Learn about many useful and time-saving tools and resources that will help you manage your content effectively.
Content Management Tools
Learn about many useful and time-saving tools and resources that will help you manage your content effectively.
Here are some great tools and resources that will help you manage your content effectively and save you time (click on the links below to explore these further):
Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.
Content Management System (CMS)
Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.
A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that allows users to easily create, manage, and publish digital content, typically for websites.
It provides an interface for users to add and edit text, images, videos, and other types of digital media, and to manage the organization and presentation of that content.
A CMS typically includes a database to store the content and a set of tools for managing users, permissions, and workflow.
Note: While there are different types of content management systems available, this course focuses mostly on using WordPress, a popular and free CMS platform that allows businesses to easily manage their content and most aspects of their website without requiring technical skills or relying on technical experts.
In this lesson, you will learn why a CMS is a powerful content management tool, discover the benefits of using a content management system, explore different CMS platforms, and discover what you can do using the WordPress CMS platform.
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What Is A Content Management System (CMS)?
A content management system (CMS) is a software application that provides a centralized platform for organizing, storing, and managing digital content.
A CMS typically includes a variety of tools for creating, editing, and publishing content, as well as for managing the content lifecycle, which includes tasks such as version control, workflow, and publishing.
The main goal of a CMS is to simplify the process of managing content, making it easier for organizations to keep their digital content up-to-date and consistent.
A CMS typically includes a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for non-technical users to manage content, as well as features such as templates, workflows, and access controls that allow organizations to maintain a consistent look and feel across their digital properties.
CMSs can be used to manage a variety of content types, including web pages, blog posts, images, videos, and more. Some CMSs are designed for specific types of content, such as e-commerce products, while others are more general-purpose and can be used for any type of digital content.
Why Use A Content Management System (CMS)?
A Content Management System (CMS) allows your business to easily manage and publish website content without the need for technical skills.
Some of the key benefits and features of using a CMS to manage your website content include:
Ease of use: A CMS typically has a user-friendly interface that allows non-technical users to easily create, edit, and publish content on the website.
Centralized control: A CMS allows multiple users to access and manage your website’s content, which is particularly useful if your business has multiple departments or team members responsible for different aspects of the website.
Versatility: A CMS can be used to manage different types of content, such as text, images, videos, and audio files.
Collaboration: A CMS allows multiple users to work on the same website content, making it easy for teams to collaborate and review changes before they are published.
Scalability: As your business grows, a CMS can easily be scaled to accommodate more content, users, and features. A CMS can also be used to manage small websites or large, complex sites with thousands of pages.
Search engine optimization (SEO): Many content management systems include built-in SEO features, such as the ability to create custom URLs and meta tags, which can help improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.
Security: A CMS can provide security features such as user access controls and backups, which can help prevent unauthorized access to your website and protect against data loss.
Popular CMS Platforms
There are many popular content management systems to choose from, each with its own set of features and capabilities.
Platforms like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal are open-source and have a wide range of functionalities, templates, and plugins that can be used to customize your website to suit the needs of your business.
Before Content Management Systems came along, websites were traditionally built by gathering together a collection of separately linked static pages where every element of a page (e.g. navigation menus, page layout, content, etc.) was created using web code (e.g. HTML) and assembled by a web designer or website developer using a web editor application tool (e.g. Dreamweaver).
Websites used to be static collections of web pages that only coders could understand and use…until CMS-driven websites came along!
These separate pages were then uploaded to a web server and accessed online by typing in the page URL associated with the page file into a web browser.
Then, something called a Content Management System, or CMS came along.
A Content Management System is an application that lets you organize and store all your documents, images, videos, and any other type of digital content on a database, and quickly and easily add, retrieve, edit, delete and publish content on your website with no coding skills required.
A CMS also allows multiple editors and authors to access, manage and work collaboratively on a website’s content and publish it under different authors and in different areas of the website.
A CMS also takes care of a number of “behind the scenes” content management tasks such as:
Generating website navigation elements automatically (e.g. menus, links, etc.)
Storing content in an organized way, making it searchable, findable, and indexable.
Keeping track of registered users, including managing user permissions, logins, and security settings.
Allowing multiple users to collaborate, edit and publish content on the site.
And much more.
A content management system lets you manage every aspect of your content.
In short, a Content Management System gives businesses complete control over their content and its management and lets anyone easily perform content-related tasks, like:
Content creation, editing, and deletion
Content publishing / content delivery
Content organization (e.g. archiving)
Content formatting
Content revision
Content indexing, searching, and retrieval
Content export and import
Now that you understand a little more about the benefits of using a content management system, let’s talk about the CMS platform we recommend using to build and manage a website.
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform. WordPress is 100% FREE and is used to power millions of websites around the world (over 40% of all websites).
WordPress is much more than a CMS. It’s a complete website-building and web-publishing platform. You can build any type of website you like with WordPress and easily change anything and everything on the site anytime you want.
Using WordPress is easy and requires no technical expertise or coding skills.
There are many ways that WordPress puts your business in complete control of your digital presence.
For example, WordPress gives your business a “speed to market” advantage…
Publish content quickly with WordPress – just think, write … and publish!
WordPress also lets you publish time-sensitive content quickly and make it available online immediately. This is great for getting information out fast, such as:
Limited-time offers, special offers, discounts, etc.
New product releases, new product reviews, promotional videos
Company announcements
Industry or company events
Pricing updates
Customer/Reseller training tips, etc.
After your WordPress site has been set up and configured, you can easily create rich content anytime you think of something you would like to inform, promote, or communicate to others.
Then, simply hit the “publish” button and the information will be made live immediately and instantly available to online users.
Management & Marketing Automation
Another reason WordPress puts your business in control of your digital presence is that your website can be expertly configured so that all you need to do is publish new content and WordPress will then automatically and instantly:
Notify search engines like Google, Bing, etc. (you can specify exactly how you want Google to display your listings in its search results),
Post excerpts of the content to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. with links pointing back to the website (you can specify exactly how excerpts should display on social media sites),
Notify and syndicate dozens and even hundreds of other online properties like blogs, search directories, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed aggregators, etc.
Instead of a ‘static’ web presence that involves time-consuming activities like publishing content on a website and posting new content on social media accounts and other online properties to drive traffic and generate leads, your WordPress site can be configured to instantly syndicate (i.e. distribute) and get your newly-published content indexed faster, automatically driving more web traffic and generating new leads for your business…
Posting content to different sites can be very time-consuming! You can publish content on WordPress and instantly posts this content on social media.
WordPress lets you set up a content distribution and a lead and traffic generation system automatically…
Automate content distribution with WordPress to drive more traffic, leads & sales!
WordPress can also automate management and maintenance tasks on a website like scheduling files and data backups, updating software, adding and managing new users, and more.
An expertly configured WordPress site lets you do all this by configuring internal (i.e. built-in) settings, adding different add-ons, and integrating many essential (and mostly free) external services…
An expertly-configured WordPress site can automate many digital processes in your business!
As your business grows and evolves, you can easily add more functionality and automation to your WordPress site at minimal cost, like:
Adding eCommerce to sell products and services and process payments online
Capturing leads with opt-in forms and automatically adding new subscribers to newsletters and autoresponders
Adding a membership site that allows visitors to register on the site as private members with different membership levels, unique logins, etc.
Adding directories, forums, social networking features, social sharing, and engagement features, etc.
And so much more!
All this can be done inexpensively (or even for free) in WordPress using ‘app-like’ add-ons called plugins.
Once plugins are installed and configured, you can direct your site visitors to different areas of your website such as your online store, subscription forms, membership area, directories, etc. using calls to action placed in your content, graphic banners, navigation menus, etc. and let the automated processes configured on your site and your plugins do the rest.
Additionally, WordPress comes with a powerful built-in Content Management System (CMS) that works right out of the box, allowing you to easily create and manage your digital content, website administration (including updating and backing up site files and data), and automate various aspects of your digital marketing.
One of the many benefits of using the WordPress CMS is that it is 100% free to use and modify for any commercial purpose. This helps to prevent you from becoming locked into a ‘proprietary’ CMS platform that could make it harder to leave or switch to another provider.
So…
You can configure your WordPress site to automate management and marketing processes like backups, content distribution, and syndication, search engine indexing, web traffic generation, lead, and sales automation, and more, without involving website developers or web designers or requiring technical expertise or coding skills.
You can also easily look after ongoing management processes like keeping your site’s software and plugins updated, adding and configuring new site functionality, making changes to site design, layout, and content to improve sales conversions, and training other team members to do the same without hiring website developers or web designers.
Building a website with WordPress, then, puts you in complete control of your digital business processes, saving you considerable money and allowing you to generate better online results.
Want to be in complete control of your digital presence? Then choose WordPress!
A CMS platform like WordPress can put your business in complete control of your digital presence, automate key digital management, content scheduling, and marketing processes, and help you improve your online business online results.
A WordPress website can also be expanded easily and inexpensively at any time and allows businesses to integrate additional features, functionality, and services like:
Social media, social media content sharing, and social engagement tools
External services and accounts (e.g., Google webmasters, SaaS, and cloud services)
eCommerce, membership sites, directories, event bookings, and registrations, etc.
Support services (helpdesks, online chat, forums, affiliate management, etc.)
Reporting tools (e.g., server monitoring, web analytics, etc.)
And many additional functions.
Unique WordPress Features
WordPress includes many unique features that make managing websites easy, including:
Plugins
Like most apps and add-ons, plugins install with a few clicks and allow users to easily add and configure almost every kind of functionality imaginable to their website (e.g. forms, banner ad management, membership sites, directories, e-commerce, notifications, live chat, pricing tables, etc.).
Themes are web design templates that let users change the entire look and feel of their site and/or customize the site’s web design with just a few clicks without affecting its content.
Widgets let users reorganize and rearrange the site’s web layout and add new functionality without touching code using features like drag and drop and pulldown menus.
WordPress can also be configured to fully automate or reduce many complex website management tasks to processes using a few clicks.
This includes:
Managing and scheduling content for publishing
Performing data and file backups
Updating core software, plugins, and themes
Registering and managing users and subscribers
Moderating comments from visitors, preventing comment SPAM, etc.
Preventing brute force attacks and threats from malware and hackers
Fixing broken links in the content
Redirecting visitors to other pages
Generating user, statistical, performance, and sales reports
Notifying management and administrators if there are any problems with the site
And more.
Depending on what your business wants to achieve online, WordPress can also easily add and automate the management of features and functionality like:
Setting up an e-commerce store (and automating areas like featured product information, online payment processing, emailing customers download links, product delivery information, emails to prevent cart abandonment, etc.)
Providing customer service tools, services, and information sections like a knowledgebase, support helpdesks, live chat, FAQs, etc.
Setting up business directories and advertising zones (and automating processes that allow users to buy, manage, and renew their listings and advertisements)
Running event and booking sites (and automating the management of event bookings and registrations, setting up appointments, scheduling deliveries of online course content or webinars, ticket printing, confirmations, etc.)
Setting up an affiliate program (and automating affiliate management tasks, commission reports, payments, etc.)
Setting up and automating many other tasks like scheduling and posting content to social media, adding subscribers to newsletters and customer lists, processing contact information, engaging users with customer surveys and user polls, and so much more.
Most Websites Are Powered By WordPress
Not only are millions of websites around the world built using WordPress, but if one in every three websites is powered by WordPress, the chances are that if your business has a website, it is probably also powered by WordPress!
A content management system (CMS) is a software application that allows users to create, manage, and publish digital content.
A CMS is an essential tool for businesses that want to easily manage and publish content on their website. It allows non-technical users to easily create, edit, and publish content, while also providing tools for collaboration, scalability, SEO, and security.
It’s important to research different CMS options and choose one that fits the specific needs of your business.
Some of the most popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Joomla is a popular open-source CMS, it is more complex than WordPress, but it is good for managing large and complex websites.
Drupal is also an open-source CMS, it is more powerful, and it is best used for creating complex, large-scale websites.
WordPress is the world’s most widely used content management system. It is free and open-source, and it has a wide variety of themes and plugins to choose from. It is also the platform used to power millions of professional websites and blogs around the world.
WordPress is:
100% free open-source software
Highly flexible, scalable, and customizable (can be adapted for any use)
Supported by a community of tens of thousands of web developers (continually updated to improve security, add new features, and fix bugs & issues).
Resources
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress User Tutorials
Here are the best resources for learning how to use your WordPress website and CMS effectively:
WPTrainingManual.com
WPTrainingManual.com – WordPress User Training
WPTrainingManual.com provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date WordPress step-by-step tutorials for non-technical users and non-coders available.
These tutorials are 100% free to access (and download as a PDF, print, or share via email), and will help you learn how to use your WordPress site and CMS effectively.
For more information and to access all the free WordPress tutorials, go here: WPTrainingManual.com
WPMasterclasses.com
WPMasterclasses.com – WordPress & Digital Business Skills Video Courses
WPMasterclasses.com is a WordPress and digital business video training sitewith dozens of video courses and 2,000+ video tutorials on using WordPress and covering essential digital business areas.
Here are some of the WordPress video courses available on WPMasterclasses.com (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to unlock the power of the WordPress content management system (CMS) using the many powerful features inside your WordPress administration area.
Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and how to craft website pages and blog posts that will help you get better search engine rankings and improve your traffic results.
This video course takes you step-by-step through the WordPress Maintenance Process and shows you how to keep your WordPress site updated, protected, and error-free!
Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.
Learn how WordPress plugins work, how to find, install, and update plugins on your site, and how to expand your WordPress site’s functionality in almost unlimited ways.
Need a new website or blog in a hurry? This video course shows you how to quickly install and configure a WordPress website or blog on your own domain name.
Learn how to plan, build, grow, and maintain a viable membership site using WordPress that can be easily scaled and automated to become a sustainable, cost-effective, and profitable asset for many years to come.
The All Access Pass membership gives you 24/7 ongoing access to 60+ digital business skills and WordPress CMS video courses (over 2,100+ self-paced video lessons and 225+ hours of videos).
For more details of all available video courses, go here: WPMasterclasses.com
WordPress Site Management
The choice of managing and maintaining your WordPress site is completely up to you. You can outsource your site management to professionals or learn how to do it yourself.
Here are the best resources available if you choose to do it yourself:
WPCompendium.org
WPCompendium.org provides hundreds of FREE detailed step-by-step tutorials that will teach you everything you need to know to build and manage a WordPress site with no coding knowledge or technical skills required.
WPCompendium.org – Free WordPress Step-By-Step Tutorials For Non-Techies
The tutorials on WPCompendium.org are fully interlinked for ease of navigation, allowing you to learn WordPress at your own pace, and organized into comprehensive training modules covering all areas of WordPress:
WPMU DEV provides a complete WordPress site management and dedicated hosting platform with professional plugins covering everything from SEO, optimization, and security, to marketing, forms, analytics, and more, plus 24/7 expert support on all things related to WordPress.
While the site is aimed mostly at WordPress web developers, if you are an advanced WordPress user or DIY site manager, we recommend visiting the WPMU DEV Blog containing thousands of advanced and useful WordPress tutorials, and subscribing to their email newsletter for regular WordPress tips and information.
WPMU DEV’s Blog is jampacked with useful WordPress tutorials.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
The Small Business Digital Manager – This guide covers the challenges many small businesses face running an effective digital presence and provides practical ways to address these.
Also, visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for managing your content effectively.
Digital Business – Module Lessons
Below are all the lessons included in this module. Click on a link to go directly to the lesson:
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual provides detailed and comprehensive WordPress training tutorials for non-technical users.
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual
Learn how to use WordPress to manage your web content effectively with the most detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users available!
Does your business or organization’s website run on WordPress?
Then it’s important that everyone in your team should be a competent and skilled WordPress user to manage all web content in your CMS effectively.
Every feature and function you need to know to use a WordPress website or blog is explained in step-by-step detail in The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual.
The tutorials are written for non-technical users and contain thousands of instructive screenshots, so you can easily follow and apply every step.
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual is the most comprehensive, detailed, and up-to-date WordPress training resource available anywhere.
A paid membership to the site includes full access to the complete WordPress training site and additional resources like access to 2,100+ video tutorials, email courses, downloadable guides, templates, and checklists.
Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.
Content Tools & Resources
Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.
On this resources page, you will find a comprehensive collection of tools and resources for creating, promoting, and managing your content effectively.
Whether you are a marketer, blogger, content creator, business owner, seasoned content creator, or just starting out, these resources will help you streamline your content creation process, reach a wider audience, and take your content to the next level.
We have compiled below a comprehensive (and growing) list of useful, time-saving, cost-effective, and essential tools and resources that will help you be more productive in the areas of digital content planning, content production, content marketing, and content management.
Most of the tools and resources recommended below are free, and some are paid. Hopefully, you will find these to be invaluable, helpful, and worth knowing about.
Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.
File Transfer Tools
Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.
Sending and receiving files to and from other users, transferring files between different devices, and uploading or downloading files or media from various computer devices to your website, server, or remote storage services are all essential aspects of managing your content effectively.
In other lessons, we’ve looked at setting up effective content storage systems and documenting these processes to manage your organization’s files, media, and content.
If you need help in those areas, refer to the following lessons:
In this lesson, we look at various file transfer tools and methods you can use to get your content and files quickly and easily to other users, devices, web servers, and cloud storage services.
