Creating websites locally can be a good idea for several reasons. It’s free, for one thing. You can keep working even if you can’t connect to the Internet or if it goes away. You can use localhost to try out different themes and plugins or to make your own. Lastly, your sites are private until you decide to let other people see them.

Setting up websites on localhost used to be hard, but new tools like Local by Flywheel are making the process much easier.

What is Flywheel Local?

Local by Flywheel, also known as “Local,” is a WordPress-optimized local development environment. It can be used instead of tools like XAMPP, MAMP, and WAMP.

Local by Flywheel takes care of the hard work behind the scenes so that you can quickly build sites. You can set up a new WordPress site with just a few clicks. You don’t have to download WordPress, edit wp-config.php, or mess with ports. Local takes care of all of that.

Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks likes it, as do developers and teachers Carrie Dils and Tonya Mork.

Need to know about WordPress.

Want to know more about how to use WordPress to run a website? Has it been hard for you to use the software? Are you scared of the process of learning? This article has tips to help you get started with your site, so read them all and learn as much as you can.

If your site is made with WordPress, try to use a landing page. This is a great way to spice up your site instead of showing your most recent posts. You can even use Premise for WordPress, which is a paid service that can help you get started.

Check out add-ons to find simple tools that will make your website or blog better. You could, for example, add a calendar to your side menu bar to share events that your readers might be interested in. You can also find a lot of great add-ons that give you control over advertising and make your site a money-maker.

Make sure that your sidebar is as clear and simple as possible. You don’t want it to have 100 ads, buttons, and links. Instead, only put important things in your sidebar, and if you need more links, put them in submenus that show up when the user moves the mouse over your main menu.

With WordPress, you can choose from a lot of different themes, so your blog can look great. Spend a lot of time looking at all of your options so you can choose the one that fits your style and your topic the best. Choose a paid theme if you want a truly unique look. This is a great way to make your blog stand out.

Set a time for your blog posts to go live. You can choose when an article will be published when you are editing it to get it ready for publication. Setting regular updates for a certain date and time is a good idea. To make sure your blog is always up-to-date, write your blog posts ahead of time and let WordPress post them for you.

When you’re done with your site, look at it from the point of view of a visitor. Did you say everything you meant to say? Go to your site from someone else’s computer to see it from their point of view and make a list of the changes you need to make to make it look better.

You should have a landing page. This will make sure that visitors end up on a certain page instead of your most recent posts. A landing page gives your site an air of legitimacy and makes it look a little more professional than it would have otherwise.

Make it a point to learn about all of the options and tools you can use with WordPress. A kitchen Sink is a great tool. It gives you many ways to import and format files. Another useful tool is Screen Options. You can use this to change many different formatting elements.

One reason why WordPress is so easy to use is that its plug-ins can do so many different things. Still, you need to be careful about which plug-ins you choose. Don’t start downloading them without thinking. Start with the most important plug-ins: WP DataBase BackUp, All-In-One SEO Pack, and WP Optimize. Choose people carefully to get just what you need.

Use a page where people can land. Users won’t go straight to the posts, but will first go through this landing page. You can use this in a lot of different ways like to promote a product or yourself. Many themes come with a landing page, but you can also pay for one.

Make sure your WordPress site loads as quickly as possible for your visitors. This is important because users won’t come back to your site if it crashes or takes too long. When people visit your site every day, they will be happy if it loads quickly.

Are there so many comments on your site that you can’t keep up? If that’s the case, you and your visitors may find it hard to sort through all the comments. You can add a plugin that takes care of this for you. This makes the site easier to find your way around because it is better organized.

Video blogs are getting a lot of comments, so this is an option to think about. Video blogging is becoming not only more popular but also easier to use. In its current form, WordPress makes it easy to blog with videos. This can bring in more people, especially those who aren’t as likely to read.

So, how are tags and categories different, and why should I care? Categories are broad and can hold a lot of posts in the same genre, like “cleaning tips.” Tags are more specific words that describe what a post is about. For example, “removing blood stains” or “getting grass stains out” are tags.

