18	324 KB
Master Slider	900 ms	22	345 KB

As you can see in the above scores, Soliloquy was the fastest loading WordPress slider in our tests. Closely followed by MetaSlider.

If you want a high-performance fast WordPress site, then Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider for you.

Now you might think that all other sliders performed well too. Why do we think that Soliloquy is the fastest?

If you notice the test results, you will see that Soliloquy increased page load size without affecting the speed.

This is achieved by using a neat little trick. Basically, it loads your cover slide first and then other slides are loaded asynchronously. In other words, you can upload high-quality slider images with minimum impact on performance.

Ease of Use – Which WordPress Slider Offers Better User Experience?

Creating sliders is not as simple as we would like it to be. There is too much technical language used in the user interface of all top WordPress slider plugins.

We want our slider plugin to be beginner friendly and something that just works out of the box. Let’s see how our top contenders perform in this regard.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the most beginner friendly WordPress slider plugin on our list. You can simply create a new slider and then just drag and drop your images.

It takes care of the other things like resizing images, choosing a slider theme, navigation style, etc. You can simply hit the publish button to save the slider.

The reason why it’s easy to use is that it uses the WordPress coding guidelines and blends in with your native WordPress admin interface. Soliloquy has a simple but intuitive user interface to create slides using the default WordPress media uploader.

Adding your slider to WordPress posts and pages is also a breeze. Soliloquy gives you a number of options including shortcodes, a Gutenberg editor block, a button for the old classic editor, and a widget.

MetaSlider

MetaSlider is another easy to use WordPress slider. Creating a new slider is quite simple and it automatically takes care of all the technical settings for you.

It gives you options to choose different slider scripts, slider theme and styles, add captions and SEO titles, and more. Beginners can ignore all those options and can simply insert slider anywhere on their site using shortcode, Gutenberg block, widget, or template tag.

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 uses a different user interface which feels different than the rest of the WordPress admin screens. It is somewhat easy to use and beginners can find their way around.

However, it packs a lot of options which may not be as easy to discover for beginners. The overall user experience is satisfactory and you can easily add a slider into posts and pages using the default block, shortcode, and template tag.

Slider by Nivo

Slider by Nivo is a free slider plugin that is easy and quite straight forward. You can simply upload slider images using the media uploader and rearrange slide order with drag and drop.

Using the same media uploader interface, you can add captions, link, and alternate text to your slide images. It comes with shortcodes and template tags so you can add a slider to your posts, pages, and template files.

Nivo Slider is an image slider and does not support video and other multimedia type. It comes with a nice bundle of themes that you can use and lots of transition effects to choose from. However, if you are counting on features and options, then Nivo falls behind other sliders on this list.

Slide Anything

Slide Anything allows you to add anything into a slider. You can add text, HTML, images, videos, or anything else you want. It is not as easy to use or intuitive as some other WordPress sliders and many of them also allow you to add other types of content.

You will have to insert all your slide content inside an HTML editor. This makes it a bit difficult to keep your slides the way you want them to be.

Master Slider

Master Slider is another slider plugin with a non-native user interface that looks different than the rest of the WordPress screens. It is easy to use, but many of the options are hard to locate.

It starts with a template selection and automatically imports some demo slides for you to start with. You can then delete those slides and replace them with your own.

It has beautiful templates and can be easily inserted into WordPress posts, pages, and sidebars by using the shortcode, Gutenberg block, and template tag.

Master Slider works best with WordPress themes that automatically load jQuery on each page load. If your theme doesn’t do that, then you will need to change plugin settings and force it to load assets on page load.

Features – Which Slider Plugin for WordPress Offers More Choices?

If all you want to do is create simple image slide shows, then any of the free WordPress slider plugins on this list can do the job.

However, Soliloquy and MetaSlider come with a lot more features. They are fully responsive sliders and look equally beautiful on all devices and screen sizes. Both support video slides, HTML 5 videos, featured content slides, themes, animations, and transitions.