We’ll cover:
Essential File Transfer Tools
Transferring Files To Your Server Or Remote Storage
Uploading Files To Your Website From Different Locations
Using CMS Features To Upload Files To Your Website
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Essential File Transfer Tools
Being able to transfer files quickly and easily to other users is essential for areas like content production, so it’s important to organize your content management systems around tools like:
Email (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.)
Mobile Devices
Team Communication Tools (e.g. Zoom, Slack, etc.)
Email
You already know that you can send files via email as an attachment.
You can send files via email as an attachment…
But…did you know that with certain applications like Gmail, you can also send your files via email securely?
Gmail also lets you send files over email securely using Confidential mode.
For example, Gmail offers a confidential mode that prevents your email recipients from forwarding, copying, printing, or downloading either the message or its attachments. This helps you protect sensitive information from being shared accidentally or without your consent.
Watch the video below for more information about this feature:
With Gmail, you can also insert a file from Google Drive as an attachment (we cover Google Drive further down)…
Use Gmail and Google Drive to upload, store, and send files online to other users.
Mobile Devices
Mobile devices are another great tool for sending media files like images, videos, audio recordings, notes, etc.
See the ‘References’ section at the end of this lesson for links to excellent articles covering different methods you can use to transfer files using your mobile devices.
Team Collaboration Tools
Applications like Slack, Zoom, and many other tools have built-in features for sharing files, so your team can use these to quickly send files to different team members and across to other users and departments.
For example, Slack lets you upload files like documents, videos, artwork, etc. from your computer and shared drives and share these with your team.
Use Slack’s built-in features to upload and share files with your team.
Zoom also lets you upload and share file attachments, as the video below shows.
Transferring Files Between Your Computer And Your Web Server
Managing content effectively often requires uploading (and downloading) files between your computer or other devices and your web server.
Two popular methods used for transferring files between computers and web servers are:
Using a Desktop FTP client
Using a webhosting control panel application (e.g. cPanel’s File Manager.)
We’ll look at using these methods below, as they don’t require you to have advanced technical skills like other file transfer methods (e.g. SSH).
Checklist: Set Up Tools For File Transfers
Use the checklist below to set up the tools and services you will need to transfer files between your computer, website, server, and remote storage services:
These tools will allow you to connect to your website’s server and transfer files between your computer and the server.
2. Set Up FTP/SFTP Connection
Obtain FTP/SFTP credentials from your web hosting provider (usually found in the hosting control panel).
In the FTP client, add a new site with the following information:
Host: Your domain or server IP address.
Port: 21 for FTP, 22 for SFTP.
Protocol: Choose FTP or SFTP.
Enter your username and password.
Save the settings and connect.
3. Transfer Files to the Website
Use the FTP client to drag and drop files from your computer to your website’s server. For example, upload a new theme or plugin.
Make sure you place files in the correct directories (e.g., /wp-content/themes/ for themes).
4. Install a Backup Plugin
Install a WordPress backup plugin.
Use this plugin to automatically back up your website files and database to your remote storage service.
5. Configure Remote Storage
In the backup plugin settings, configure remote storage options like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3.
Authenticate and allow the plugin to connect to the chosen remote storage service.
6. Automate Backups
Set up a backup schedule (e.g., daily or weekly) to automatically back up your website.
Ensure backups are stored both locally and remotely for redundancy.
7. Use a File Syncing Service
Set up a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive on your computer.
Use the service’s desktop app to sync files between your computer and the cloud.
This setup allows easy access to website files, backups, and media from any device.
8. Secure File Transfers
Always use SFTP instead of FTP for secure file transfers.
Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on your web hosting and remote storage accounts to add an extra layer of security.
9. Test File Transfers
Perform a test transfer by uploading a file from your computer to the server and then to the remote storage.
Verify that the file is accessible in all locations.
10. Document the Process
Create a document detailing your FTP/SFTP credentials, backup schedules, and remote storage settings.
Store this document securely for future reference.
The above setup will ensure that you can easily manage, back up, and transfer files across your computer, website, server, and remote storage services.
Always back up your website (files and data) before modifying any files on your server.
Follow the tutorials and the links provided below to learn how to use an FTP tool and File Manager to transfer files from your computer to your web server.
Desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
This section explains how to set up a desktop-based FTP application to transfer files directly from your computer or laptop.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an outdated way of sharing files and most web browsers no longer support it, as it is no longer considered to be secure.
Browser FTP was once popular but most web browsers no longer support it.
Using SFTP or FTPS (and HTTPS) instead of FTP is highly recommended.
The most reliable alternative to browser FTP is a dedicated FTP/SFTP client installed on your computer, like Filezilla
Setting Up A Desktop FTP Client – How To FTP/SFTP Files To Your Server Using Filezilla
Filezilla is a popular free desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. It is open-source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Transferring files using a desktop FTP application like Filezilla is all done via the tool’s interface.
Filezilla interface
Filezilla’s interface looks complicated, but it’s really not. After connecting to your server, all you basically do is select files from a folder in your computer or hard drive (left panel) and drag these across to a folder on your server (right panel) and the tool will automatically begin to upload your files.
Similarly, you can download files by selecting and dragging these from a folder on your server (right panel) to a folder on your computer or hard drive (left panel).
Filezilla provides a basic tutorial on its site. If you need more help using Filezilla, see this video course for beginners: How To Use FTP
When using FileZilla, we recommend selecting the SFTP- SSH File Transfer Protocol for transferring files from your computer to your server securely.
Click on the General tab and select SFTP File Transfer Protocol.
Transferring Files Using cPanel’s File Manager: Step-By-Step Tutorial
Let’s show you how to use cPanel’s File Manager to upload files from your computer or external hard drive to your web server.
We’ll go through a step-by-step example on how to upload and extract a zipped file.
Note: Make sure your hosting uses cPanel for this tutorial. Otherwise, check with your hosting company to see what file transfer tools they provide.
First, log into cPanel…
cPanel’s login screen.
File Manager is located in the Tools > Files section of your cPanel administration screen.
Click on File Manager…
cPanel: Files – File Manager
Your server files will be visible inside the File Manager screen.
The File Manager screen.
Some of the main functions you will use inside File Manager to perform file transfer operations include:
Move File – allows you to select files and move them into another directory. This feature is useful if you upload files to the wrong folder and want to move these to another folder location.
Upload – allows you to upload files directly to your server. This feature is useful when performing manual software updates, and restoring or reinstalling website files.
Download – allows you to download files from your server to your local machine. This feature is useful when performing manual backups.
Delete – allows you to delete selected folders and files on your server.
Extract – allows you to unzip files inside your server directories. This feature is useful for uploading folders or multiple files (covered below).
Compress – allows you to compress (zip) folders inside your server directories. This feature is useful for downloading entire folders, large files, etc.
cPanel’s File Manager allows you to perform a range of useful functions by clicking buttons.
Additionally, you will find useful Directory Navigation Menu Buttons inside the File Manager area, including:
Up One Level – Moves files up one level inside the folder.
Reload – Refreshes your screen.
Select All – Selects all files.
Unselect All – Unselects all files.
Use the buttons in the navigation menu to perform additional functions.
Using File Manager To Upload And Extract Zipped Files
In this example, we’ll show you how to upload and extract a zipped plugin file to your server.
First, make sure to have your zipped file ready for upload.
A zipped file ready to upload to the server.
Next, log into cPanel and open up the File Manager panel.
Log into cPanel’s File Manager.
You can drill down folder hierarchies to access nested folders and files by double-clicking on the upper directory folders.
Double-click folders to access nested folders and files
Next, locate the folder on your server where you will upload your file and click Upload.
In the screenshot below, we will upload the zipped plugin file into the plugins folder section of our WordPress site installation.
Click on the Upload button to upload your file to your server.
A new screen called ‘Upload files’ will open up in your web browser. You can drag and drop files into the section with the dotted border to automatically begin uploading your files, or click on the ‘Select File’ button as shown below, then locate and select your zipped file to upload.
Click the Select File button to select and upload your file.
Select your file and click ‘Open’ to begin uploading the file to your server …
Select your file and click the Open button to upload your file to your server.
File Manager will begin to upload your file to your server. Wait until the file has finished uploading.
Wait until your files have been uploaded…
Once your file has been uploaded, click on the “Go Back…” link to return to the folder inside your File Manager’s screen where you have uploaded the file to.
Your file has now been uploaded. Click on the link to return to the File Manager’s folder screen.
You should see the file you have uploaded inside the folder on your server.
If you cannot see the file, then do the following:
Check that you are in the correct folder, and
Click the Reload button to refresh the screen.
Click Reload to refresh the screen if you cannot see the file you have just uploaded.
Also, if you upload a file to the wrong directory, use the Move button to select the right destination folder for your file.
Have you uploaded a file to the wrong folder on your server? No problem, use the Move button to place it in the right folder.
After your zipped file has been uploaded, click on the ‘Extract’ button to decompress (unzip) your file.
Let’s extract this zipped file inside your server.
A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm the location where you want to extract your files to. Click Extract File(s) to continue.
Click Extract Files to confirm and begin unzipping your file.
The ‘Extraction Results’ window displays all of your extracted files once the operation has been completed.
Click Close to return to the File Manager screen.
All of your zipped files are now extracted. Go ahead and close the Extraction Results window.
Click the Reload button to refresh your screen.
Click Reload to refresh your screen.
All uploaded files are now extracted and added to your server.
Your newly uploaded file…fully extracted and ready for use!
You can delete the original zip file from your server to save space and keep your folder free of unnecessary clutter.
To delete the zipped file, select it in your File Manager screen and click on the Delete button.
Select the original zipped file and click the Delete button to remove the file from your server and save space.
The above method for uploading files to your server is useful. Large files that normally take a long time to upload via FTP can upload in seconds or just a few minutes when transferred using cPanel’s File Manager.
Not all hosting companies offer cPanel. Many hosting companies, however, offer a file manager application, so check with your web host.
How To Configure Server File Permission Settings
Most software program installations nowadays will configure everything automatically for you. Sometimes, however, you may need to manually set permissions to allow other users to read, write, modify, and/or access information after uploading some files or programs to your web server.
File permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your server files and folders or directories.
Server file permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your files.
This is important because some applications need to upload or access files in some of your server directories to perform certain functions. If permissions for these files or directories are not enabled or set correctly, it can cause errors.
Errors can occur if file permissions on server directories are not set correctly.
For example, if your site runs on WordPress and permissions have not been automatically set or enabled for files in your wp-content directory, you may experience errors when uploading plugins or you may not be able to save changes made to plugin settings.
Refer to the short tutorial below to learn how to configure server file permission settings for files and directories on an open-source operating system like Linux.
Again, we recommend doing a full backup of your website’s files and data before modifying any files on your server.
How To Configure File Permission Settings On Your Server (Linux)
CHMOD
Chmod (abbreviated from change mode) is a command that lets a user tell the system (or server) how much or how little access it should permit a file or a file directory to be given.
It changes the file system modes of files and directories, including permissions and special modes.
If you experience issues you may need to configure file permission settings on your server.
Setting File Permission Settings Using ‘CHMOD’
If you use an FTP program like Filezilla, do the following to view and change security permission settings for your server files and folders:
Access your server
Locate the directory or file with the permissions you want to change
Right-click on the file and select ‘Properties’
File Properties
The CHMOD options should display in the menu. If not, access the help section of your FTP client and search for chmod, permissions, or change mode. Most FTP programs have this feature readily available.
To change or set permissions for your files, simply check or uncheck the permission boxes (for Owner, Group, or Public), or add the desired permission setting number in the Manual display field, then click OK to save.
Setting CHMOD File Permissions
Common WordPress file and directory permissions include the following settings:
777 – Everything for everyone. This command gives read, write, and execute permission to the owner, group, and public. chmod 777 is considered potentially dangerous because you are giving read, write, and execute permission on a file/directory to everyone on your system. Normally, this setting should be avoided.
755 – Only the owner can write, read and execute for everyone. This command means that only the owner will be allowed to write to the file. The owner, group members, and everyone else will have read and execute permissions.
644 – Everyone can read, only the owner can write. With this setting, the owner will have read and write permissions while the group and everyone else has read permission only.
Setting directory permissions to make your files writable depends on your web hosting environment. For example, to make a file or directory writable, you would normally set (i.e. chmod) file permissions either to 777 or 755.
Notes:
Only change file permission settings if your site installation or plugin requires it. Normally, this will either be specified in a user manual (e.g. a plugin manual or installation guide) or if changing file permissions is required while performing some kind of function on your site (e.g. installing or making changes to plugins or themes).
If you are performing installations using wizards, a notification message will usually appear on your screen asking you to make a particular file or directory writable, or specifying which permission settings you need to change.
Unless the change required to the file permission settings is permanent, you would normally restore the file to its original settings after making and saving the change for security purposes (e.g. changing a file from 644 to 755, then back to 644 again). This prevents hackers and unauthorized users from accessing and modifying the files on your server.
After making changes to files, refresh your site’s page in your browser to make sure that everything is working correctly.
Changing file permissions is not complicated. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you are concerned that you might do something that can cause errors, don’t modify any files. Instead, ask your web hosting provider or someone with more knowledge or experience to do this for you.
If you experience errors after changing permission settings, change the permission settings back to what they were and see if the error messages disappear. If errors persist after restoring file permissions, contact your web hosting provider for help.
Use this handy chmod calculator if you need help configuring different file or directory permissions.
Amazon S3
If you are hosting media files (e.g. an image) on Amazon S3 (covered in the next section) and the file is not displaying correctly on your browser, you may not have set the correct permissions for that file.
Typically, this is what you will see if a file has incorrect permissions…
This is what you will see if you have not set the correct permissions for your file on Amazon S3.
To display images stored on Amazon S3 on your website’s pages, set your file permissions as shown below:
Set up your image file permission as shown here and click Apply Changes to display images stored on Amazon S3 to users on your website.
Full Control
Owner – Tick the checkbox
Any AWS Users – Leave the checkbox unticked
All Users – Leave the checkbox unticked
Read
Owner – Leave the checkbox unticked
Any AWS Users – Tick the checkbox
All Users – Tick the checkbox
After ticking the boxes as described above, click on Apply changes to set your file permissions.
The images should now display to your website users. The Amazon S3 section below shows you how to add media files from S3 to your web pages.
Transferring Files To Cloud Storage Services
Your website files can be stored on your web server or a cloud storage service.
Some of the most popular storage services for storing files remotely in the cloud include:
Amazon S3
Google Drive
Dropbox
Let’s take a brief look at each of these services and how to transfer cloud-hosted files to and from your devices and your website.
Amazon S3
Store your files remotely using Amazon S3’s cloud storage service.
Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) is a scalable cloud storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon S3 is great for storing all kinds of files, especially media files, website backups, data archives, and more.
Amazon S3 storage folders are called buckets.
With Amazon S3, you store your files in buckets (folders).
A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. You can store any number of objects in a bucket and can have up to 100 buckets in your account.
Many applications can connect directly with your Amazon S3 account, allowing you to quickly and easily upload and store files in your s3 buckets and serve these directly on your website.
For example, the image below is being hosted on Amazon S3.
This image of a cute puppy is hosted on Amazon S3.
To check this using Google’s Chrome browser, right-click on the image and choose Inspect.
Right-click on the image and select Inspect (Chrome browser users).
You should see an Amazon S3 bucket address displayed for the image.
This image is hosted on Amazon S3 as the Chrome Browser’s Inspect function shows.
Uploading files directly to Amazon buckets can be a little complicated, so we recommend using a tool like the one below to transfer files to and from your computer or hard drive and your Amazon S3 account…
S3 Browser
We recommend using a tool like S3 Browser to upload files to your S3 account.
S3 Browser is a free Windows client for Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network, (CDN). We use and recommend installing the paid version of this tool as S3 Browser is free for personal use only.
Also, as this site is built using WordPress, media files stored on Amazon S3 can be inserted directly into the content, so here’s what we did to display the image above on this web page:
First, we uploaded the image to our Amazon s3 account…
Image uploaded to S3 bucket.
After the image was uploaded, we then set file permissions as explained earlier, right-clicked on the file, and selected Generate Web URL…
Select Generate Web URL…
We then copied the URL of the image to our clipboard…
Click the button to copy the file URL to your clipboard.
And pasted the URL into the content…
Paste…done!
That’s it! When you look at that image on our web page, it’s being served from Amazon S3, not from our web server.
Remember to add an alt tag image and a caption to your image URL before publishing to improve your content SEO.
Easily add media files hosted on Amazon S3 to a WordPress site.
Amazon S3 also allows you to set up a “bucket policy” on your server that protects files stored in buckets from being hotlinked.
Google Drive lets you store files on Google’s servers in the cloud. You can also share files and synchronize files across different devices.
Google Drive is great for storing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, forms, and other files created using Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. It also lets you collaborate with your content team to edit your documents.
Files created and edited through the Google Docs suite are automatically saved in Google Drive. You can also upload large files (up to 750 GB in size), and change privacy settings for individual files and folders, including enabling sharing with other users or making your content public.
Tutorial: How To Embed Files From Google Drive Into Your Website
You can easily embed files from Google Drive into your website.
In this example, we’ll embed an image stored on Google Drive into a WordPress site.
Note: You can use the same method as shown in the tutorial below to embed other types of files into your site like videos, audios, etc.
After uploading your media file to Google Drive, right-click on the file and select Preview.
Right-click on your file and select Preview.