Is your WordPress dashboard a jumble of things? Do you want to clean up? On that page, click the Screen Options link to choose which boxes you want to see and get rid of the ones that aren’t useful to you. This will make it easier for you to use your dashboard in the future.

You no longer have to approve comments by hand. Let Akismet filter out the spam for you. You can have an email sent whenever someone comments, however, it might be best to deselect manual approval for posting. If you don’t do that, Akismet is pretty much useless.

Make posts “sticky” if you want them to stay at the top of your page. If you want people to see certain posts first, you can make them “sticky” by going to the “visibility” option on the “edit posts” screen. Select the messages you want to move to the first page, and that’s it.

In this article, some of the best advice from experts is served to you hot off the stove. As long as you use what you’ve learned, creating your new WordPress site will be easy. Now that you know so much, get to work and your website will be up and running in no time.

Tips and tricks for using WordPress to make blogging easy

You must have heard of WordPress at least. More than likely, you’ve read a blog written on this platform or even played around with it yourself at some point. Keep reading if you want to learn more about how much this platform can do.

If you want to make your site with WordPress, you should only do so if you want to make it responsive. People use all kinds of devices to access websites, and you want to make sure that anyone who wants to look at your site can do so without any problems.

Don’t let WordPress host your blog if you’re doing it for professional or search engine optimization reasons. Move your blog to a different host and use the WordPress application there. Blogs on the WordPress website are sometimes taken down because they are too commercial or seem like spam.

Let people use different avatars on your website. This will make your site a lot of fun and easy for people to use. Also, you’ll be able to show off your personality better. To find this part, go to the settings area of your dashboard and look for “discussion.”

Do many people leave comments on your posts? You might not want to read through every comment. You can add a plugin that takes care of this for you. So, it will be easier to get around your site, and it will be well put together.

Keep a close eye on the people who visit your blog. This is the only way to make it better and make your reader happier. This can be done with Jetpack stats on a free WordPress blog. Google Analytics can be used by both free and paid blogs. Make the most of both services if you can, because they each have their benefits.

Know that WordPress lets you write posts and send them at a later time. All you have to do is change the post from “Publish Immediately” to a specific date and time in the future. So, you can write blog posts and set them to go out even when you’re on vacation.

Make sure to check the spelling of your WordPress story. This is easy to do with WordPress because the editor has a button to check for spelling mistakes. Look for a button with “ABC” written on it. Then, it will check your post for common spelling and grammar mistakes. Check any word or phrase with a red squiggly line under it.

When people start responding to your posts, you might want to let them post with an avatar. It only takes a minute and makes your site feel more like a community. Just click “discussion” in the settings section of your dashboard. You should be able to turn on avatars there.

Make sure to use targeted titles and descriptions. These are the first things people who find your blog through a search engine will see. They are very important to your website. Use SEO software Scribe to have more control over this on WordPress sites that use that platform. With these editing tools, you can make your site look better.

If you want to use a WordPress template, choose one that gets updated often. You don’t want to use a template whose maker has stopped updating it, because you might have to fix security problems. A better product will come from a creator who keeps his template up to date.

Use a plug-in for security. It’s important to keep your blog safe, and there are a lot of plugins that promise to do just that. Try a plugin that you feel comfortable with. The best choice is Wordfence. It is free, has a firewall, checks for viruses, and blocks any bad networks.

If you want to post on off days, use WordPress to schedule them a few days in advance. This way, your posts will go up even if you are busy with something else. Find the “publish” box on the “Edit” screen. Right below this is a note that says, “PUBLISH IMMEDIATELY.” Change that to make it show the time and date you want it to be published. When the right time and date show up on the screen, click “OK.” Check the “Schedule For” page and then click “Schedule.”

Spend some time reading reviews when looking for plugins. Remember that anyone who knows how to code can make these plugins. It is important not to use plugins that have been reported to have a lot of problems. Most of the time, plugins with high ratings and a lot of downloads are safe.

If your WordPress site is running slowly, you might want to add a plugin for caching. By caching pages that don’t change often, these plugins make page loads faster. This means that just by adding the plugin, your site’s speed could go up by 20% to 30%. There are a few choices, but W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular ones.