They both offer simple and easy to use interface and they both have additional add-ons that you can install to add more features.

Soliloquy has slightly more features like WooCommerce add-on for product slideshows, social media integration, Instagram add-on, and more.

Pricing

Cost is another decisive factor that might help users choose a slider plugin for WordPress.

Here is the price for a single site license of these plugins.

Slider Plugin	Single Site License
Soliloquy	$19
MetaSlider	$39
Smart Slider 3	$35
Slider by Nivo	Free
Slide Anything	Free
Master Slider	Free

Among the paid plugins Soliloquy may look the cheapest, but their single site license doesn’t give you access to all the add-ons. You’ll need the developer license to access all add-ons, which costs $99.

On the other hand, both MetaSlider and Smart Slider 3 give you access to all add-ons even with a single site license.

Conclusion – The Best WordPress Slider Plugin

After comparing these plugins we can confidently say that the best WordPress slider plugin award goes to:

Soliloquy

It is by far the fastest WordPress slider plugin in the market. It follows all of the coding best practices, it is very well documented, easy to extend for developers and even easier to use for users.

Use our Soliloquy Coupon to get an extra 10% off.

Our second choice would be SmartSlider 3. It offers a very good balance of functionality and performance. The user interface is easy to use for beginners as well as developers.

We hope this article answers the questions regarding the best WordPress slider plugin in terms of performance and quality. You may also want to see our comparison of the best WordPress caching plugins to improve your website performance.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 6 Best WordPress Slider Plugins – Performance + Quality (Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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5 of the Best Reseller Hosting Providers for WordPress Compared 2019

If you are thinking about getting into the web hosting game, then reselling hosting can be a lucrative business. Whether you are a web agency looking to provide hosting for your clients, or company providing stand-alone hosting options, there are plenty of reseller hosting providers to select from.

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How to Allow Users to Edit their Comments in WordPress

Have you ever felt the need to edit a comment you just left on a website?

Maybe you want to correct a spelling or grammar or error, or maybe you accidentally hit the submit button before finishing your comment.

It happens to all of us. The problem is that most WordPress sites do not allow users to edit their comments once they are published.

If you receive a lot of comments on your website, then you may want to consider allowing users to edit their own comments for a short period of time.

In this article, we’ll show you how to allow users to easily edit their comments in WordPress for a short period of time.

Why Allow Users to Edit or Delete their Comments

Most WordPress sites allow users to submit comments on their articles after providing their name and email address. However, users are not allowed to edit or delete their comment.

Sometimes, people want to make changes to their comment after clicking on the submit button.

The most common scenario is to fix their mistakes like a spelling or a grammatical error. Some users may want to modify their comments to add or remove something.

There can also be some rare cases where a user may think about deleting their comment because what they wrote was is completely out of context.

Whatever the case may be, the best solution can be to allow people to edit their comments for a short period of time, maybe for the first 5 or 10 minutes.

During that time, they’ll be allowed to modify or even delete their comments.

The reason for adding the time limit is to make sure that link builders and spammers don’t abuse the comment section by adding links to their approved comments.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily allow users to edit their comments in WordPress.

Allowing Users to Edit Comments in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Simple Comment Editing plugin. You can see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for detailed instructions.

Upon activation, the plugin will allow your users to make changes to their comments within the first 5 minutes.

After the first 5 minutes, users will not able to edit their comments.

You can change this time limit by going to Settings » Simple Comment Editing in your WordPress admin area.

On the settings page, you can change the time in the text field to anything you like.

However, it is recommended to set the limit under 30 minutes since the purpose is to allow users to fix the errors right away.

Once you’ve changed the time, you need to click on the Save Options button to store the changes.

Next, we recommend leaving a test comment on any of your posts, so you can see the plugin in action.

Once you’ve submitted your comment, you’ll find the “Click to Edit” link and a countdown timer below the comment text. The timer is useful for indicating the time within which you can edit your comment.