Next, click on the vertical ellipsis icon (More Options) and select Open in new window…
Select Open in new window.
Click on the vertical ellipsis icon again and select Embed item…
Select Embed item…
Copy the embed code to your clipboard…
Select and copy the embed code to your clipboard.
If you are using the WordPress classic editor, switch to the Text tab and paste the content from your clipboard into the location where you want your image (or video, or audio file, etc.) to display.
Paste the embed code into your content.
Your embedded file should display when you publish and preview your content.
Dropbox is a file hosting service that lets you store, share, and synchronize files in the cloud.
Dropbox is excellent for transferring files between multiple devices, as it allows you to access your account from anywhere, on any device.
For example, let’s say that you have a home computer and a work laptop and your media editing tools are installed on both devices.
With Dropbox (and Google Drive too), you can upload files to your account while you are at work via your laptop…
Upload files to Dropbox from one device (e.g. your work laptop)…
And download these files to your home computer when you get home to continue working…
And download the files from Dropbox to another device (e.g. your home computer).
Additional Cloud Storage Solutions
In addition to the above, here are some affordable cloud, remote and offsite storage solutions you can use to transfer and store your website files and backups securely:
External Drive: Purchase an external hard drive and regularly back up your site files and data to this drive.
Microsoft OneDrive: Offers 5 GB of free storage with seamless integration with Windows and affordable subscription plans. It can be used with various WordPress backup plugins.
Backblaze B2: An affordable alternative to Amazon S3, Backblaze B2 offers competitive pricing for cloud storage, making it a great option for budget-conscious website owners.
Wasabi: Provides low-cost, high-performance cloud storage with no egress fees, making it an attractive option for WordPress users needing reliable offsite backups.
The WordPress Media Library lets you upload all kinds of media files to your site and comes with many built-in features for managing your uploaded files.
You can use drag and drop or select files to upload media to your WordPress site.
In addition to the Media Library, there are various WordPress Media Plugins you can use to transfer and manage files on your site from your computer and cloud storage services.
For example, S3 Media Maestro lets you display videos hosted on Amazon S3 securely on your site.
Use S3 Media Maestro to display content stored on Amazon S3 securely on your WordPress site.
If you store files on Google Drive, you can use a plugin like Google Drive Embedder to add files to your content.
You can also use a plugin like Dropr to easily access files from your Dropbox account and add them to your WordPress website.
Dropr is a Dropbox plugin for WordPress.
For more plugins that can help you manage the transfer of files to your WordPress site, see this section: WordPress Media Plugins
WordPress Automatic Updates
WordPress has a built-in feature that automatically transfers data like new software updates, plugins, and themes from the main WordPress repository (WordPress.org) to the WordPress installation files in your server.
It also automatically uploads, extracts, and places all data directly into the correct folders inside your web server and database.
The WordPress auto-updating feature is useful for transferring files from your server when:
Updating WordPress via the dashboard
Uploading and installing WordPress plugins
Updating WordPress plugins
Uploading and installing WordPress themes
Updating WordPress themes
The ability to perform updates directly inside your WordPress dashboard is extremely convenient. However, keep the following in mind…
One-click updates work on most servers. If you have any problems, it is probably related to permissions issues on the filesystem.
See the section earlier on configuring server file permissions if you run into any issues with WordPress (also refer to this WordPress Troubleshooting Guide if you experience other errors on your site).
Zapier
Zapier lets you connect and integrate your web applications and automate your workflows.
Essentially, Zapier allows thousands of different applications to communicate with each other and create all kinds of “when this happens…automatically do this” tasks (called “Zaps”), saving you a lot of time in the process.
Zapier also offers many integrations with WordPress.
Zapier offers extensive help documentation, including detailed tutorials on how to integrate the tool with all kinds of services.
Video Courses For Beginners – Transferring Files
The video courses below cover basic areas of transferring files and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to set up and use Amazon S3 to upload, store, manage, and protect your site’s images, large media files, downloadable files, stream videos, and more.
Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.
Effective content management involves the continuous transfer of files between users, different devices, web servers, and remote storage services.
In this lesson, we have covered many different methods you can use to transfer files and share content in your organization.
Action Steps
Make an inventory of the file transfer tools, methods, and processes used in your organization and make sure there is workflow documentation for your content team on how to use these effectively.
Resources
WordPress User Manual – The most detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users available.
The tools and resources listed below will help to speed up your content planning and content production scheduling.
Bookmarks
Your web browser’s Bookmarking tool is a great way to organize and access links to useful documentation, regularly-used tools and services, and other valuable content production resources quickly and easily.
Before adding bookmarks to your web browser, we recommend spending a little bit of time planning the structure of your bookmarking folders. This will save you a lot of time locating these later as your bookmarking list grows.
Use your web browser’s Bookmarks tool to organize bookmarking folders, and save links to useful documentation, tools, and online resources.
You can use your web browser’s bookmarks to create a ‘master’ set of bookmarks linking to all the documentation and other useful tools and resources your content team will need to work efficiently.
To do this, first, organize all the different folders you will need in your own web browser’s bookmarking tool…
Organize your bookmark folders.
Next, add all the important links to the documentation, tools, and resources your team will need.
Bookmark all the tools and resources you need to speed up content production.
Next, export your Bookmark files and share this export file with your team members. Ask them to import these into their own web browsers, so everyone in your team has access to the same resources.
Share bookmarks containing links to documentation and useful resources with your content team.
See these guides to using bookmarks in different web browsers and devices:
Create columns for each workflow process you want to track
Arrange columns in sequential order
Add new projects to rows (one per row).
Use color coding to highlight the status of your projects. For example:
Yellow = Work-in-progress
Green = Completed (published)
Red = Needs attention
Use spreadsheets to create simple content production workflows and colors to highlight your project status.
Let’s take a look at some popular spreadsheet applications.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a full-featured spreadsheet tool from Google.
Google Sheets can be accessed online via a desktop or mobile device. Additionally, Google Sheets can be stored on a Google Drive account and shared with different users, allowing for collaboration.
Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is part of the Microsoft Office suite and is available only as a subscription service.
Smartsheet is a SaaS collaboration and work management tool that lets you effectively manage your team’s work, projects, and processes through team collaboration, workflow automation, and content production management tools.
Smartsheet lets you assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, and share documents using a tabular user interface.
If you like using spreadsheets to manage projects, you may want to look into Airtable.
Airtable is a cloud collaboration service best described as a “hybrid” between a spreadsheet and a database (i.e. it has database features applied to a spreadsheet).
“A basic rule of thumb is that a database is more suited to organize a large amount of information. Spreadsheets are the best fit for running calculations. Airtable gives you the best of both worlds: a relational database that’s as easy to work with as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.”
Airtable is an ideal tool for creating spreadsheet-like editorial calendars and content inventories but with the power of relational databases.
For example, you can create spreadsheet-like sortable tables for:
An editorial calendar
Storing the names and email addresses of outsourced service providers, freelancers, etc.
Posts that need reviewing or updating
Posts that need a “search and replace” (e.g. replace old pricing or a rebranded product name), etc.
Airtable is also a low-code tool, so you don’t need to learn database scripting languages like SQL to use it.
If your organization requires managing a range of projects, tasks, and activities across different people, teams, or departments, you may need to consider upgrading your content production tools and switching to integrated workflow and communication/collaboration software.
Here are some popular work and collaboration tools you can use across your team or organization to improve workflow and productivity.
Slack
Slack
Slack is a tool that allows individuals across teams, departments, and organizations to communicate and collaborate online via channels, messaging, team meetings (called Huddles), and more.
Slack also lets you easily upload and share files like documents, videos, artwork, etc., from your computer and shared drives.
Slack lets you share files like documents, videos, artwork, etc. with your team.
Zoom is a cloud-based communications tool that allows people to meet online using their desktop or phone, and communicate via video and audio conferencing, chats, screen sharing, file sharing, whiteboard tools, and more.
For other work and collaboration tools, see the References section at the end of this lesson.
Market Muse
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a cloud-based content planning tool used by content creators, content marketers, publishers, marketing agencies, and eCommerce companies.
The tool includes components that can greatly aid your content production, such as MarketMuse Inventory, which automates your content inventory and content auditing processes by collecting and organizing your pages, analyzing them, and making them more easily accessible.
MarketMuse’s AI-driven content briefs help writers produce quality SEO-optimized content with instructions on how to structure the article, what topics to address, what questions to answer, what content to link internally and externally, and more.
Users can access content briefs without logging into the platform using a special link and writers can work directly from within the brief and get scored against suggestions as they go.
TextExpander is a time-saving tool that increases your productivity and efficiency by allowing you to quickly store, share, and retrieve information using Snippets.
Snippets are longer repetitive texts paired with an abbreviation that you type in its place. Essentially, you can think of TextExpander as a “copy and paste” tool on steroids.
Instead of searching through and copying text from old emails, notes, or a repository where you keep content that you use repeatedly, you can simply type an abbreviation as a shortcode into your content and it will then insert a full-blown content snippet that you have previously created and saved.
Use TextExpander’s Snippets to save time adding content in repetitive tasks.
Snippets also allow you to create content templates with “fill in the blank” fields and different snippet groups.
Some of the more common uses for this tool are writing out customer support responses, creating follow-up emails, recruitment messages, and many daily work tasks.
Similar to the previous tool, if you’re tired of typing the same phrases repeatedly, Beeftext is a tool that lets you set up shortcuts (keywords) for commonly used pieces of text (snippets).
When you type a keyword, Beeftext automatically replaces it with the associated snippet. This works in any application where you can copy and paste text. It’s especially useful for things like email signatures, frequent phrases, or even emojis.
Beeftext is free and open-source, meaning it doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t have ads or malware. While it listens to your keystrokes to function, it doesn’t store or send your typing data anywhere. It only checks for updates once a day.
Setting up Beeftext is simple. You create combos with keywords and their corresponding snippets. It’s like creating your own typing shortcuts. Just be careful with keyword choices to avoid accidental replacements.
So, if you’re a content manager dealing with repetitive writing tasks, Beeftext could save you time and make your work smoother. You won’t need to type out the same things over and over again.
Project management software lets you plan, schedule, organize, and track your content production projects, and communicate with your team.
Notion
Notion: AI-powered workspace.
Notion AI revolutionizes workspaces by integrating tasks, documents, and collaboration, departing from traditional tools like Google Docs and Dropbox. It offers customizable, all-in-one workspaces, allowing users to tailor their environment with modular building blocks.
Notion’s AI Assistant lets you seamlessly incorporating AI into everyday tasks.
Notion lets you store important project documents, track team progress, and manage multiple departments in one central workspace.
Teams benefit from streamlined project management, enhanced communication, and aligned workflows.
Notion AI’s unique features include:
Versatility: Solving diverse team challenges with tailored solutions, from engineering to design.
AI Integration: Seamlessly incorporating AI into everyday tasks, such as writing assistance and generating insights.
Security: Ensuring data privacy and compliance with global regulations like GDPR and ISO 27001. Notion AI prioritizes data security, only using customer data with explicit consent and for improving AI features in partnership with trusted entities.
Template Library: Offering AI-powered templates for various tasks, including writing, recruiting outreach, and video script generation.
Use Notion’s vast template library and AI tools to save time performing everyday tasks.
Notion AI integrates with existing workflows and includes a flexible text editor. It’s capabilities are continually expanding, going beyond an AI-powered note-taking software and into the future of all-in-one workspace innovation.
Trello lets you plan, organize, and track your projects visually.
You can manage multiple tasks for any type of project, workflow, or task tracking using Kanban-style boards with lists and cards that simulate the use of “sticky” notes and can include checklists, deadlines, attachments, conversations, etc.
From there, you can incorporate task assignments, calendars, timelines, productivity metrics, and more.
Asana acts as a communication hub and lets you assign respective tasks to relevant team members for specific projects.
With Asana, teams can integrate and share tasks, files, plans, and goals, and manage their work from a single app, providing visibility to all members involved.
Additionally, projects can be split up into actionable tasks and assigned to multiple collaborators, and team members can view tasks through a choice of various views (e.g. board, calendar, list view, timeline, workload, and portfolio views).
Asana provides a traditional checklist format for project management with customizable collaboration tools and project-level reporting dashboards. It also supports third-party apps (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Dropbox, etc.), the implementation of data from other applications, an Android and iOS app, and a mobile site that can be accessed on any device.
Asana provides useful templates for content-related activities, including:
Monday is a productivity suite and work management software that lets you centralize work processes, tools, and files and customize dashboards and workflows to fit your organization’s needs using customizable “no code” building blocks.
These building blocks include items, columns, views, automation, integrations, and widgets. You adapt each building block to build applications and tools that fit your needs.
The software allows you to manage production projects and other workflows with cross-team collaboration tools, easy-to-use automation, and real-time notifications.
Brightpod is a web-based project management tool that:
Provides a unified system for campaigns, content, and website projects.
Lets you build guidelines and checklists, and organize, manage and track all your SEO, social media, blog strategy, and content marketing projects from one place to save time.
Helps you organize, manage, and track your team’s work from a central location.
Allows your team to accurately view the progress of their projects and helps to address issues of collaboration such as email spam, multiple file versions, lost files, task accountability issues, lack of clarity & work transparency.
Lets you see everyone’s tasks, content publish dates, and events on the shared calendar, see what is coming up next, and manage deliverables when growing your projects and clients.
Helps you work smarter, automate, and simplify communication.
Brightpod sits somewhere between being a simple project tool and a more complex project management software and includes features like Kanban and list tasks, recurring tasks, time tracking and estimates, activity logs, milestones, messages, calendar, reports and analytics, workflows, automatic email reminders, project cloning, and more.
Optimizely is a digital experience platform SaaS that provides tools to help you improve your site’s optimization and achieve better conversion rates.
Optimizely’s Content Management lets you create, tailor and scale content for an enterprise CMS, run multiple shops, inventory, and an online/offline catalog, use AI to test and optimize new features, and more.
GatherContent allows everyone involved in content creation to work together to plan, organize, and produce content in one cloud platform.
GatherContent lets you organize content into shared projects and folders to create a single source of truth for content. It allows content teams to collaborate on content creation, search, filter, or sort content, perform tasks in bulk, assign work to contributors, identify bottlenecks in the workflow, and more.
GatherContent creates a single source of truth for content production.
Designrr – Create, Design & Launch Stunning eBooks and Reports with Ease!
Designrr is an all-in-one solution for effortlessly creating and designing captivating eBooks and reports. With the power of ChatGPT and the revolutionary Wordgenie, Designrr has transformed the eBook creation process.
Some of this tool’s powerful features include:
AI-Powered Writing Assistance: Wordgenie is an A.I. writing assistant module tailored for non-fiction content, powered by ChatGPT. It helps you create powerful titles, develop cohesive outlines, discover fresh angles for your content, and generate impressive written content in minutes.
Streamlined eBook Creation: Overcome the hurdles of writing and designing your ebook. One-click export generates beautiful eBooks in various formats, including Flipbooks and PDFs, ready for publishing.
Comprehensive Editing Tools: With the built-in image editor, there’s no need for tools like Photoshop. The image editor allows you to crop, resize, and color images. The draft editor provides a distraction-free interface for content creation, offering flexibility and efficiency.
Engaging Design Options: Create animated Flipbooks easily shareable on mobile devices. The built-in design editor with drag-and-drop functionality allows you to customize and reorganize your eBook effortlessly.
Save Time and Money: Designrr includes over 100 free eBook templates, saving you from outsourcing costs and the hassle of searching for designers, and providing a seamless process from content import to eBook generation.
Commercial License: A free commercial license is included that lets you create and sell unlimited eBooks without additional fees or royalties and access to a 35,000-member strong community for support and advice.
Content At Scale is an innovative AI copywriting software platform utilizing three advanced AI engines, natural language processing (NLP), and semantic search analysis. It crafts entire blog posts, including titles, meta descriptions, headings, URL slugs, and paragraphs with extras, all within an astounding 5 minutes.
Key Features:
Speedy Content Generation: Creates long-form content in just 5 minutes.
Comprehensive Editor: Utilize the content editor for easy viewing and editing. Content At Scale generates titles, URL slugs, meta descriptions, and provides a checklist of optimized NLP terms for SEO enhancement.
Simple Input: Requires only a keyword to generate content.
Three AI Copywriting Engines: Ensures diversity and creativity.
Content Quality Assurance: Run the content through a tool like Grammarly and you should see an impressive score.
AI Writing Tools:
Generative AI Suite: Ideal for paraphrasing, short-form content, undetectable rewrites, and simple writing.
Content Producer: Tailor and plan fully optimized, brand-specific long-form content.
RankWell®: Gain unparalleled SEO insights for ranking and scaling content efficiently.
Content At Scale also offers seamless integration with WordPress. Connect Content At Scale directly to your WordPress website to enable automatic content publication.
Creating content with Content At Scale is easy. Enter a keyword, hit “Write Post Now” to let the AI handle the research, and receive a complete, original, and research-backed piece within minutes.
Here’s a walkthrough video of the tool:
Content At Scale also guarantees plagiarism-free content with tools like:
AI Checker: Trained on diverse content types to assess AI probabilities.
AI Detector: Identifies content authenticity within seconds.
AI Humanizer: Craft human-like content, undetectable by AI detection tools.
Content At Scale offers a subscription-based pricing model and a Done-For-You service, combining AI generation with human editing for superior quality.