Use the Search and Replace plugin if you misspelled a name in multiple posts or just want to change a certain word across your site. The amount of time it takes to do this by hand is terrible, so let the plugin do it instead.

Disqus is a great plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for people to leave comments. The API for this free commenting system works well. It lets you import comments and save copies of them. It also adds important SEO to your comments, which makes it easier for search engines to find and list them.

Use a variety of tools to write a blog. You don’t like that dashboard on WordPress, do you? Use a program like Windows Live Writer to write your blog. Many tools work with WordPress and are much better than WordPress itself. Try out a few of them to find out which one works best for you.

If you knew anything about WordPress before reading this article, you already knew that it’s not a hard platform to use. But there is a lot to learn and discover about WordPress if you want to do more with it. This article has given you some help. Get ready to show what you’ve learned.

Tips that are easy to follow about WordPress.

To get more people to visit your website, keep the theme up-to-date. Change your theme to one that makes your colors and logos stand out. Also, if you plan to show your site to a lot of potential customers every day, you might want to choose a more professional theme.

Make sure that everything on your site is up-to-date. This is very important because people are more likely to leave your site if it’s out of date or shows the very old information. Spend some time every week getting rid of the old stuff on your website to make it look better.

If you want to make it easy to look through the videos or photos you upload, put them all in a single folder in WordPress. To do this, go to Settings > Media and uncheck the box that tells WP to put your media into folders based on the date.

Don’t forget to check your spelling. Even though it might seem obvious right now, many people forget to do it. Make sure to use the spellcheck feature of the WordPress editor when posting to your blog. Even if you already checked your post for mistakes, it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick spellcheck.

When you use different tags for different topics on your blog, keep in mind that these are only for searching the content on your blog. Search engines can’t use these. If you want Google to be able to find your pages, you need to add an SEO plug-in like Headspace.

Take any special characters out of your blog post URLs. These will make it hard for search engines to crawl your site, so you should get rid of them. You can also make the URLs shorter so they don’t overwhelm your visitors. Just use the keywords.

Encourage your users to share your site on the most popular social media sites with their friends, family, and loved ones. Twitter and Facebook are the best sites I can think of because they can spread your name to millions of people. This can be done with the help of a social sharing plugin.

Hold shift while you press the enter key to make a line break but not a paragraph break. This moves the cursor to the next line without leaving a space between them. This should make it easy to put a letterhead-style address on your page.

Check your site and its content often. All of your plugins and other tools you use need to be up to date. This will help make sure that your visitors’ time on your site goes smoothly. If you have trouble remembering to do this, you could set your phone to remind you to do it once a month.

Instead of turning off comments to stop spam, you can install the right plugin. The Akismet anti-spam plugin is a great way to keep your site clean. You can also add Recaptcha, which adds a captcha to the comments box on your site to make sure that no bots can leave a message.

If you want a post to stay at the top of the page, you no longer have to set its date for a long time in the future. Instead, go to the post and click Edit under Visibility. Pick the option that lets you make the post “sticky,” and have fun!

Set up when you want to publish your posts ahead of time. You can set them to automatically post whenever you want, even when you’re not at your computer. Using the Publish command on your Edit screen is a simple way to do this. Under the box that says “Publish,” there is a radio button called “Publish Immediately.” Put in the time, day, month, and year in military format when you want your post to go live. Click OK. When the “schedule for” screen comes up, check the information and press “Schedule” if it’s right.

Carefully think about a plugin before you add it to your WordPress account. There are no rules about making plugins, so anyone with the right skills can make one and make it available to the public. Read the reviews and pay special attention to the negative comments to make sure the source is reliable.

Take the time to make a plan before you start making a WordPress site. Write down the goals of your site and what you want people to get out of it. This will let you make your website fit your needs instead of trying to add things later.

Use the space for your footer. In WordPress, this section near the bottom of the page can keep your visitors interested. You can put in information about ownership and copyrights or links to other pages. In some premium themes, you can add things like biographies and other information that is important to your site or cause to these sections.

You can make changes to your blog without publishing it if you make a copy of it in a different folder with the same database. This will make sure that any changes you make to your site don’t hurt it.