To modify your comment, you need to click on the Click to Edit link.

This will allow you to make changes to your comment. However, you’ll not be allowed to change your name, email, or website URL.

Once you’re done, you need to click on the Save button to update the comment.

If you want to delete your comment, then you have to click on the Delete button. This will open an alert box asking you to confirm that you want to delete your comment.

Go ahead to click on OK to complete the process.

That’s all! We hope that this article helped you to learn how to allow users to edit their own comments in WordPress for a short period of time.

You may also want to see our guide on how to style the comment form of your WordPress site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Allow Users to Edit their Comments in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

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How to Add Free Live Chat in WordPress (The Easy Way)

Are you looking for a solution to add free live chat in WordPress?

Adding the live chat functionality to your website lets you interact with your visitors. You can answer their questions and solve their problems in real-time.

This helps you to convince your potential customers to purchase your product. It also allows you to provide faster support to your existing customers, so they stay loyal to your brand.

In this article, we will explain how to add live chat in your WordPress site, the easy way.

Why Use Live Chat on Your WordPress Site?

In this age of instant gratification, customers want to get instant answers to their questions. This helps them make a quick decision to purchase a product or service.

According to eConsultancy, live chat has the highest level of satisfaction among all the customer service channels.

Live chat has a satisfaction level of 73% where as email satisfaction is 61%, phone is at 44%, and SMS satisfaction rate is at 41%.

Live chat is an incredibly powerful tool to recover abandoned carts and improve overall conversion rate across your website, specially if you run an online store.

Aside from being a powerful sales tool, you can also use live chat to provide support to your existing customers which can help turn your loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a free live chat in WordPress.

Adding Live Chat to WordPress

While there are many live chat solutions available for WordPress, we’ll be using LiveChat Inc. for the sake of this tutorial.

It is the best live chat software in the market. We can confidently recommend it because we use it on one of our own business websites, OptinMonster.

While the WordPress live chat plugin is free, you will need to have a paid subscription to the LiveChat service. This is one of the most cost-effective solutions in the market.

There is no good free live chat plugin for WordPress.

LiveChat Inc’s paid solution starts at $16.99 per month, but they offer a free 30-day trial for testing their product.

We believe that it is the best option for small businesses that are just starting out. It is worth spending money on it because it will help grow your business.

You can add it to your website for free and give it a try.

To get started, head over to the LiveChat website to create a new account.

Next, you need to click on the Sign up free button located at the top-right corner of the screen.

This will take you to a new page where you have to provide some basic information like your full name, email address, and password.

Click on the Continue button to move forward.

In the next step, you have to provide the URL of your website and the purpose for creating the LiveChat account. It can be for support, sales, or both.

Once done, click on the Continue button to proceed forward.

Now, you have to provide some information about your business. You can select the company size, industry of your business, and type of audience.

Once you’ve filled in the required information, you can click on the Create Account button to complete the process.

Customizing the Appearance of the Live Chat Window

Your LiveChat window needs to grab user’s attention while blending in with the rest of your website design. LiveChat allows you to make changes to the appearance of the chat window to match your needs.

To do that, you need to click on the Settings link on the left sidebar of your LiveChat account area.

This will take you to the Customization page where you can style the live chat window and see your changes applied in real-time.

On the right side of your screen, you can select a theme for the maximized window and the minimized version. You can also pick a color for the chat window to match it with your website’s colors.

To replace the LiveChat Inc. logo with your website logo, you need to click on the Advanced window tweaks link.

This will take you to a new page where you need to click on “Upload your logo”.

You can also add the links to your social media pages. Once done, click on the “I’m done editing” button.

If you want to add custom CSS, then you need to click on the “Customize using own CSS” link.

Once you are finished with the customization, click on the Save Changes button to store the settings.

Setting up Live Chat on Your WordPress Website

LiveChat comes with a free WordPress plugin that allows you to add it to your website within a few minutes.

Go ahead to install and activate the LiveChat plugin. You can check out our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for help.