SpinRewriter uses content spinning (spintax) to generate unique versions of your content.
Spin Rewriter is a software tool that analyzes and rewrites articles to create unique, high-quality content.
It uses a proprietary technology called ENL Semantic Spinning to thoroughly understand the meaning of the original article and generate new, readable versions using a hand-curated database of synonyms.
With Spin Rewriter, you can rewrite your articles at the paragraph, sentence, phrase, and single-word levels. The software also allows you to fully automate the process with a single click.
Here is a live video demo of the tool in action:
Spin Rewriter has received high praise from its users and is considered the best article-spinning tool on the market. It is compatible with a variety of SEO software and supports multiple spintax formats. All of your articles are encrypted in the software’s database for added security.
Spin Rewriter can also be easily integrated into other SEO software products for even more powerful performance.
Copy.ai is an AI-powered writing tool that can help you write faster and better by cutting down your writing time by up to 80%.
With Copy.ai, you can write high-quality blog posts, social media posts, and emails with ease.
The process is simple: start by entering your post’s title and keyword, and then the AI writing tool generates an outline and main talking points to help guide your writing.
Then, it generates a full-length draft of your post in seconds, which you can edit and polish using the tool’s editor to rewrite paragraphs and sentences.
With Copy.ai, you can write high-converting social media posts and emails by providing a brief description of your post or brand, and the AI content generator will give you multiple options to choose from, which you can then edit to make your own.
Finally, just copy and paste the work into your CMS for publishing.
PlayHT is a cutting-edge AI-powered text-to-voice generator that offers high-quality text-to-speech synthesis and audio accessibility solutions using ultra realistic AI voices available in almost every language.
PlayHT’s next-generation AI speech technology captures the nuances and emotions embedded in text, resulting in truly impressive and human-like speech.
You can generate realistic Text-to-Speech (TTS) audio using the online AI Voice Generator and synthetic voices, instantly convert text into natural-sounding speech and download as MP3 and WAV audio files.
PlayHT’s key features include:
AI Voice Generator Products – Quality AI voice over generation with PlayHT’s AI text-to-speech technology.
Ultra realistic AI voices – Next generation AI speech technology that is truly human-like.
Premium AI Voices – 800+ AI Voices in 140+ languages with great customizability and control.
Voice Cloning – Create high-fidelity voice clones that are extremely accurate to their real human voices.
Text to voice editor – Powerful text to Audio Online Editor with great control of voice style.
Pronunciations and Phonetic – Create custom pronunciations of acronyms and niche terms that can be saved to a pronunciation library.
Audio Widgets – Plug-and-play, and fully customizable audio widgets for websites to increase accessibility, time on page metrics and user engagement.
AI Podcasts – Create and publish audio content to iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts
Team Access – Scale content creation by inviting and collaborating with your team
Female AI Voice Generator Online – Generate ultra realistic female voices for audio books, videos, and more.
Male AI Voice Generator Online – Create realistic male AI voices online using the text to speech technology to generate quality male AI voices.
PlayHT’s AI Voice Generator excels in a wide range of applications, including:
Videos: use the Ultra Realistic editor to easily transcribe and sync audio to your videos and create engaging multimedia experiences for users.
Elearning and Training: Use realistic AI voices to bring educational content to life and empower learning and development teams, training course providers, and educators.
IVR System: Create humanlike AI voice responses for interactive voice response systems, ensuring a natural and engaging customer experience.
Audio Articles and Accessibility: Attract new audiences and improve accessibility by offering audio versions of articles, blog posts, and written content.
YouTube and TikTok Videos: Narrate your YouTube and TikTok videos with AI-generated voices to add a professional touch to your content.
Character and Celebrity Voice Generation: Create stunning voices for game characters, animations, and cartoons, or capture the essence of any celebrity’s voice to generate identical speech.
This time-saving and cost-effective solution is ideal for businesses, content creators, educators, podcast and audiobook productions, and more.
Speechelo provides realistic and expressive AI voice sounds and is very easy to use. Simply create the voiceover, download the mp3, and import it into your video editor (it works with all video creation software).
You can create engaging voiceovers for sales videos, training videos, educational videos, explainer videos, product review videos, webinars, video ads, audio presentations, narrated web pages, recorded announcements, review draft articles, and a whole lot more!
Speechelo’s text-to-speech engine provides inflection controls with different voice tones for reading text (normal reading, joyful, and serious), settings for breath control, pauses, changing speed & pitch, over 30 human-sounding male and female voices, support for 23 languages, and more.
This is a cloud-based tool that lets you convert any text into a 100% human-sounding voiceover in English and other languages.
If you need help creating audio-based content using text-to-speech, see this excellent Text-to-Speech Course (narrated entirely using AI voices).
Royalty-Free Media
If you need royalty-free images, music, or videos for your content, check out the resources below:
Images
Find free and royalty-free images – A comprehensive list of sites where you can find free and royalty-free images (photos, illustrations, vector images, clipart, etc). Some of the sites also provide free access to stock videos and video clips.
Music
BenSound– Royalty free music for content creators. You can download copyright safe music for use in videos (YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) and use it freely in return for attribution, or subscribe to one of the site’s paid plans.
Videos
Pexels – Videos (and images) can be downloaded and used for free. No attribution required.
Content Creation Services
There are different types of content creation services available.
Freelancers
If you don’t have an in-house content creation team, you can hire freelancers to help you with your content creation.
For resources on finding freelancers and outsourced talent, see this section: Outsourcing.
PLR
Private Label Rights (PLR) content is content written by external service providers, which is then resold to customers.
With PLR content, all the content planning, research, and writing are done by a 3rd-party. You just buy the finished product and use it or resell it as your own.
While PLR content can help you save time and money writing web content, the content is not original (as the same content is resold many times to other customers) and most are not very high quality (often requiring extensive rewriting).
The main value of using PLR content is to save time creating information products to use as lead generation magnets, additional bonuses for subscribing to your service or buying your main product, and as individual or bundled digital products to sell online.
Also, see the WordPress User Manual for hundreds of step-by-step tutorials on all aspects of using a WordPress website.
WordPress Plugins
See the WordPress plugins section for plugins that can help you with different aspects of content production.
Video Courses For Beginners – Content Production
The video courses below cover basic areas of content production and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to create, launch, and sell high-quality digital products like downloadable reports, e-books, videos, and audio content quickly and cost-effectively.
Learn how to access and use free image creation and editing tools, basic and advanced image editing techniques using tools like Photoshop and free alternatives, creating images for web content, presentations, infographics, social media, and so much more.
Learn about the benefits of using webinars in your business, how to create high-quality and engaging webinars, and how to sell your products and services using webinars.
In this practical step-by-step video course, you will learn how to use text-to-speech and the latest AI voice technologies to create professional and realistic-sounding voice narrations from text files for a wide range of commercial uses and business applications.
Useful time-saving content editing tools and resources to keep the quality of all edited content consistent and error-free.
Content Editing Tools And Resources
These useful content editing tools and resources will help you save time and keep the quality of all edited content consistent and error-free.
Depending on the kind of content you publish, you may need to edit your content regularly to keep the information relevant and up-to-date.
The tools and resources in this section will save you time editing content and hopefully provide your team with content editing guidelines to help maintain consistency and quality in all published content.
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Spell Checking And Grammar
Whether your team is publishing articles and blog posts or creating digital information products like ebooks, reports, or any other kind of written documentation, it’s important to make sure that your content is free of grammatical errors and misspellings.
Here are some tools that can help to improve your content:
Grammarly
Grammarly – Free grammar-checking software
Grammarly is a FREE grammar checking tool that helps to improve your content writing by correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes while also catching contextual errors, improving your vocabulary, and suggesting style improvements.
Grammarly analyzes your work, spell-checks it, and offers suggestions on how to improve sentence structure.
The software’s online grammar-checking algorithms have been developed and are regularly maintained by linguistic technology experts.
You can use this software to check your articles, blog posts, reports, e-books, or any kind of written documentation.
How To Use Grammarly
You can install Grammarly on your web browser, on a word-processing application like Microsoft Word, or on your desktop.
Install Grammarly on your web browser.
Once installed, the tool lets you check your content anywhere online, including Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress.
Use Grammarly to check your content for errors.
If you are writing a post, for example, you can run your post or article through Grammarly before publishing to make sure that your content has no errors.
Check your posts for errors before publishing.
If you don’t see the symbols when checking your content, make sure that you have enabled Grammarly for your site.
Make sure that Grammarly is enabled.
Note: To use some of the software’s features you need to make sure that you’re logged into your account.
Make sure that you’re logged into your account and that Grammarly is enabled.
If you can see your Grammarly dashboard, you’re logged in.
Grammarly Dashboard
To check your content for errors inside applications like Microsoft Word, make sure that the tool is enabled.
You can use Grammarly with MS Word.
Grammarly will begin scanning your document for errors. Depending on the size of your document, allow a few minutes for the scan to complete.
Grammarly scans your documents for errors.
After the scan is complete, the tool’s menu bar will display the number and types of errors found in your document.
Grammarly scan results.
A screen opens up next to your content where you can view the critical errors and advanced issues the tool has found after scanning your content.
Grammarly displays the number of issues found in your content.
To view and correct issues, click on the error counter and Grammarly will scroll through your content until it finds an issue. You can fix critical issues with the free version of the tool (repairing advanced issues requires upgrading to the premium version).
Grammarly not only catches all of your spelling and grammatical errors, it will also point out errors in your punctuation (e.g. wrong use of commas, double spacing between words, duplicated words, etc.).
Fix punctuation errors.
Grammarly scans your text for common and complex grammatical mistakes, spanning everything from subject-verb agreement to article use to modifier placement, missing articles, weak adjectives, repeated words, etc.
Delete duplicate words.
Work through your content to fix all mistakes in your sentence structure and style.
Fix mistakes in your sentences.
As you scroll through each error, Grammarly shows you what’s wrong and gives you the option to automatically fix errors with just one click.
To correct mistakes, just click on the suggestion.
Click on suggestions to correct errors
You can also ignore the suggestions and keep scrolling through to the next item or scroll back to view previous items.
Ignore suggestions to continue checking for issues
The premium version of Grammarly takes your content checking to a whole new level, allowing you to repair advanced content issues, view suggested vocabulary enhancements, detect instances of plagiarism, etc.
As you can see, Grammarly is a powerful and essential tool for content writing.
Once you begin using it to improve your content, you will not want to publish articles or blog posts again without first scanning for grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors.
ProWritingAid is an AI-powered writing assistant software that provides more than just grammar checking, helping writers to identify and improve style issues such as repetitiveness, sentence length and variation, readability, overused words, redundancies, and transitions.
With over 20 different writing reports and 3,000 explanations and videos written by experts, ProWritingAid offers easy-to-follow suggestions and advice to help you improve your writing like a pro.
The software delivers thousands of grammar and style improvements in real-time as you write, with a team of copy editors hand-coding thousands of rules to cover the most vital style improvements.
In-app suggestions, explanations, videos, and quizzes help you build your writing skills while you edit, and the Word Explorer and contextual thesaurus helps you find the perfect words.
ProWritingAid easily integrates with popular writing platforms such as MS Word/Outlook, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Final Draft, and even offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari to check writing on almost every website.
Whether you’re an individual writer or an organization, ProWritingAid gives you and your team the ability to customize the software to your specific needs and create style guides and dictionaries, ensuring consistency across your writing and editing.
Hemingway Editor is a free tool that checks your writing for technical errors and readability. It is designed to be like a spellchecking tool, but for style. It helps make your writing bold and clear to make sure that your readers focus on your message, not your prose.
The Hemingway Editor highlights in yellow and red where your writing is too dense. Use the tool’s recommendations to remove needless words or split a sentence into two.
The software’s features help you to:
Improve your content’s readability
Write first drafts free from distractions
Strengthen your writing with powerful and more vivid-sounding verbs instead of using weak adverb constructs (e.g. instead of saying that someone is “walking slowly” you can say that they “tip-toed” or they “crept.”)
Eliminate complicated words and replace these with simpler words (e.g. replace words like “utilize” with “use”)
Change sentences from passive to active voice,
Format your content with text-formatting tools (e.g. bold, italicize, bulletize, numberize, turn highlighted text into links, change paragraphs into different heading sizes, etc.)
The desktop version of Hemingway gives you access to updates whenever a new version is released.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel and create your own content styles and formatting guides from scratch. You can simply adopt an existing style or format as your own.
Style Guides
Wikipedia Manual of Style (MoS)
Wikipedia Manual of Style
Wikipedia uses this style manual for all of its English articles.
If you are looking for a style guide, this is a very useful resource and covers everything from article titles, sections, and headings, to capitalization, formatting content, grammar, and usage, etc.
This is another excellent style guide used as a writing and editing reference in newsrooms, classrooms, and corporate offices worldwide.
Its specialized chapters cover guidance for writing about people with disabilities, sports, business, data journalism, digital security, health and science, news values, polls and surveys, inclusive storytelling, religion, social media, and more.
The Chicago Manual Of Style (CMOS) has evolved over more than one hundred years from a style sheet created by the University of Chicago Press to a pamphlet circulated throughout the University, to a book containing a compilation of typographical rules, to its modern version… an authoritative reference work for authors, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers, with more than a thousand pages in print and more than two thousand hyperlinked paragraphs online.
The CMOS is regarded by many as the industry leader in style matters and provides up-to-date recommendations for the digital age on electronic workflow and best practices in electronic manuscript preparation and editing.
Here are some useful tools that can help take the guesswork out of formatting your content:
TitleCase.com
TitleCase.com
TitleCase is a free online tool that lets you convert post and article titles into different cases.
You can select a case from the Convertors menu…
Select different TitleCase convertors.
Or simply type or paste in your post title and click on the Convert button.
TitleCase.com – Enter Text field.
TitleCase converts your title into different cases and displays the results. Browse through the different options and copy and paste them into your content.
TitleCase.com converts your sentences into different cases.
Knowing the word count of your content can be important. For example, you may need to create a piece of content (e.g. an article, essay, whitepaper, eBook, etc.) with a minimum or a maximum number of words.
There are many online word counters you can use to get statistics about your content like the number of words, number of characters, check grammar, etc.
Here’s a great tool you can use to get text statistics:
WordCounter
WordCounter.net
WordCounter is an online editor that can do more than just counting words and characters. It can help you to improve word choice and writing style, and, optionally, help you to detect grammar mistakes and plagiarism.
To check word count, place your cursor into the text box above and start typing. The tool will display the number of characters and words and increase or decrease these as you type, delete, and edit them.
You can also copy and paste text from another program into the online editor. The Auto-Save feature makes sure you won’t lose any changes while editing, even if you leave the site and come back later.
WordCounter helps to ensure that your word count reaches a specific requirement or stays within a certain limit.
In addition, WordCounter shows you the top 10 keywords and keyword density of the article you’re writing. This lets you know which keywords you use, how often, and in which percentages, preventing you from overusing certain words or word combinations and checking for the best distribution of keywords in your writing.
The “Details Overview” lets you see the average speaking and reading time for your text, while “Reading Level” is an indicator of the education level that your readers would need to understand the words in your content.
Google Docs is a great tool for editing content collaboratively.
With Google Docs, you can share your drafts with other team members and have them edit the content directly or add suggestions that you can then accept or reject.
Additionally, Google Docs provides tools that let you see your content’s word count and the number of characters.
Use Google Docs’s Word count feature to calculate your text statistics.
For tools that let you convert content into different media formats (e.g. videos into GIFs), see this section: Media Editing Tools
Video Courses For Beginners – Content Editing
The video courses below cover basic areas of content editing and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
In this practical step-by-step video course, you will learn how to use text-to-speech and the latest AI voice technologies to create professional and realistic-sounding voice narrations from text files for a wide range of commercial uses and business applications.
Editing content can be time-consuming. The right tools and resources can help your team save time editing content and ensure that the quality of all published content remains consistent and error-free.
Action Steps
Help your team become familiar with these content editing tools and resources and make sure to implement standard guidelines for consistency in your content documentation.
Resources
Avoiding Widows and Orphans – ‘Widows’ and ‘orphans’ are terms used to describe unwanted stray words in typography. This tutorial explains ways to fix and deal with these issues.
Keyboard Shortcuts– See this section for ALT code keyboard shortcuts for adding international characters and symbols to content.
Optimize your content for SEO and improve your content marketing results with these search optimization tools and resources.
Search Engine Optimization Tools And Resources
Optimize your content for SEO and improve your content marketing results with these search optimization tools and resources.
Search optimization tools and services can help you research your competitors, discover new content opportunities, find traffic-driving keywords, create content optimized for search engines, build quality backlinks, and improve your content marketing results.
Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that lets you understand how well your content is performing across all devices and platforms.
Use Google Analytics to help you:
Formulate your content audit and your content marketing strategy. Use the tool’s information to gain insights about visitor behavior on your site: who is visiting your website, how they have found you, where they are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay engaged with your content, etc.
Find your best-performing content in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.
Estimate how effective your content has been in achieving your marketing and business goals.
For example, to view a general breakdown of traffic by organic, direct, referral, and social channels, go to Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels…
Use Google Analytics Reports to view a breakdown of all your traffic channels.
To identify the social traffic networks where users are engaging with your content, go to Reports > Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals…
Learning how to use Google Analytics can provide you with valuable insights to help you create better content targeted to audiences on different channels.
