Customizing and Extending WordPress

There are some pretty simple customizations you can do to your website that will add a lot of value both to you as a publisher and to your readers and audience. Some of these videos we already covered in different sections of the guide, but I thought it was important to repeat some of them.

Note that with any modern theme you can find all of its customization options under Appearance > Customizer thanks to the design unification efforts of the WordPress developers. Be sure to take a peek through those menu options within the Customizer before you proceed with any of the options below.

All About User Photos: Gravatars

User photos or avatars are not quite as you'd imagine. With most social media profiles you simply choose to edit your profile, then upload your pic and you're done.

WordPress does make this a bit more complicated, but I swear it's for a good reason that will make your life easier later on down the road.

WordPress uses a system called Gravatar to set your user photo, which you can read all about on their website here. The gist of it is simple: set your image using your Gravatar account once and any WordPress (or other Gravatar enabled site) you log in to with the same email address will automatically use your image.

Therefore to set your photo for your WordPress site, create a Gravatar account that uses the same email address as you've used for your WordPress user account.

Installing JetPack For Additional Features

Installing An Email Subscription Box

Adjusting the Number of Posts per Page

The default number of posts per page is usually 5 or 10. This is controlled in the WordPress admin under Settings > Reading -- it's the setting called "Blog pages show at most"

Even though it's called number of posts per page, it doesn't always mean per page; it will frequently also apply to any area on a page where you have posts listed.

Always check that setting to see if the current value matches up with what you're seeing on your site, then edit it however you see fit, but try to avoid specifying more than 30 or 40, as too large of a number will result in slower page load times.

When using a page builder, like Beaver Builder, you'll find that their post or content modules will allow you to specify an override. That way for each module you insert on a page, you can select the number of posts that will be displayed.

Creating Social Media Share Buttons

Adding a Contact Form

If you're using the paid / premium version of BeaverBuilder, a Contact Form module is built in! Simply go to the page you want to insert the contact form within, choose Page Builder, then drag and drop the Contact module to the part of the page on which you wish to insert it.

If you're not using the paid version of BeaverBuilder, there's a couple of great form plugins we use on the regular:

WPForms is by far the simplest to use form builder for WordPress and makes creating a contact form dead simple. A free version is available for basic contact form functionality, but if you want more advanced features, you'll have to pony up for their paid version.
Contact Form 7 is a great free alternative that we've used for over a decade. Watch our video to learn how to install and make use of it.

How To Customize Your Sidebar

SEO & Data Tracking

Setting up Google Analytics

Install an SEO Plugin

WordPress includes super basic SEO capabilities that are mostly automated. To ensure optimal control over your site's SEO, you must install a plugin.

There are many great options for this available to you, but three of which have really stood out for us. Each one of them has a free option available under Plugins > Add New, and each of them also have great paid options available.

SEOPress: as of around 2019, this has been our preference. Its free version includes a ton of useful functionality, it's easy to use, and super powerful. Meanwhile their paid Pro version can save you significant time.
RankMath: although we haven't personally used this plugin, we've seen it on may of our client's sites and it's frequently mentioned alongside SEOPress as being a great option for managing a WordPress site's SEO.
Yoast: prior to using SEOPress, this was our preferred option. It's still a great solution for SEO, however we had found it beginning to have some performance impacts on the WordPress admin. Still, it's a great starter option for SEO for WordPress.

Check out more of our recommended resources for WordPress.

Continue To The Next Stage Of The Guide

If you haven't set up your website yet, I would strongly urge you to go back and do that now. It's really hard to design your new site when you don't even have it setup yet. If you have your website setup already, we can move on to the next section of the guide.

Customize Your Theme

How to Create a WordPress Website Navigation

Set-Up

WordPress How-Tos

CUSTOMIZE & EXTEND WP

ADVANCED THEMING

Making Money

PRODUCTS / E-COMMERCE

Marketing - learn how to increase visitors

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