Upon activation, head over to LiveChat » Settings from the left sidebar of your admin panel.

On the Settings page, you’ll have to connect to the LiveChat account by clicking on the “Connect with LiveChat” button.

This will open up a popup window where you need to click on the Sign in link and then log in to your LiveChat account.

Next, WordPress will ask for your permission to access your LiveChat account from the admin area. Click on Allow to complete the process.

Now you’ll find some new options on the settings page.

You may click on the “Hide chat on mobile” toggle box to display live chat on desktop only.

You can also hide the chat feature for guest visitors to test the software.

Now you can visit your website to see the Live Chat bubble added to the bottom-right corner of your screen.

You’ll receive notifications on your LiveChat account whenever someone uses it to contact you. You can then interact with them, from your account area to answer their queries.

How to Find Trained Live Chat Agents

The above method allows you to add the live chat feature to your site easily.

However, the biggest challenge for most small businesses is to maintain a team of support or sales professionals.

You’ll have to hire and train the team so that you can provide live support to your customers.

The easiest solution is to outsource the service to LTVPlus. It is a managed live chat service for online businesses.

LTVPlus is started by the co-founder of MaxCDN, the content delivery solution that we use on WPBeginner website.

They offer affordable live chat agents who can provide 24/7 support on your website. This will help reduce your expenses and grow your business without worrying about hiring more support and sales staff.

You can use the combination of LiveChat and LTVPlus to add live chat functionality to your website and take your business to the next level.

We have used the combination of these two services to increase the sales on our sister company, OptinMonster.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to easily add free Live Chat in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the best CRM software for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Free Live Chat in WordPress (The Easy Way) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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How to Add Free Live Chat in WordPress (The Easy Way)

Are you looking for a solution to add free live chat in WordPress?

Adding the live chat functionality to your website lets you interact with your visitors. You can answer their questions and solve their problems in real-time.

This helps you to convince your potential customers to purchase your product. It also allows you to provide faster support to your existing customers, so they stay loyal to your brand.

In this article, we will explain how to add live chat in your WordPress site, the easy way.

Why Use Live Chat on Your WordPress Site?

In this age of instant gratification, customers want to get instant answers to their questions. This helps them make a quick decision to purchase a product or service.

According to eConsultancy, live chat has the highest level of satisfaction among all the customer service channels.

Live chat has a satisfaction level of 73% where as email satisfaction is 61%, phone is at 44%, and SMS satisfaction rate is at 41%.

Live chat is an incredibly powerful tool to recover abandoned carts and improve overall conversion rate across your website, specially if you run an online store.

Aside from being a powerful sales tool, you can also use live chat to provide support to your existing customers which can help turn your loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a free live chat in WordPress.

Adding Live Chat to WordPress

While there are many live chat solutions available for WordPress, we’ll be using LiveChat Inc. for the sake of this tutorial.

It is the best live chat software in the market. We can confidently recommend it because we use it on one of our own business websites, OptinMonster.

While the WordPress live chat plugin is free, you will need to have a paid subscription to the LiveChat service. This is one of the most cost-effective solutions in the market.

There is no good free live chat plugin for WordPress.

LiveChat Inc’s paid solution starts at $16.99 per month, but they offer a free 30-day trial for testing their product.

We believe that it is the best option for small businesses that are just starting out. It is worth spending money on it because it will help grow your business.

You can add it to your website for free and give it a try.

To get started, head over to the LiveChat website to create a new account.

Next, you need to click on the Sign up free button located at the top-right corner of the screen.

This will take you to a new page where you have to provide some basic information like your full name, email address, and password.

Click on the Continue button to move forward.

In the next step, you have to provide the URL of your website and the purpose for creating the LiveChat account. It can be for support, sales, or both.

Once done, click on the Continue button to proceed forward.

Now, you have to provide some information about your business. You can select the company size, industry of your business, and type of audience.

Once you’ve filled in the required information, you can click on the Create Account button to complete the process.