Other useful insights you can gain from Google Analytics could be:
Patterns derived from your visitors’ behavior, such as finding out which are your most popular blog articles in a specific country read by visitors belonging to a certain demographic profile
Comparing referred visits across different content items to help you decide what should be your next content project.
Which content is sending you the most traffic from offsite campaigns using custom URLs with UTM parameters.
As you can see, Google Analytics is a powerful, comprehensive, and useful tool. We recommend taking some courses to get a better understanding of how to get valuable insights using this tool.
Google Search Console is another powerful tool from Google that can help you understand how your website is performing on Google Search, and what you can do to improve your search results to bring more relevant traffic to your website.
Google’s Search Console provides information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. This can help you monitor and optimize your site’s search performance.
Use Google’s Search Console information to help you monitor and optimize your site’s search performance.
Using the URL Inspection tool within Search Console allows you to submit recently updated web pages to Google’s index and view the status of your site’s pages.
Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to get new pages of your website indexed.
And submitting sitemaps and RSS feeds helps Google crawl your site and index your content.
Adding sitemaps to Google helps Google discover your site’s pages and index your content.
We cover using sitemaps in this section of the course. Also, if your site uses WordPress, check out the WordPress SEO plugins section for plugins that can automate Google indexing of your content using sitemaps.
To learn how to use Google’s Search Console to better understand how your website is performing on Google Search and ways to improve your search performance to drive more relevant traffic to your business, go here: Search Console User Guide & Training
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools provides site performance data and free SEO tools that help you explore your site, analyze backlinks, manage keywords, and gain insights to improve your page rankings on Bing search results.
It also provides a list of questions related to the keyword, which is useful for generating new content topic ideas.
And keyword-related questions too!
Note: To obtain a detailed list of related keywords, along with data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and other relevant metrics, requires the paid version of the tool.
HubSpot develops and markets software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service and provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, customer support, and search engine optimization.
Essentially, HubSpot brings everything you need to create engaging content targeted to your audience and grow your business into one tool.
Screaming Frog is a website crawler. It crawls your website, collects URLs from your sitemap, categorizes it for you, and generates the information you need to perform an SEO audit, from page URLs and page titles to on-page SEO insights.
Scan your site’s URLs with Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog can audit up to 500 links for free and provides a ton of SEO-based analysis about how to improve your website’s SEO. You can plug in your Google Analytics to extract page performance data and export everything to a spreadsheet.
URLProfiler lets you audit links, content, and social data.
You can integrate Google Analytics data into your profiles, do a full link audit, and build a complete and comprehensive content inventory for your website.
The video below shows you how to create a content inventory of your site using URLProfiler:
Dr. Link Check is a tool that lets you easily find broken and malicious links on your site.
Simply enter a URL and the tool’s bots will automatically crawl through the HTML and CSS code of your entire website and examine all the links it can find, including internal page links and outbound links to other websites, as well as links to images, style sheets, and other resource files.
Enter a URL and Dr. Link Check automatically checks your site for broken and malicious links.
The tool performs checks like:
Broken link checks – Check links for validity and follow them to make sure the server is reachable and the link target still exists.
Blacklist checks – Check links against blacklists of known phishing and malware sites that may harm visitors.
Soft error checks – Check the content of linked pages for issues such as error or placeholder messages, even if the server responded with “200 OK” and didn’t indicate any problems.
SSL certificate checks – Check if SSL certificates are issued by trusted certificate authorities, have not expired, and are valid for the current hostname.
Once the scan is done, you can view the results on the web page…
Dr. Link Check scan results.
Or export these to CSV or PDF.
Export scan results to CSV or PDF.
The tool’s free version will scan a maximum of 1,500 links on your site.
Note: Every unique HTML document, image, style sheet, script, or other resource referenced from your website counts as a link (resources linked from multiple pages still only count as one link).
Paid subscriptions are available that allow you to scan more links, analyze blacklisted links, view soft errors, schedule automatic scans and notify you of results via email, and more.
Majestic is a tool that analyzes billions of URLs a day and provides accurate data to help you understand your and your competitors’ link profile and develop a Search Engine positioning strategy.
As stated on their website,
“Majestic surveys and maps the Internet and has created the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world.
This Internet map is used by SEOs, New Media Specialists, Affiliate Managers and online Marketing experts for a variety of uses surrounding online prominence including Link Building, Reputation Management, Website Traffic development, Competitor analysis and News Monitoring. “
Majestic maintains two huge indexes from which it extracts its data: a Fresh Index and a Historic database with records going back to 2006, providing a database with the world’s most complete backlink profile.
Majestic maintains a huge database of Internet data.
Majestic lets you extract information and perform tasks like:
The best websites in your industry or niche
Track your favorite sites
Find links near you and your competitors
Check out top backlinks for any website
Filter by topic, quality, language, and a range of industry-standard metrics
Compare top-level metrics for websites and URLs
Discover link opportunities by looking at your competitor’s websites
Look for mutual links between any two websites
Use Majestic’s web-based link investigation tool to gain valuable SEO insights.
SemRush provides a suite of SEO tools that lets you uncover millions of keywords, analyze any domain’s backlinking profile, run SEO audits, and track your SERP positions daily.
You can enter a domain URL and receive a robust audit with a customized report that shows you where you can make improvements to your site.
Adding your analytics tool account allows SemRush to provide more information (e.g. which posts your audience engages with the most) and help you identify which content performs well for your audience to create a more targeted content strategy.
WooRank is a useful content auditing tool. With tools like SEO monitoring and Site Crawler, WooRank lets you know how your landing pages are performing, how any disruptions to your website have affected your SEO, and how Google sees your site and interprets the information for search engines.
DynoMapper is a website discovery, planning, and optimization tool that lets you organize your website projects using visual sitemaps, content inventory, content audit, content planning, daily keyword tracking, and website accessibility testing.
Dynomapper’s Visual Sitemap Generator
With DynoMapper, you can:
Create an inventory of your website’s pages, images, documents, videos, audio, and files, use the content audit tool to optimize your assets and plan content tasks using the content calendar tool.
Add your Google Analytics details to display analytic metrics, and sort and filter pages in your visual sitemap, which can be exported to PDF or CSV.
Automatically import keywords from a domain and receive daily keyword tracking reports by location or device about your rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Use the website accessibility testing tool to scan your entire website for WCAG / Section 508 compliance, and identify known errors in web design and content for ADA Website Compliance.
Identifying keyword opportunities that can help boost your search results and drive more targeted traffic to your website is an important aspect of creating an effective content plan.
Here are some keyword research tools you can use to build a list of keywords and keyword phrases for your content strategy:
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is the keyword search and ad planning tool from Google Ads that helps advertisers find keywords for ad targeting.
Google’s Keyword Planner lets you find keyword ideas, search volumes, Google Ads competition, and cost-per-click (CPC) data for search terms.
To use the Google Keyword Planner tool, you need to create a Google Ads account (see this tutorial if you need help setting up a Google account).
Google Trends is a free tool from Google that lets you perform keyword popularity comparisons in a given country or region for up to 5 different keywords and see how interest in those keyword searches has changed over time.
For example, the Google Trends graph below shows you the relative popularity of worldwide searches for “ground coffee” versus “whole bean coffee” over the past twelve months.
Use Google trends to compare keyword searches over a period of time.
Google brings up related keywords in the autocomplete tool.
Google’s Autocomplete tool (Formerly known as Google Suggest) is a prominent feature of Google search.
When a user enters a search term into Google, its sophisticated algorithm suggests search queries it thinks best matches the entered term’s intention and displays suggested keywords under the search box.
Clicking on any keyword from Google’s autofill list loads the search results page for that user.
KeywordTool
KeywordTool
KeywordTool is a free tool that helps you understand what people are searching for online.
It gets keywords from different search engines (e.g. Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, App Store, Play Store, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and others) and shows you keywords, products, and hashtags searched on various search engines in different countries around the world from their autocomplete data.
Use KeywordTool to build a list of keywords extracted from many different autocomplete search engines and platforms worldwide.
The free version of Keyword Tool can generate up to 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term from Google autocomplete in seconds.
The paid version provides advanced features and additional data like search volume data, cost-per-click data, Google Ads competition data, competitor, keyword analysis, bulk search volume analysis, and twice as many keyword results on average than the free tool version.
Use this tool to quickly find and analyze thousands of relevant long-tail keywords for content creation, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or other marketing activities.
Predictive Keyword Metrics: Sort by Keyword Difficulty, Volume, and expected Organic Click-Through Rate for effective strategy planning.
SERP Details Analysis: Understand SERP rankings with detailed breakdowns, including Moz Domain Authority, Page Authority, and backlink metrics.
Global SEO Strategies: Search keyword suggestions and rankings by country.
Competitive Keyword Analysis: Uncover your site’s and competitors’ important keywords and identify high-impact suggestions for instant improvement.
Keyword Suggestions: Discover relevant suggestions sorted by Moz’s Relevancy metric and integrate these into campaigns or keyword lists.
Rich SERP Features Preview: Analyze rich search engine results, including Top Stories, Images, Knowledge Graphs, and more.
Keyword Lists Organization: Efficiently organize, track, and compare thousands of keywords. Display Monthly Volume, estimated CTR, and more for strategic planning.
Explore Keywords by Site: Uncover organic search keywords for any site. Track or export up to 10,000 rows for a detailed analysis.
Organic Keyword Analysis: Perform gap analysis on your competitors. Filter results by ranking, search volume, or Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score.
You can explore this tool’s extensive features with a free trial.
If your site runs on the WordPress platform, there are many WordPress SEO Plugins you can use to optimize your content for search engines, automate and speed up search engine notifications, and help search engines (and users) find and index more of your site’s content.
The video courses below cover basic areas of search engine optimization and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and how to craft website pages and blog posts that will help you get better search engine rankings and improve your traffic results.
There are many search optimization tools and resources that can help to improve your SEO. This lesson lists a number of useful SEO tools and resources that can help to improve your results.
Action Steps
Research and try some of the above tools and services to find the right tools for your content strategy and setup.
There are a number of tools and plugins that can help to speed up your content creation process, as the examples below show.
We recommend using plugins like the ones listed below as tools to aid in your content research and content creation, not as content generators per se.
Search engines like Google reward quality content designed to add value to humans, not content aimed at search bots, so keep this in mind when using tools like the ones listed below.
MyCurator
My Curator
MyCurator is a content curation plugin for WordPress that can help to speed up your content research by showing you relevant articles related to your topic using AI technology.
You can train the plugin to deliver more reliable information in its results using upvoting and downvoting features.
Train MyCurator to deliver better results using up or down vote buttons.
The plugin lets you curate articles in your WordPress Editor
and adds an excerpt, image, and attribution.
You can curate content for topics for free, but accessing its cloud services requires an API Key. Low-priced monthly plans (with a free 30-day trial) are available for users that want to curate content on lots of different topics or multiple sites.
The video below provides more information about this plugin:
There are also a number of training videos available on how to use this plugin.
WPRobotWPRobot – Autoblogging plugin for WordPress
WP Robot is a popular autoblogging plugin for WordPress.
This plugin allows you to drip-feed content to your site on auto-pilot at regular intervals that you specify. Your posts will then be targeted to any keyword you select and in any topic you choose.
You can autopost articles from over 20 content providers and specify which modules you want to autopost content from, run multiple posting campaigns using a different template for each campaign, run, copy, and pause individual campaigns, and much more.
WordPress makes available various content organizer plugins. Here are a few popular ones:
Content Views
Content Views
Content Views is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to display and organize your posts in a grid or list layout. It provides various customization options to organize your content effectively.
Content Views lets you easily organize and control your site’s content and content layouts.
Key features of this versatile plugin include:
Grid Shortcode & Block: Easily display various content types like posts, pages, images, and taxonomy terms in attractive layouts such as grids, lists, sliders, and accordions.
Flexible Content Display: Effortlessly showcase recent posts, category-specific content, tag-filtered posts, and more.
Editor Compatibility: Compatible with both the classic editor and Gutenberg block editor for seamless integration into any WordPress environment.
Multiple Layout Options: Offers a wide array of responsive layouts, including grids, lists, sliders, masonry, timelines, and more, catering to diverse website needs.
Powerful Query Filters: Enables precise content filtering by post type, taxonomy, custom fields, keywords, authors, dates, and other criteria.
Front-End Filtering (PRO): Advanced filtering options for website visitors, including category, tag, taxonomy, and custom field filters in various formats.
Pagination Options: Supports both normal and AJAX pagination styles, enhancing user experience.
Theme Layout Replacement (PRO): Easily switch to alternative layouts for specific WordPress pages without altering the theme.
Integration Compatibility: Seamlessly integrates with popular plugins like WooCommerce, The Events Calendar, Advanced Custom Fields, WPML, and more.
Additional Features: Mobile-friendly design, complete control over layout and styling, lazy loading for images, SEO optimization, and social sharing integration.
With its extensive feature set, Content Views simplifies content management for users of all levels.
PublishPress Series is a plugin that lets you organize multiple posts on the same topic or time periods into issues or series.
This plugin is ideal for sites that want to publish content in the style of magazines or newspapers, as well as short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, etc.
For example, you can:
Turn posts into monthly issues for a magazine.
Group together newspaper articles on the same topic.
Organize chapters into a story.
You can easily add a post that you are writing to an existing series, or start a new series. You can also add a new post into the middle of an existing series, and the plugin will adjust the order, and filter the post list by series to see all the posts you’ve already added to the series.
The free version of the plugin lets you display options for your series information, supports advanced layouts, provides widgets and blocks, and allows you to quickly manage all posts linked to a series. You can re-order, schedule, publish, and unpublish all the posts in a series.
The paid version of this plugin supports custom post types, multiple series, shortcodes, and extra features, such as allowing you to add multiple authors and guest authors to WordPress posts, manage user roles, permissions, and capabilities (e.g. moderation, revisions, etc.), group content together into a series, and more.
Content Control is a versatile plugin that lets you control the visibility of different elements on your WordPress site. It’s useful for organizing content by restricting or displaying it based on various criteria.
Post Types Order
Post Types Order
Post Types Order allows you to reorder posts, pages, and custom post types using a drag-and-drop interface. It helps you organize your content effortlessly.
Before installing any plugin, make sure to check the compatibility with your WordPress version and read user reviews to ensure it meets your specific requirements. Additionally, always create a backup of your site before making significant changes.
Content Collaboration Plugins
Multicollab Team Collaboration
Multicollab Team Collaboration Plugin for WordPress Editorial Teams
Multicollab is a collaboration plugin tailored for editorial teams that allows team collaboration with Google Doc-style content editing directly within the WordPress Gutenberg interface.
It seamlessly integrates into the WordPress dashboard to bring real-time commenting, suggesting, and collaborating directly to your WordPress interface, eliminating the need to juggle between Google Docs and WordPress, the frustration of copy-pasting, and the limitations of traditional editorial processes.
With this plugin, users can effortlessly share feedback, comment on text and media blocks, and invite team members to collaborate seamlessly.
Features include inline commenting, team collaboration, detailed reports, and instant email notifications, all within your WordPress environment.
Designed for Gutenberg, Multicollab streamlines content collaboration in WordPress and enhances your editorial workflow without disrupting your existing processes. It is a valuable tool for efficient, organized, and high-quality content creation in WordPress.
Atarim Visual Collaboration is a user-friendly plugin that simplifies website collaboration, allowing seamless feedback collection and efficient project management. Almost 10,000 agencies and freelancers worldwide use it on over 120,000 websites, making it an essential productivity tool for any collaborative project.
Atarim reduces project completion time by automating workflows, freeing up valuable time for team members and making gathering feedback and managing tasks effortless, whether it’s submitting feedback directly on WordPress websites or managing requests and tasks efficiently.
The plugin caters to various users, including freelancers, agencies, and website owners, streamlining collaboration processes. It replaces multiple project management tools, eliminating fragmentation and the need for constant screenshots.
Atarim offers a plethora of features, including visual collaboration, urgency updates, status changes, automated screenshots, file uploads, and technical information tracking. Its cloud-based platform allows centralized request management, enhancing efficiency and communication.
With Atarim, collaboration extends beyond project completion, facilitating ongoing communications and feedback. Plus, it’s free to use forever, empowering teams to embrace visual collaboration and enhance project and task management.
Additional collaboration plugins include:
Admin Page Notes – Add notes and links on your pages to give your clients, authors or other editors clear directions when editing their site.
BuddyPress Docs – BuddyPress Docs enhances BuddyPress communities with collaborative workspaces akin to Google Docs, offering wiki-style collaboration, document editing and management, and shared Dropbox functionality. Key features include:
Document linking to groups or users, customizable privacy levels.
Support for fully-private document uploads.
Document taxonomy with tags.
Sortable and filterable document lists.
Front-end document editing with TinyMCE.
Overwrite prevention and idle detection/autosave.
Comprehensive revision history access.
Dashboard management of documents for site administrators.
Content Protection Plugins
If you want to protect your content from being copied or stolen, there are WordPress plugins you can use to help protect your site from content theft.
WP Content Copy Protection
WP Content Copy Protection Pro
WP Content Copy Protection is a free plugin for WordPress that uses various methods to protect your online content from being stolen by mouse, keyboard, and browser content-copying methods like right-clicking and saving images, highlighting and copying text, source code viewing, and common keyboard copy shortcut keys.
The premium version of the plugin provides everything included in the free version, plus advanced content protection features for WooCommerce-powered eCommerce sites, the ability to exclude specific pages, posts, or categories from being protected, enabling or disabling protection for site admins only, or registered users only, or admin and registered/logged-in users, advanced image protection, feed removal, extended keyboard copy protection commands, and more.
The plugin will not affect your SEO, embeddable codes, or advertising (e.g. Adsense).
Spam adds unwanted content to your site (e.g. comment spam) which can have a negative impact on your visitors and search engines.
WordPress has a number of plugins that can help you combat and prevent spam.
Akismet
Akismet Spam Protection plugin
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if these look like spam or not and lets you review any spam it catches under your site’s Comments admin screen.
The Akismet servers monitor millions of blogs and forums, watching the methods and tricks used by spammers in real-time.
When spambots, comment factories, buffer sites, and social engineering tricks are identified, Akismet uses this knowledge to try and prevent automated or human spammers from trying to place a spam comment on your site.
Akismet was developed by Automattic, a company founded by the creator of WordPress itself, Matt Mullenweg, and has proven to be very effective in fighting SPAM. Millions of WordPress users have Akismet installed on their sites.
One way to keep visitors longer on your site is to let them know that your site provides other content related to the topics they are interested in.
With WordPress, you can automatically provide links to related content on your site using a plugin like the one below.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) is a simple and easy-to-use plugin that inserts related post links at the end of each of your site’s posts, pages, and custom post types intelligently and automatically.
As discussed in the WordPress CMS Plugins lesson, YARPP works with related posts, pages, and custom post types. It also provides a templating system that lets you choose how your related posts are displayed.
YARPP finds related content across your site using a customizable algorithm that takes into account elements such as post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies, then caches the related posts data as pages on your site are visited, helping to improve overall site performance.
The above is just a small sample of plugins you can use to save time creating content with the WordPress CMS.
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Tutorials for advanced WordPress users.
Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on using WordPress as a CMS.
These WordPress plugins will help to boost and improve user engagement with your content and your website.
WordPress Engagement Plugins
These WordPress plugins will help to boost and improve user engagement with your content and your website.
There are many different ways for your visitors to engage with your business through your website.
Most of these ways involve interacting with some form of content on your site, so it’s important to be able to manage this content effectively.
WordPress provides many different kinds of plugins to boost and improve engagement with visitors on your website in areas like:
Contact Forms
FAQs
Knowledgebase
HelpDesk
Chat
Advertising
Lead Generation
Event Calendars
Event Registrations
Bookings & Appointments
Maps
Membership Sites
eCommerce
Courses
Social Sharing
Testimonials
Company Pages (e.g. Meet The Team)
etc.
This section provides examples of various WordPress plugins you can use to improve user engagement with your website in the areas above and manage the content in these areas.
Many of the plugins described below can also be easily configured and added to your site’s pages or content using a shortcode.
Managing Content On Your Site With WordPress Engagement Plugins
While using plugins can save time and money on web development costs, using plugins to boost and improve user engagement on your site usually requires adding additional content to the plugin and managing it via the plugin itself.
Let’s look at some examples of WordPress engagement plugins and what kind of content you would need to add and manage to boost user engagement effectively.
Analytics
Features like custom reports and segments in Google Analytics allow businesses to delve deeper into specific engagement metrics, gaining a comprehensive understanding of how visitors interact with their content.
They can then use a data-driven approach to implement specific steps and methods with proven tactics and tools to effectively track and boost user engagement on their WordPress websites and further increase user engagement.
WordPress analytics plugins play a crucial role in enhancing user engagement on websites. These tools provide valuable insights into user behavior, allowing site owners to make informed decisions to optimize their content and user experience.
By tracking various metrics, such as popular content, bounce rates, and user interactions, these plugins enable website administrators to tailor their strategies for maximum user engagement.
Analytics plugins like those listed below offer a user-friendly solution to set up and monitor user engagement in WordPress.
Beehive – WordPress Analytics
Beehive – add customizable Google Analytics dashboards and reports to WordPress.
Beehive is an all-in-one Google Analytics Dashboard plugin that lets you easily track all of your important website statistics straight from your WordPress dashboard.
Beehive Pro features beautiful charts and graphs, Google Tag Manager, Custom Stats Dashboard, User Roles & Permissions, and more. It also allows you to enable display ads and view their current analytics in real-time and includes personalized authentication screen icons and project names, eCommerce compatibility, and constant updates with enhancements.
Most WordPress form plugins typically forward the sender’s message through to an email address and then store the information on your site’s database.
Using a contact form on your site effectively, then, requires having documentation and processes for areas like:
Forwarding the information (i.e. who gets which kind of information, e.g. sales, support, billing, etc.?)
Replying to senders (e.g. policies, guidelines, attachments, etc.)
Handling stored contact information on your database to make sure that your site complies with all data storage and privacy laws (for example, the GDPR if your site processes information about European citizens).
Here is an example of a WordPress contact form plugin you can use on your site…
Forminator
Forminator is a free custom form builder plugin for WordPress that lets you create and add different kinds of forms to your site like contact forms, opt-in forms, payment forms, and even quizzes and polls.
You can easily set up a professional contact form for your site in just a few clicks.
Forminator lets you easily set up contact forms. Source: WordPress.org
Forminator adds its own block to the WordPress Block Editor.
Forminator adds its own block to the WordPress Block Editor. Source: WordPress.org
The plugin integrates with many applications like Zapier, Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, and different email marketing apps.
Forminator has built-in integrations with 1000+ apps. Source: WordPress.org
Use Forminator to create forms that allow users to upload files to your site, collect electronic signatures, etc.
The plugin includes advanced features to help your site stay compliant with GDPR and a form preview button so you can view and adjust your form before embedding it on a page.
Forminator lets you create forms that allow users to upload files to your site. Source: WordPress.org
You can also use the plugin to create and add payment forms to your site. Forminator features codeless styling that lets you create the look you want without knowledge of code or CSS, use conditional logic to create dynamic forms, and add calculations and data validation fields to your forms.
Add lead-generating calculators to your site with Forminator. Source: WordPress.org
The forms let you accept payments from users with PayPal and Stripe.
Accept payments on your site with PayPal and Stripe. Source: WordPress.org
The plugin also lets you submit blog posts from a form and build interactive quizzes and polls.
Build interactive quizzes and polls to boost user engagement on your site. Source: WordPress.org
You can publish polls that display real-time graphs and stats
Publish polls with real-time graphs and stats. Source: WordPress.org
Including FAQs on your site helps visitors and prospective customers get their questions answered and overcome objections before making purchasing decisions.
WordPress FAQ plugins can save you time and resources when providing customer support by allowing you to create a “self-service” help center for a fraction of the resources of hiring a support team to handle customer inquiries.
Many FAQ plugins also make it easier to organize your questions by allowing you to group your FAQs by categories (e.g. for questions about products, ordering, etc.), and place these on a dedicated FAQ page using a shortcode.
Look for FAQs plugins that let you easily add new FAQs and update your FAQ content using a drag-and-drop interface, and build an FAQ section for your website using different categories and customizable styles and colors.
There are many great FAQ plugins for WordPress available.
For example…
Ultimate FAQ
Ultimate FAQ – WordPress FAQ and Accordion Plugin
Ultimate FAQ is an FAQ and accordion plugin for WordPress that includes easy-to-use Gutenberg blocks, shortcodes, widgets, an advanced FAQ search, and FAQ schema.
Creating and adding different FAQ categories in the plugin is just like using regular post categories.
Add FAQ Categories to the plugin just like you would add regular post categories.
Create FAQs and publish these or save them as drafts, just like regular posts.
You can easily view all your FAQs inside your WordPress dashboard using the plugin’s FAQ Summary panel…
All the FAQs you have created are listed inside your WordPress dashboard in the FAQ Summary panel.
To display your FAQs to site visitors, simply create a dedicated FAQs page, add the shortcode (or use the FAQ plugin’s block), and publish.
For example, here is a page with the FAQ shortcode inserted…
Insert a shortcode where you want to display your FAQs…
And this is what your site visitor will see after the page has been published…
A Frequently Asked Questions page listing all the FAQs in their categories.
Additional features of the plugin include the following:
Create unlimited FAQs
Create unlimited FAQ tags and FAQ categories
Add an FAQ block (WordPress Block Editor)
Add an FAQ shortcode
A responsive accordion layout that works on all sites and devices
FAQ page ordering and sorting options
Group FAQ options
Translation ready
Bulk import FAQs from a spreadsheet
Style your FAQ page layout
This plugin is user-friendly and includes a guided walk-through wizard that helps you configure the plugin’s settings, create your first FAQs, and create an FAQ page.
Watch the video below for an overview of this plugin:
As you can see, managing your site’s “frequently asked questions” using an FAQ plugin is both time-saving and very effective.
Customer Support – Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, and Live Chat
Like FAQs, Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, and Live Chat plugins allow you to automate and manage important areas of your business like customer support and help sections for a fraction of what it would cost to hire, train and set up a live support team.
If you plan to add a Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, or Live Chat section to your website to provide customer support, answer user questions, or address their concerns, it’s important to plan and create as much of the content that you will feed into these sections as you can beforehand.
You can use a WordPress plugin like the one shown below to continually add and update support-related content.
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk – Live Chat, Helpdesk & Community for WordPress
ThriveDeskis a light and fast knowledgebase, helpdesk, and live chat plugin for WordPress.
ThriveDesk integrates live chat, helpdesk, and a knowledgebase in one streamlined plugin.
The plugin lets you provide timely customer support by integrating live chat, helpdesk, and a knowledgebase into one feature-rich application.
To learn more about all the features and integrations included in this plugin, see the plugin info here: ThriveDesk
Advertising
If you plan to display ads on your website through banners, text ads, or contextual ads (e.g. Google AdSense), then you will need to manage your advertising content effectively, especially if you are promoting content like time-sensitive offers, products of the week, expiring discount codes, etc. on multiple pages or sections of your website.
This means having an organized system for storing and accessing information like:
Banner ad images
Ad copy and destination URLs
Scripts (e.g. Google AdSense publisher code)
Details of advertisers, ad inventory, ad schedules, where ads are placed, etc. (e.g. a spreadsheet)
There are many WordPress advertising plugins you can use to display and manage ads on your website.
Here are a couple you can check out…
AdRotate
AdRotate – Ad manager & AdSense Ads
AdRotate is a plugin that lets you easily manage all your advertising campaigns, affiliate banners, text links, etc. from one location.
You can create advertisements using any kind of ad banner or text link, group adverts together, and place them anywhere on your site using shortcodes or AdRotate’s Post/Page Injection sections.
Use AdRotate’s shortcode or Post/Page Injection sections to add groups of adverts to your site.
WP AdCenter is a complete advertising solution for WordPress sites.
WP AdCenter is another advertising plugin you may want to look at if you plan to monetize your WordPress site with banner advertising.
WP AdCenter is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you:
Create and manage different ad zones.
Place your own banners anywhere on your site
Notify your advertisers after 80% of the campaign is over
Export your campaign details as a spreadsheet
Rotate banners or place multiple banners in one Ad-Zone
Use the same slot to display different ads (without requiring refresh)
Automate your income – with PayPal
Monetize your WordPress site with affiliate banners, Google AdSense, etc.
The plugin integrates with payment gateways like PayPal and lets you offer advertising spots for sale on your site. Your advertisers can buy available spots and use the plugin’s built-in intelligent reporting features to review AdZone performance and optimize revenue.
Additional features include:
Unlimited ad zones.
Unlimited banner sizes.
Unlimited campaigns.
Set automatic start and end campaign dates.
Place ad zones into your WordPress theme using shortcodes and widgets.
Add media easily.
Detailed statistics with downloadable/printable charts.
Collect payments automatically.
Add different effects to your ads (fadezoom, blindX, blindY, and more).
Responsive ads work well on mobile and desktop devices.
Display multiple banners per AdZone and multiple ads in a row, column, or grid.
Auto-disable expired ads.
See the video below for an overview of the plugin:
After working out your marketing and content promotion strategies for generating new business leads, using content promotion tools with lead generation plugins like the ones listed below will not only make it easier to implement your strategies but also manage their content.
Hustle
Hustle is a versatile free marketing and lead generation plugin that you can use to build a mailing list and convert site traffic on a WordPress site.
The plugin includes opt-in forms, targeted marketing popups, slide-ins, embeds, shortcodes, designer-made form templates, and social sharing capabilities.
Hustle lets you create great-looking lead generation pop-ups, slide-ins, and embeds using professionally-designed templates.
You can fully customize the look of your campaigns in the plugin’s settings.
Use Hustle’s built-in appearance settings to customize the look of your campaigns.
You also have complete control over your lead generation forms.
With pop-ups, for example, you can choose the visibility conditions that will display your pop-ups to visitors (e.g. only display the pop-up if visitors land on certain pages or visit posts published under certain categories, or use specific devices/browsers, or are visiting from a specific country, etc.).
Target your audience with Hustle’s display conditions.
You can also use pre-built layouts, align the position of your images in your selected layouts and more.
Hustle includes one-click layouts.
Hustle not only lets you easily grow your mailing list and display targeted ads across your site with pop-ups, opt-ins, and slide-ins, but you can also add social sharing widgets to your site so visitors can share your content across different social media platforms.
Quickly build floating social share bars to add to your content.
Additional plugin features include:
Fully customizable and mobile responsive layouts with granular control of all form design elements (e.g. adjust images, typography, color, margins, padding, borders, spacing, shadow, module sizing, etc., or use your own custom CSS).
Smart triggers for pop-ups and slide-ins (e.g. time on page, scroll, exit intent, and more).
Set campaign schedules (e.g. start and end dates, schedule modules to show on specific days of the week, at a certain time of day, choose a custom timezone, etc.)
Follow-up emails with manual or automated email messages.
Integrations with social media platforms, form builders, email services, etc.
Smart exit intent technology (detects when visitors are about to leave your site and displays a pop-up or slide-in to grab their attention).
Recaptcha to protect your signup forms from spam.
Adblocking detection and override.
Intelligent results tracking of individual modules with conversion stats, and insightful charts.
For additional options (e.g. unlimited pop-ups, slide-ins, embeds, and social sharing bars), we recommend upgrading to the Pro version of the plugin.
Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:
Additionally, see these tutorials to learn how to use the plugin:
Normally, you would need to create content for your lead magnet AND for the article or post that will promote your lead magnet to your visitors and prospects. What if your articles or blog posts already contain compelling content? Couldn’t you use these as lead magnets?
This is where this clever little WordPress plugin comes in that automatically turns your articles and blog posts into lead magnets, helps you get more free web traffic, and grows your subscriber list … all completely on auto-pilot!
Post Gopher is a WordPress plugin that converts your blog posts and pages into downloadable PDF books. It builds beautiful forms, integrates directly with your autoresponder, captures leads, and sends out download links completely on autopilot.
Post Gopher handles everything on autopilot
Post Gopher does the following while you focus on creating content:
Automatically converts your blog posts or pages into PDF lead magnets,
Auto-generates lead capture forms that integrate seamlessly with all major autoresponder services,
Sends a customizable email to your new subscribers with the download link to their PDF version of your blog post or article.
Tracks your results with a built-in dashboard that provides details on your most popular posts, conversion rates, and when readers return to your blog using the links inside their PDF file.
After the plugin has been activated and configured, Post Gopher displays a fully customizable lead generation banner on your posts and pages.
Add a lead generation call-to-action banner to your posts.
Everything can be customized to suit your preferences, from the text and design of your call-to-action banners to pop-up form colors, text and fields, and even your PDF templates.
You can also specify which posts and pages will display the lead generation banner, where to position it in your content (e.g. top, bottom, top & bottom), and more.
Customize your PDFs
If someone visits your site, decides to download and read your post content later, and clicks on the banner, Post Gopher automatically converts your post or page into a downloadable PDF book or report, adds the user details to your autoresponder, and emails them a link to download the PDF file.
Post Gopher integrates directly with your autoresponder, capturing leads and sending out download links to your new subscribers on autopilot.
Post Gopher automatically adds new readers to your autoresponder.
The plugin includes built-in statistics reporting for tracking views, clicks, opt-in rates, downloads, and return visitors, and analyzing your best performing lead generation content and most popular blog posts.
The built-in stats panel lets you track and analyze results.
Post Gopher, then, is an easy “set and forget” tool that passively collects leads, grows your list, boosts user engagement, and helps you get more traffic on autopilot.
If your website or blog provides lots of high-quality content, use this plugin to help you leverage your content creation efforts into growing an engaged subscriber list, increasing your reach, and getting you more dedicated content readers.
Thrive Leads – Lead generation plugin for WordPress.
Thrive Leads is a lead generation plugin for WordPress that combines a list-building solution focused on cutting-edge conversion tactics and conversion optimization.
The plugin combines every kind of opt-in form you need with a simple drag-and-drop design editor designed to help you build a profitable list by showing relevant and highly targeted offers to your visitors based on posts, categories, tags, and more.
Thrive Leads also includes an advanced but easy-to-use A/B testing feature and actionable reporting & insights covering the most important metrics you need to assess how your opt-in forms are performing and where your most valuable traffic is coming from.
Social or community events (e.g. art classes, camps, golf tournaments, church events, etc.)
Community events (fundraisers, festivals)
Workshops, Seminars, Conferences (physical or virtual)
Or any other event?
If so, then plugins like the ones listed below will help you manage your events and all the information associated with running these events.