Customizing the Appearance of the Live Chat Window

Your LiveChat window needs to grab user’s attention while blending in with the rest of your website design. LiveChat allows you to make changes to the appearance of the chat window to match your needs.

To do that, you need to click on the Settings link on the left sidebar of your LiveChat account area.

This will take you to the Customization page where you can style the live chat window and see your changes applied in real-time.

On the right side of your screen, you can select a theme for the maximized window and the minimized version. You can also pick a color for the chat window to match it with your website’s colors.

To replace the LiveChat Inc. logo with your website logo, you need to click on the Advanced window tweaks link.

This will take you to a new page where you need to click on “Upload your logo”.

You can also add the links to your social media pages. Once done, click on the “I’m done editing” button.

If you want to add custom CSS, then you need to click on the “Customize using own CSS” link.

Once you are finished with the customization, click on the Save Changes button to store the settings.

Setting up Live Chat on Your WordPress Website

LiveChat comes with a free WordPress plugin that allows you to add it to your website within a few minutes.

Go ahead to install and activate the LiveChat plugin. You can check out our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for help.

Upon activation, head over to LiveChat » Settings from the left sidebar of your admin panel.

On the Settings page, you’ll have to connect to the LiveChat account by clicking on the “Connect with LiveChat” button.

This will open up a popup window where you need to click on the Sign in link and then log in to your LiveChat account.

Next, WordPress will ask for your permission to access your LiveChat account from the admin area. Click on Allow to complete the process.

Now you’ll find some new options on the settings page.

You may click on the “Hide chat on mobile” toggle box to display live chat on desktop only.

You can also hide the chat feature for guest visitors to test the software.

Now you can visit your website to see the Live Chat bubble added to the bottom-right corner of your screen.

You’ll receive notifications on your LiveChat account whenever someone uses it to contact you. You can then interact with them, from your account area to answer their queries.

How to Find Trained Live Chat Agents

The above method allows you to add the live chat feature to your site easily.

However, the biggest challenge for most small businesses is to maintain a team of support or sales professionals.

You’ll have to hire and train the team so that you can provide live support to your customers.

The easiest solution is to outsource the service to LTVPlus. It is a managed live chat service for online businesses.

LTVPlus is started by the co-founder of MaxCDN, the content delivery solution that we use on WPBeginner website.

They offer affordable live chat agents who can provide 24/7 support on your website. This will help reduce your expenses and grow your business without worrying about hiring more support and sales staff.

You can use the combination of LiveChat and LTVPlus to add live chat functionality to your website and take your business to the next level.

We have used the combination of these two services to increase the sales on our sister company, OptinMonster.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to easily add free Live Chat in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the best CRM software for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Free Live Chat in WordPress (The Easy Way) appeared first on WPBeginner.

from WPBeginner http://bit.ly/2I5S0cY
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5 Best WordPress Search Plugins 2019

There are a lot of great things about WordPress, but most people would agree that the default WordPress search functionality is not one of them. Thankfully, with the best WordPress search plugins from this list, you can give your search system a much-needed upgrade that makes it more user-friendly and gives your visitors more options […]

The post 5 Best WordPress Search Plugins 2019 appeared first on aThemes.

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Blog SEO: 11 Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO (like a Pro)

Many of our readers have asked us to share tips on how to optimize blogs posts for SEO, so they can get better search rankings.

The best time to optimize your blog content for SEO is when you are creating it, but you can always go back and improve your old articles as well.

Blog SEO is important because it helps you consistently get more traffic to your website. There are many things you can do to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

In this article, we will share our best blog SEO tips to help you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. These are the tips that we use on our own blogs, which gets millions of visitors from search engines.

1. Plan Your Content with Proper Keyword Research

Many beginners just use their best guesses to write about topics they feel that their users would be interested in.

You don’t need to rely on blind guesses, especially when you can do keyword research to find out exactly what your users are looking for.

Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover topics your users are interested in based on the search engine data.