WP Event Manager
WP Event Manager – Event management solution plugin for WordPress.
WP Event Manager is a lightweight and scalable plugin that lets you implement a full-featured event management system for live and virtual events on WordPress.
WP Event Manager lets you display and manage all of your physical and virtual events.
The plugin works out of the box with practically every available WordPress theme saving you time and money on developing custom solutions.
The free version of the plugin has all the core features and functionalities you need to create a robust event management system on your site in a few minutes.
You can also purchase and install a number of premium add-ons that will enhance your event management capabilities by allowing you to do things like:
Sell tickets
Accept registrations
Display an event calendar on your website with upcoming events
Add Google Maps
Add recurring events
Collect information about the attendees at the point of registration
Send notifications to event managers
Change event colors to match event types and categories
And even turn your WordPress website into a live streaming platform for virtual events.
Provide your site visitors with all the information they need to register for your events.
Event Espresso is another popular event registration and ticketing manager plugin for WordPress.
It can turn your existing WordPress website into a fully-featured event registration and ticketing website that can accept online payments, add custom registration forms and emails, seating limits, multiple price options, discount codes, and printable tickets and event apps on your phone.
If your business depends on taking bookings and appointments, you will need to manage a calendar for scheduling your bookings, sending confirmation emails, rescheduling appointments, etc.
All of these processes can be automated using WordPress plugins like the one shown below
Booking Calendar
Booking Calendar – WordPress plugin
Booking Calendar is a free booking and reservations plugin that allows you to manage your time more effectively by adding appointment bookings to your site and sending out customized emails automatically.
The plugin works right out of the box. Your visitors can check the availability of your services and book appointments online quickly and easily (and even pay for appointments online) using an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Booking Calendar lets your site visitors view available times and schedule appointments on your website.
The plugin sends notifications to site administrators and users. You can access information about your bookings and easily manage all of your scheduled bookings and appointments from the plugin’s Booking Listing screen.
View and manage all of your bookings and appointments from the plugin’s Booking Listing screen.
The plugin also provides a number of features and screens where you can view detailed information about your bookings and appointments and make changes.
View detailed information about all of your bookings and appointments.
And you can manually schedule bookings and appointments by entering customer information via the Add booking screen.
Take bookings over the phone or via email and manually enter the information into your calendar.
Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, supports multiple languages, and is also available in a premium version that offers many more features and functionalities.
Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:
This plugin is suitable for a wide range of business services – medical, dental, health & fitness, repair services, massage therapists, yoga classes, restaurants, making room reservations, event venues, etc.
Adding maps to your site, such as Google Maps, can also help visitors and customers find you more easily, increase local SEO, and allow you to display the location of events.
Adding a map to your website helps your customers find you.
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
The WordPress CMS is powerful and flexible enough to transform any website into a full-featured eCommerce store using plugins.
eCommerce stores built on the WordPress platform can range from anything like regular websites offering users the ability to pay for a service online through a payment processor (e.g. PayPal, Stripe, etc.), to running enterprise-sized eCommerce sites selling thousands of products.
Your store content and information are normally managed from the plugin within your WordPress dashboard, although there are many solutions that integrate with WordPress, where your WordPress site serves as the “shop front” for your customers and you manage all the content on your store from your eCommerce solution’s website.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce plugin for WordPress.
Installing the plugin automatically adds eCommerce capabilities to any WordPress site.
The WooCommerce core platform is free. You can enhance the functionality of your store with hundreds of free and paid extensions from the official WooCommerce Marketplace, and manage your store from anywhere using the free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS).
Being open-source also means that you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data.
WordPress lets you turn a simple website into a large, professional, and feature-rich membership site containing private content that is accessible only to members using plugins.
There are many membership plugins available for WordPress. While they all perform a similar function (i.e. restrict content access to members only), most membership plugins will let you set up different membership levels, manage registrations and members, set different access levels to content, and automate actions like content sequencing and delivery (e.g. drip feeding of content with monthly subscriptions).
Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a membership plugin for WordPress that lets you restrict exclusive content for members using a lightweight built-in eCommerce solution.
With the plugin installed, you can create unlimited subscription packages with membership levels (e.g. free, trial, premium, etc.), set up content previews that display an offer for visitors to sign up to access the rest of the content, offer discounts and coupon codes, and much more.
WP Courseware is a learning management system plugin for WordPress that lets you set up professional training courses and build e-learning products quickly with WordPress.
There are many WordPress plugins that can help your business reach a wider audience online and build your social following by sharing your content on social media.
For example, you can use the Hustle plugin mentioned earlier (see above) to add social sharing capabilities to your WordPress site.
Social sharing plugins make it easier for visitors to promote your content on their social networks.
The plugin supports all popular platforms and includes features like a social counter, a floating or inline social bar, style settings, visibility conditions, and more.
Testimonials add powerful social proof content to your site.
Having testimonials on your site, however, also requires an effective system for requesting, collecting, managing, and displaying this content on your site.
Testimonial plugins like the one shown below can help you in all of these areas.
Thrive Ovation – Testimonials Plugin For WordPress
Thrive Ovation is an all-in-one, set-and-forget testimonials management plugin for WordPress.
You can turn comments left on your site into testimonials with one click, leverage the power of social testimonials by integrating with Facebook and Twitter and collect testimonials on auto-pilot.
Thrive Ovation also provides a time-saving testimonial management dashboard, giving you a complete bird’s eye overview of user-submitted, comments, social media, and imported testimonials in one testimonial library that allows you to see testimonials that are ready for display, waiting for approval or review, have been rejected, are missing a photo, etc.
Thrive Ovation – Testimonial Management Dashboard
Additional plugin features include:
Insert testimonials wherever you like using shortcodes.
Edit and update testimonials from one location, which then update dynamically throughout your site.
A library of fully customizable, professionally designed testimonial templates.
There are many plugins you can use to add and manage information about your company and your staff.
Here is an example:
Simple Staff List
Simple Staff List
Simple Staff List is a free plugin that lets companies display information about their employees on their website.
The plugin makes it very convenient to manage information about your staff and their profiles. You can add new staff members, edit existing team members’ details, remove profiles from employees who are no longer with the company, and more, all from one central location.
Enter information about your staff into the plugin’s profile fields…
Add information about your staff or team members.
After you have entered the information for all staff members and configured other plugin settings, copy and paste the shortcode into a page (e.g. “Meet the Team”) and publish.
Visitors now have a page where they can learn more about your team members.
Your visitors can now learn more about your team on your Staff Profiles page.
There are many WordPress plugins you can use to help boost user engagement with your content.
We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and tracking your results to improve your content’s performance and boost user engagement on your site.
The above is just a small sample of WordPress plugins you can use to improve engagement on your website using the WordPress CMS.
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Tutorials for advanced WordPress users.
Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on boosting user engagement with your content using WordPress.
Media files used in WordPress are typically uploaded to the WordPress Media Library if files are saved on your web server (as opposed to being stored in a cloud service like Amazon S3).
Plugins can extend the functionality of your WordPress media library.
Media Library Folders
Media Library Folders
Media Library Folders enhances the functionality of the WordPress Media Library by allowing you to add and build new folders and subfolders to label and organize your media folders and perform operations on these folders and their contents.
Media Library Folders lets you organize your media files into folders.
The plugin provides an effective way to manage image and video folders when creating WordPress image galleries and albums.
The paid version of the plugin offers enhanced functionality like the ability to organize media using categories, add images to WooCommerce product galleries, offload Media Library items to external cloud storage services like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces, and more.
The video below provides an overview of the plugin:
WordPress plugins can make embedding media files into your content easier.
EmbedPress
EmbedPress
EmbedPress lets you easily embed media-rich content like documents, videos, PDFs, audio files, maps, charts, and slides into your WordPress site.
The plugin connects to over 100 services and media platforms and lets you embed content from these services by simply pasting in their URL. It also includes blocks for the WordPress Block Editor.
The premium version of the plugin gives you additional features like enabling lazy loading for loading embedded images on your website faster and adding custom-branded logos for all your video embeds.
Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:
For a step-by-step tutorial on using the blocks to embed content into WordPress, go here: WordPress Embed Block
File Download Plugins
WordPress lets you manage your download files right out of the box but it doesn’t have advanced management features like:
Download password protection
Tracking file revisions
Monitoring/restricting the number of downloads
Preventing unregistered users from accessing your files
Managing and selling digital downloads
etc.
You can easily add these features using file management and download management plugins like the plugin below:
Easy Media Download
Easy Media Download
Easy Media Download is a free plugin that makes it easy for users to download digital media files from your website (music, videos, images, etc.). The plugin supports downloadable files in all formats. It creates buttons that begin downloading files immediately when clicked on. Shortcodes allow you to place download buttons anywhere in your content.
Check out the video below to see the plugin in action:
For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add, edit, and manage downloadable files in WordPress and more WordPress download plugins, go here: How To Add Downloadable Files In WordPress
Image Plugins
There are many great WordPress plugins you can use to manage images on your site more effectively, compress and optimize images to make your pages load faster for visitors, add visual effects, styled borders, or frames to images, display images in galleries and slides, etc.
Smush – Image Optimization
Smush – Image Optimization and Compression Plugin For WordPress
Images can take up a lot of storage space on your server and slow down your site.
Smush is a free image compression and image optimization plugin that saves storage space, helps your site load faster and reduces image file size without reducing the quality of your images.
You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually, or in bulk. You can also Super Smush your images, which compress these even further without losing image quality.
Smush automatically detects and optimizes all of your images.
This plugin is highly recommended for all WordPress sites, and especially for sites that use loads of high-quality images (e.g. photography, design, portfolio sites, etc.)
Photo Gallery is a user-friendly and feature-rich plugin that lets you add responsive image galleries and albums to your website.
The plugin lets you add image descriptions and tags to gallery images and makes renaming, uploading, removing, and copying images in the galleries you create easier.
Photo Gallery’s Gallery Editing screen makes it easier to edit images in your galleries.
The plugin also lets you add videos and audios to your galleries, customize gallery layouts, create unlimited responsive gallery and album views, set up and manage multiple widgets, add image watermarking and right-click protection, and more.
The Photo Gallery plugin also provides additional extensions to take its functionality further, making this a great choice for image-heavy websites like photography websites, portfolios, blogs, and any sites that want to feature professional-looking image galleries with easy user navigation.
With the Photo Gallery Premium version of the plugin installed, you can add commenting capabilities with Captcha protection, add a dynamic tag cloud widget with an image tag cloud and text tag cloud options, and set role permission capabilities (i.e. specify who can edit galleries, albums, and images).
The video below provides more information about the plugin:
For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add, edit, and manage images in WordPress and more WordPress image plugins and image tools, go here: Using Images In WordPress
Video Plugins
WordPress lets you easily integrate videos into your content. You can add videos to your posts, pages, custom post types…even your sidebar menu using plugins.
Video Player
Video Player WordPress plugin.
Video Player is a WordPress plugin that lets you manage the entire video player using a friendly interface. You can customize the player look & feel, playlist, and CSS file.
The plugin comes in two versions: Right Side playlist and Bottom Playlist.
Some of the plugin features include:
Support for any type of video file that Flash Player supports: FLV/H.264 encoded video: MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, F4V, YouTube, RTMP (using FMS or RED5), and RTMP live streaming.
Ability to play audio MP3 files.
Support for Google Analytics
You can set this player to any size you want, changing the player width, the player height, and the playlist width.
Ability to integrate with your posts and pages using a shortcode
Just like videos, WordPress also lets you easily integrate audio files into your content.
HTML5 Audio Player
HTML5 Audio Player
HTML5 Audio Player is a compact and responsive audio plugin for WordPress that supports .mp3 and .ogg file formats and works on all browsers and devices.
You can add audio files and audio previews to your WordPress posts and pages using a shortcode.
For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add audio files in WordPress and more WordPress audio plugins, go here: How To Add Audio Files In WordPress
Plugins For Managing Media Stored Remotely
In addition to plugins that will help you better manage media files on your WordPress site, you can also install plugins that integrate 3rd-party media services and platforms with your site and allow you to manage media stored in remote locations (e.g. cloud services like Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.).
S3 Media Maestro
Use S3 Media Maestro to display content stored on Amazon S3 securely on your WordPress site.
S3 Media Maestro lets you display videos hosted on Amazon S3 on your site, protects your files from unauthorized sharing, and lets you easily manage and deliver media or download files securely using Amazon’s S3 web storage services.
You can easily configure default media player settings for video and audio players like player type, skins, splash images, volume, size, metadata, etc.
S3 Media Maestro media player settings.
You can use this plugin to set up online learning and video membership sites. S3Media Maestro prevents paying customers from sharing links to your content with others by creating unique expiring links that will only work for your customers. Anyone else who tries to use the same link to your content will be denied access.
Dropr lets you easily access files from your Dropbox account and add them to your WordPress website.
The plugin essentially turns your Dropbox account into a secondary WordPress Media Library. You can access your Dropbox files from the WordPress text editor screen, then drop files into your content without having to upload them to WordPress, saving you server bandwidth.
The plugin also includes its own block for the WordPress Block Editor.
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.
Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on using media with WordPress.
Use these WordPress SEO plugins to optimize your content for search engines, boost your search rankings, and improve your content marketing results.
WordPress SEO Plugins
Use these WordPress SEO plugins to optimize your content for search engines, boost your search rankings, and improve your content marketing results.
WordPress SEO plugins help to improve your content SEO and provide information to search engines that help them better understand and organize your content for indexing and displaying on search results.
The plugins listed below help to optimize your content and will even notify search engines when you publish new content for faster page indexing.
SmartCrawl
SmartCrawl – WordPress SEO plugin
SmartCrawl is a free plugin that helps to improve your content’s SEO and search rankings on search engines like Google and Bing with built-in keyword optimization tools, XML sitemaps, meta tags, titles and descriptions, and more.
SmartCrawl features one-click setup, automatic XML sitemaps, improved social sharing, real-time keyword, and content analysis, Schema Types builder, traffic redirection, SEO scans and reports, and integration with 3rd-party tools (e.g. Moz SEO Tools).
You can quickly and easily set up and use SmartCrawl with the plugin’s setup wizard.
Use SmartCrawl’s Quick Setup Wizard to quickly install and set up the plugin on your site.
Once installed, you can run a scan of your site’s content…
Run an SEO test with SmartCrawl to analyze your content.
After running your scan, go to the plugin’s dashboard to activate various SEO features and begin configuring SEO settings for your site…
Configure all of your site’s SEO features and settings from SmartCrawl’s dashboard.
You can create optimized title and meta descriptions for each post and preview how these will display on Google Search results…
Preview how your content will display in Google’s search results.
You can also customize post titles, descriptions, and featured images for social shares…
Configure SEO settings for promoting your content on social media.
And configure advanced SEO settings and instructions for displaying your content in search results…
Configure advanced SEO settings for your articles.
Smartcrawl also lets you configure Schema markup settings for your website.
Configure schema settings for your website with SmartCrawl.
You can also add preset Schema types that include all the properties recommended by Google or add your own custom schema types.
Add schema types to your site to help Google understand and rank your content better.
SmartCrawl is a powerful WordPress search engine optimization plugin that makes your site easier to find and improves your website and content ranking, for free.
Watch the video below for an overview of what the plugin can do to help improve your site’s SEO:
The PRO version of the plugin offers advanced features like reports, automated scanning, automated linking for specific keywords, a crawler that checks for broken URLs, 404 errors, and multiple redirections, plus access to 24/7 support for all things WordPress-related.
Yoast SEO is a popular and widely used WordPress SEO plugin.
The plugin includes many SEO features designed to help site visitors and search engines to better understand your content, like canonical URLs, meta tags, title and meta description templates, XML sitemaps, Schema, SEO and readability analysis tools, Google preview, and more.
Enable or disable SEO features from the Yoast SEO settings panel.
The premium version of the plugin includes additional features like extensions for news SEO, video SEO, local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO, integrations with other SEO tools and services, blocks for the WordPress Block Editor, and advanced optimization tools.
All in One SEO Pack is a powerful plugin that helps you optimize your website for search engines. It offers features like XML sitemap generation, meta tag optimization, social media integration, and advanced options for more experienced users.
Rank Math is a feature-packed SEO plugin that provides a wide range of optimization options. It offers features like advanced schema markup, redirection management, XML sitemap generation, and easy integration with popular SEO tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
IndexNow Plugin is a free plugin for WordPress that enables the automated submission of URLs to multiple search engines without having to register and verify your site.
The plugin automatically generates and hosts an API key on your site and detects when you create, update, or delete a page or post, and notifies search engines to ensure they have the latest updates about your site.
You can also toggle the automatic submission feature, manually submit a URL, view a list of recent URL submissions, retry any failed submissions from the recent submissions list, download recent URL submissions for analysis, and view the status of recent successful and failed submissions.
Access all of your URL submission tools and reports in the IndexNow Plugin Settings screen.
It’s important to track how, when, and where users are visiting your site. This data lets you see where you can make improvements to your site, increase rankings, and drive more web traffic.
BeeHive
Beehive Analytics – Google Analytics Dashboard
Beehive gives you access to powerful data insight from Google Analytics reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
With the Beehive Google Analytics Dashboard plugin installed, you can track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration, and referrers, and enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.
Customize your dashboard view with the stats you need from Google Analytics.
You can also easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup display.