You can then use these keywords to plan your content strategy. This will ensure that you write about topics that people are actually looking for, and it’s a great way to find new blog post ideas.

We recommend using keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs. They offer in-depth keyword data, competition analysis, keyword position tracking, and tons of other useful features.

For detailed instructions, see our article on how to do keyword research for your blog posts.

2. Find Semantic Keywords for Your Focus Keyword

After you have done your keyword research and discovered keyword ideas, it is time to pick one that has the highest search volume and low competition.

This will be your focus keyword. It is the search phrase that your users are most likely to look for.

If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, then you can set the focus keyword in your article’s SEO settings. This would allow you to see how effectively you have used it in your article.

Next, you need to find out the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are the searches related to your focus keyword.

The easiest way to find them is to simply enter your focus keyword in Google Search and scroll down to the bottom of results. There you’ll find them listed as ‘related searches’.

You need to incorporate as many of these keywords in your content, so you can have the most complete content for users.

It’s very important that you don’t try to stuff them in your content. This would look odd to your users and search engines are pretty good at detecting keyword stuffing.

3. Write an Effective Blog Post Title

The title of your blog post is extremely important for search rankings.

A good blog post title makes your article more relevant to the search query. More importantly, it motivates users to actually click on your article when they see it in search results.

You can make your blog post title more SEO friendly by using your focus keyword in the title.

Aside from adding your focus keyword, we also recommend making your headline catchy and click-worthy. That’s because click through rate (CTR) plays an important role in SEO.

There are several formulas to write effective headlines. The one that still works is called EMV or emotional marketing value.

This formula recommends using power words that trigger specific emotional responses in your audience. There are online tools like EMV headline Analyzer which help you calculate your title’s EMV score.

For more tips, see this article on headlines that went viral and how to copy their success in your own articles.

4. Make Internal Linking a Habit

Once you have blogged for a while, you will have enough content that you would want users to read. With internal linking, you can send new readers to check out your older relevant posts.

Internal linking is a great way to develop a contextual relationship between your new and old posts. It also allows you to pass relevant link juice to your older articles.

WordPress makes it easy to search for your old posts right inside the post editor. Simply select the text that you want to link and then click on the link button.

A text pop-up will appear below your selected words. You can start typing to search for the older articles that you want to link here.

Making internal linking a habit will make sure that your on-page SEO is good, and that your older articles continue to get new links.

Often beginners make the mistake of doing 1-way internal linking where they link to older posts from new articles. You can and should also go back to edit older posts to link to your new articles for maximum benefits.

5. Add Images and Videos to Your Blog Posts

Search engines often rank engaging content higher in search results. Images and videos are far more engaging than plain text.

You want to make sure that your blog posts contain images between paragraphs.

When adding images, you want to be careful about image copyrights. Often beginners copy images from other sites to use on their site, and this can get you in legal trouble if you do so without proper permissions.

Don’t worry, there are plenty of places where you can find royalty free images to use in your blog posts. You can also use your own original photographs or use websites like Canva to create engaging graphics.

Make sure that you optimize your images for SEO. See our tutorial on how to optimize images for search engines for detailed instructions.

Videos are even more engaging than images. You can convert your blog posts into videos by creating slideshows, vlogs, or experiment with other formats.

However, you should never directly upload videos to your blog posts. WordPress is not optimized to serve videos, and your shared hosting service can’t handle them.

We recommend uploading your videos to YouTube. It is the second most popular search engine, and the second largest social media platform right after Facebook.

See our article on how to embed videos in WordPress for more details.

6. Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post

The meta description is an HTML meta tag that you can add to any page. Its purpose is to provide a short description of your article for search engines and other crawlers.

Some SEO experts believe that the meta description tag on a page has become irrelevant. However, many others would disagree. At WPBeginner, we recommend using the meta description for all of your posts.

A good meta description can explain a lot more about an article. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn also display it when your articles are shared on those platforms.

Since now you know that people are going to be reading your meta descriptions, you want to make sure that it’s helpful.

You also want to make sure that you at least mention your focus keyword once in the meta description for search purposes. The character limit for Meta Description is 155 characters.

Try to stay within that limit or your meta description will be truncated after 155 characters. You also want to make sure that you use the focus keyword earlier in the meta description rather than later.

To add meta description, you need to scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box on your post edit screen.

7. Make Your Articles Easier to Read

Readability is an important factor considered by search engines. Articles that are easier to read often rank higher than articles that are not user friendly.

Computer and mobile screens are still not an optimal platform for reading.

This is why most users just scan through articles. In fact, studies found that users spend less than a second to decide whether they want to stay on a page or leave.

That’s a very short time for you to convince the user to stay and scroll through. By improving readability, you can make it possible for your users to quickly scan an article.

You can improve readability by using shorter sentences, smaller paragraphs, punctuation, headings, and bulleted lists. We recommend adding white space around text and use images to make your text look easier on eyes.

You can use tools like Grammarly, which allows you to check grammar, punctuation, and spelling on the fly. It also gives suggestions to improve the readability of your articles.

Yoast SEO plugin also comes with a built-in readability checker. It shows the flesch reading score of your article under ‘Readability analysis’ tab.

For more on this topic, see our article on how to improve the readability score of your blog posts.

8. Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content

Categories and tags help you sort your content not only for yourself, but for the readers and search engines.

The problem is that many WordPress beginners often end up using them incorrectly.

If you think about your website as a book, then categories would be the table of contents and tags will be the index part of the book.

Categories are used to divide your content into major topics discussed on your blog. Tags, on the other hand, are the topics discussed in an individual blog post.

To learn more, see our beginner’s guide on using categories and tags for maximum SEO benefit.

9. Aim to Be The Featured Snippet in The Search Result

Google has been trying to answer user questions as quickly as possible. As part of this effort, they have introduced the featured result or answer box.

This is the highlighted search result that appears on the top. Google generates a custom snippet from the article’s content highlighting the part that their algorithms believe to be the answer of user’s query.

According to research conducted by Advanced Web Ranking, Answer boxes secure almost 32.3% CTR. This makes them immensely important for your SEO strategy.

There is no specific set of instructions provided by Google regarding how they would pick the featured snippet. Their recommendation is to improve your content and make sure that it offers the information users are seeking.

However at WPBeginner, we have created helpful tips based on our research that will help you appear in Google answer boxes with your blog posts.

10. Make Your Blog Posts Comprehensive

Search engines love articles that cover a topic with great detail. This is why we asked you to gather the semantically related keywords (LSI Keywords) as part of your content planning step.

These related keywords give you an idea of different variations of user searches regarding that particular topic. By covering those keywords in your article, you would be able to make it more comprehensive, informative, and useful.

You should use headings and subheadings to include those keywords and try to cover as much ground as you could.

Aside from LSI keywords, another tip to create complete content is to type your desired keyword and then switch to Image Search. You will see topic bubbles with a variety of keywords.

We recommend including these when creating your content, so you can have the most comprehensive content.

11. Optimize Older Blog Posts

Many beginners tend to forget about a blog post after they have published it. In fact, you are not done optimizing your blog post for SEO once it is published.

Here are some things that you need to do after publishing your blog post:

• Promote it on social media – Promote your blog post across your social media profiles. You can even automate this task by using IFTTT to share your content.
• Add internal links – Once you have published a post, you can go back to relevant old articles and add a link to your new blog post. This gives your new articles link juice while also allowing users to discover it more easily.
• Track search rankings – You have optimized a post for SEO, but how do you keep track of its search rankings? See our guide on how to track search rankings for your blog posts for instructions.

We recommend optimizing old posts on a regular basis, so you can continue to improve your rankings.

We hope this article helped you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. Need more tips to promote your content? See our article on how to get more traffic to your blog posts.

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The post Blog SEO: 11 Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO (like a Pro) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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