Once installed, you can use the plugin’s dashboard to see what promotional channels are performing the best and driving the most traffic to your site.
Know what channels are sending you the most traffic and performing best on your site.
Set up analytics reports that include information like:
Analytics Overview – See all Users and Page Views for the current day, yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or across the year.
Session Report – See the number of interactions with your website taking place within a specific timeframe.
User Report – The total number of users for the requested time period.
Pageview Report – Know when a page containing your tracking code is visited.
Pages/Sessions Report – The average number of pages visited on your website per session.
Average Time on Page Report – See how long visitors are staying on your site.
Bounce Rate Report – See how many people leave your website after visiting one page.
Top Countries Report – See where your visitors are coming from.
Most Visited Page Report – Know what pages are being visited and how long visitors are staying.
Trends Report – Monitor trends and improve your content based on user behavior.
Referrals Report – See where most of your traffic is coming from and where you should be focusing most of your effort.
Medium Report – See how much traffic is coming from direct, email, referrals, social, or organic channels.
Search Engines Report – Know which browsers users are visiting your site from and use this information to improve and test your site’s performance across different browsers.
Social Networks – Learn which social networks are driving the most traffic to your site.
Beehive analytics lets you see which locations you should be targeting and which pages of your site are performing the best.
Beehive is one of the best free Google Analytics WordPress plugins available and comes packed with additional features to suit all kinds of websites, from blog and small business websites to eCommerce sites and enterprise networks, including:
Google Tag Manager integration
Built-in display advertising tracking for remarketing campaigns, Google Display Network Impression Reporting, demographic and interest reports
Security and GDPR privacy tracking features like Toggle IP Anonymization to anonymize your visitor IPs, stop demographic reports, protect user IDs, and more.
Roles and capabilities manager that let you customize reports, set what users have access to, and hide traffic data based on different user permissions.
Compare your statistics and results over different time frames.
MonsterInsights is a very popular and widely-used Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
The plugin provides a website analytics dashboard inside WordPress with real-time stats, reports, and actionable insights.
MonsterInsights Analytics Dashboard.
MonsterInsights includes many features like universal website tracking and Google Analytics 4 setup across multiple devices and campaigns, enhanced eCommerce tracking, page level analytics, tracking for affiliate links, ads, authors, categories, tags, searches, custom post types, users, and other events, GDPR compliance, and seamless tracking integration with many popular WordPress plugins and services.
Site maps help visitors find what they are looking for more quickly and easily on your site and search engines to discover more of your content.
Typically, search engines crawl your site’s content using XML Sitemaps, while visitors use HTML site maps. You can also add news sitemaps, video sitemaps, etc.
There are WordPress plugins you can use to add all kinds of sitemaps to your website.
To learn more about the differences between an HTML site map and an XML sitemap, what they are used for, and how to add them to your WordPress site, see these tutorials:
From version 5.5 onward, WordPress has included its own in-built XML sitemaps.
Since XML sitemaps are now a core feature in WordPress and it’s not recommended to have more than one XML sitemap on your site as it may confuse search engines, you could simply use the native WordPress sitemap instead of a plugin.
The native XML sitemap feature of WordPress, however, is very basic and supports only a small set of content types.
SEO plugins like SmartCrawl and Yoast SEO also include XML sitemaps that are more advanced and give you options to decide what goes into that sitemap.
For example, if you noindex a post or page in Yoast SEO, the plugin immediately removes it from your sitemap. Other features of plugin sitemaps include properties like last modified date to help crawlers distinguish between what’s new and what’s old, images, etc.
If you plan to use SmartCrawl or Yoast SEO or have installed either of these SEO plugins, you don’t need to install an additional XML sitemap plugin and can override the native sitemap that ships with WordPress.
With SmartCrawl, for example, you can configure all of your sitemap settings from the plugin’s Sitemaps screen. This includes switching to the native WordPress sitemap (which will disable SmartCrawl’s sitemap), choosing which post types to include in your sitemap, and including/excluding other posts and post types.
SmartCrawl includes a full-featured XML sitemap.
The plugin generates and updates your sitemap when new content is added, changed, or removed, and automatically notifies Google.
An XML sitemap is generated automatically by SmartCrawl.
SmartCrawl also generates a News Sitemap if your site publishes news-related articles and a Multilingual sitemap for each language you have on your site.
XML Sitemaps is a standalone XML sitemap plugin for WordPress.
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages and custom URLs and notifies all major search engines when you create and publish new content on your site.
WP Sitemap Page is an HTML site map plugin that automatically generates a sitemap of all your pages and posts using a shortcode.
To see an example of an HTML site map generated by this plugin, visit our own Site Map page.
We use an HTML Site Map to help site visitors find content on our site.
Note: This plugin does not generate an XML sitemap. It simply allows you to list all of your pages and posts on a single page for human visitors (i.e. not search engine bots) and exclude pages from displaying on your site map.
Whenever you change or redirect the URL of a post or page on your website to another page or website, it’s a good idea to let search engines know.
Use a WordPress plugin like the one shown below to manage your link redirections and to notify search engines that links have been redirected.
Redirection
Redirection
Redirection is a very popular link redirection management plugin for WordPress. Use this plugin to point old, removed, deleted, or trashed posts to new posts on your site or URLs on external sites, easily manage 301 redirections, and keep track of 404 errors.
Simply enter the old URL (i.e. the Source URL) and the new URL (the Target URL), click a button, and the plugin will add the necessary code to your site to inform search engines that the page with your content has moved to a new location.
Use a plugin like Redirection to let search engines know when you redirect URLs on your site.
Simply enter the old URL (i.e. the Source URL) and the new URL (the Target URL), click a button, and the plugin will add the necessary code to your site to inform search engines that the page with your content has moved to a new location.
In addition to SEO tools and services, there are a number of WordPress SEO plugins you can use to optimize your content for search engines, automate and speed up search engine notifications, and help search engines (and users) find and index more of your site’s content.
We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and tracking your results to improve your content’s performance in the search engines.
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.
Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on improving your SEO using WordPress.
Use these WordPress CMS plugins to help make your Content Management System easier to use and your website easier to manage.
WordPress CMS Plugins
Use these WordPress CMS plugins to help make your Content Management System easier to use and your website easier to manage.
WordPress offers many powerful built-in features for managing and organizing your website and its content.
The CMS plugins listed in this section will help to extend and enhance the functionality of these features and make using and managing your CMS easier, more efficient, and more productive, speeding up your content publishing and allowing you to manage different business setups and production workflow requirements.
Editorial Calendar makes it easier to see the status of all posts in your blog and when they’ll be published.
From the calendar, you can edit your post titles, post content, and scheduled times, use drag and drop to move posts around and change your post dates, manage post drafts and posts from multiple authors, and a whole lot more.
Check out the video below for an overview of what you can do with this plugin:
EditFlow is a plugin that lets you collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress. The plugin includes a number of useful content management workflow features, such as
Calendar – Provides a convenient month-by-month look at your content.
Custom Statuses – Lets you define the key stages of your workflow.
Editorial Comments – Provides threaded commenting in the admin section for private discussion between writers and editors.
Editorial Metadata – Helps you keep track of important details.
Notifications – Receive timely updates on content that you’re following.
Story Budget – View your upcoming content budget.
User Groups – Keep users organized by department or function.
Imagine having loads of published pages on your website and then having to change something in your content that appears throughout your website.
You would either have to go through every page of your website and find every instance of the content you want to change…or you can use a plugin like Better Search Replace.
Better Search Replace is a great time-saving plugin for WordPress that lets you search for text strings (e.g. words, values, dates, sentences, URLs, etc.) throughout your website and replace these quickly and automatically on your site’s database, saving you the hassle of having to manually find and replace every instance.
An example of using Better Search Replace to quickly update thousands of http links to https.
The plugin is very easy to use and requires no technical skills. After installing the plugin, go to your WordPress admin menu and select Tools > Better Search Replace.
Select Tools > Better Search Replace from your WordPress admin menu.
On the main screen, do the following:
Enter the string or URL to search into the “Search for” field,
Enter the string or URL to be replaced into the “Replace with” field,
Select one, multiple, or all database tables you want the tool to search through using Ctrl-Click (Windows) or Cmd-Click (Mac).
Make sure the “Run as dry run” checkbox is ticked In the Additional Settings section. This enables the tool to make a “dry run” search and replace query without replacing anything in your site’s database (which helps to prevent errors).
Double-check what you have entered into the Search and Replace fields, and click the Run Search/Replace button to begin the process.
In the example below, we decided to change the URL text (called the post slug) in one of our lessons, after creating our course content and adding the old URL link to many pages.
So, instead of manually going through all the course content to find every page on our website pointing to the old URL and changing it to the new URL, we simply used Better Search Replace.
After installing the plugin, we entered the old URL in the “Search for” field, and the new URL in the “Replace with” field, and selected all tables on our database to seach.
Enter the text or URL that you want to search and replace.
We then ran a “search and replace” in dry run mode. The tool found 17 instances in our site’s database that needed updating.
Dry Run results.
We then unticked the “Run as dry run” checkbox to make permanent changes and clicked the button to run the search and replace function again.
Run Search/Replace again without the dry run to make your changes.
The tool went through all of the site’s database tables and made the replacements. In our example, 47 database tables were searched and all instances of the old page URL were replaced with the new page URL.
Search and replace completed.
You can view which tables were changed by clicking on the “Click here for more details” link in the results notification.
View search/replace details.
To view full details about any changes made to your site’s database and access a whole range of advanced features, upgrade to the premium version of the plugin.
Tips:
After performing a search/replace, test and check your content to make sure that the replacement has been done correctly. This is especially important if replacing links and URLs in your content.
Use Better Search and Replace with a plugin like Broken Link Checker (described below) to avoid broken links when making changes to URLs.
Manually checking for broken links, however, can be extremely tedious and completely unnecessary when you can use a plugin instead.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that automatically monitors and tests all of your site’s internal and external links to help you find and fix broken links.
The plugin continually scans and reports broken links, giving you the choice of editing the URL, removing the link, marking “broken” links as working, leaving the link as is, and various other options.
Broken Link Checker lets you find and fix broken links on your site.
Redirection is a really popular link redirection management plugin for WordPress.
Use this plugin to point old, removed, deleted, or trashed posts to new posts on your site or URLs on external sites, easily manage 301 redirections, and keep track of 404 errors.
Upon installation and activation, the plugin presents you with a wizard that includes a brief overview of how to use the tool and then guides you through the setup process.
Use the Redirection wizard to set up the plugin for optimal performance.
Once the plugin is set up, you can use it to manage unlimited redirections on your site.
Manage unlimited redirections with this plugin.
Redirecting outdated links not only helps to improve user experience but also your site ranking, so this is also an essential WordPress SEO plugin.
Adding a redirection is simple:
Click on the Add New button to create a new redirection.
In Source URL enter the URL you want to redirect from.
In Target URL enter the URL you want to redirect to.
Click the Add Redirect button.
Add new redirections in a few clicks.
After adding a new redirection URL, there are various additional functions you can perform, including editing your redirection.
Easy Table of Contents lets you insert an automatically generated table of contents (ToC) into your posts, pages, and custom post types.
You can disable the ToC for specific posts and pages, choose which heading styles will display in the ToC, choose different customization options and settings, and a whole lot more.
An example of a Table of Contents automatically generated by the plugin.
You can see the plugin at work by clicking on any of the lesson pages of this course.
Visit any lesson page on this site to see a Table of Contents generated automatically using the Easy Table of Contents plugin.
Set up custom roles and capabilities using User Role Editor.
User Role Editor is a powerful free plugin that provides advanced user role management tools for WordPress.
With the plugin installed, you can easily create and edit new roles and manage permissions for all users with just a few clicks and set specific capabilities for each role separately simply by ticking or unticking checkboxes.
The User Role Editor plugin lets you easily change role capabilities by enabling or disabling checkboxes.
There are many useful things you can do with the User Role Editor plugin, such as allowing or disallowing registered users to upload files to your site or disallowing certain types of users to delete posts they have already published.
You can also customize roles and set permissions and capabilities like removing the ability of authors to publish posts on your site, forcing posts to be submitted for review by an administrator before being approved for publishing, etc.
Add related post your your posts automatically with YARPP.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) lets you automatically display pages, posts, and custom post types related to the post your site visitors are currently reading.
Once installed and activated, the plugin’s algorithm analyzes your site’s post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies to find related content on your site and lets you display these on your posts using a range of different placement options, templates, and styles.
The plugin automatically generates related posts for your site visitors. Source: YARPP
Showing visitors relevant content from your site can help boost visitor engagement by keeping them longer on your site.
Increasing sessions and pageviews on your site can also help to improve SEO. The plugin also gives you options like displaying related content to visitors who are leaving your site.
Display related posts to visitors exiting your website. Source: YARPP
The Pro version of the plugin includes over 50 advanced features, giving you complete control over all aspects of your tables.
These features include the ability to include any post type in tables, such as blog posts, pages, documents, and more, rename table headings, display or exclude items from showing in tables using a wider range of options, choose column widths and image sizes, embed audios and videos, and a whole lot more.
Content Views is a really useful and versatile plugin for displaying your content in attractive grid and list views.
The plugin makes it easy to display and sort posts, pages, and other content types without using code using filters like recent posts, categories, tags, authors, etc.
You can also add only selected posts to a view, and arrange the list by alphabetical order, published date, random order, or by dragging them into the order you’d like to see the content displayed.
Post grids are responsive and will automatically resize to look great on all devices.
The premium version of the plugin includes many additional useful grid and filter features, including displaying custom post type, filtering by custom taxonomy and custom field, frontend filter, displaying the grid on your Blog and Category pages, displaying ads in the grid, and much more.
We have created a tutorial that shows you how we use this plugin to keep the content on this website organized here: Web Content Organization
TranslatePress is a WordPress translation plugin that lets you create a bilingual or multilingual site for targeting users in other countries with content translated into different languages.
The interface allows you to easily translate the entire page at once, including output from shortcodes, forms, and page builders. It also works out of the box with WooCommerce.
This is a self-hosted translation plugin, so you’ll own all your translations.
You can also translate images and image sliders with TranslatePress. Source TranslatePress.
Check how many post and pages are published,drafted, or scheduled and export All URLs.
Export All URLs lets you export the URLs of all your site’s pages, posts, and custom post types to a CSV file, which you can then easily import into a spreadsheet.
This plugin is useful for performing a content audit or site migration.
Duplicate Posts & Pages is a handy plugin that lets you quickly and easily duplicate (clone) posts, pages, and custom posts.
You can set up default preferences for your newly duplicated posts and pages in the plugin’s settings section.
For example, depending on your site’s configuration, you can specify which editor new posts and pages should be saved as (classic or block editor).
Additionally, you can save duplicated items as a draft, private, public, or pending post or page, select where to redirect posts/pages after creating this, and add a suffix to your duplicated post or page.
After setting your preferences, simply hover over the post or page you want to duplicate and click on “Duplicate This” in the item’s menu.
If you need to give different user roles access to the post/page duplication function or use additional features like allowing which post types can be duplicated, then consider upgrading to the Pro version of the plugin.
The video below provides an overview of the plugin’s capabilities.
Don’t want others commenting on your posts? Use the Disable Comments plugin to prevent site-wide comments in WordPress.
If you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts then you can do this directly through WordPress. If you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site, then use this plugin.
With this plugin installed, you can globally control comments on your website and disable comments according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.
The video below provides an overview of what this plugin can do:
Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions keeps your WordPress database optimized.
WordPress (and the WordPress Autosave and Post Revisions Feature) stores all of your deleted posts, pages, comments, post revisions, spam comments, unused tags, etc. in the WordPress database.
All of this unnecessary data can significantly increase, bloat, and slow down your website.
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions is a free ‘one-click’ WordPress database optimization plugin you can use to delete all the extra table data you don’t need from your site’s database.
You can choose what to remove to avoid accidentally deleting data.
This includes:
Old post, page, or custom post revisions (you can choose to keep a certain number of your most recent revisions and delete older revisions)
Trashed posts, pages, and comments (optional)
Spam comments (optional)
Unused tags (optional)
And a whole lot more!
Optimize database After Deleting Revisions – Main Screen
You can also schedule optimization to run automatically hourly, daily, or weekly at a specific time (optional) and enable one-click database optimization links in your site’s admin bar and admin menu (optional).
After the plugin cleans up your database, it then optimizes its tables for better performance (optionally you can exclude certain tables, or even specific posts/pages, from optimization), and creates a log of the optimizations (optional).
Advanced Custom Fields is a very popular WordPress plugin that expands your Content Management System’s capabilities significantly by allowing you to add extra content fields (called custom fields) to your WordPress edit screens.
The plugin lets you create new custom fields with just a few clicks using a user-friendly field builder.
You can create as many fields as you like, each with its own name, type, and settings. Each field you create is then added to a group that allows you to organize your fields and specify the edit screens where these will appear.
In addition to posts, you can add and display custom fields on pages, custom post types, user profiles, comments, media, and more.
WPCode is a WordPress code manager that lets you insert code into headers and footers and custom code snippets.
WPCode is a code snippets plugin that makes it easy to add code snippets in WordPress without having to edit your theme’s files (note: Editing theme files like functions.php is not recommended, as you will lose all custom code functions if you update your theme or switch to another theme).
The WPCode plugin includes a built-in WordPress code snippets library.
The plugin’s Global Header and Footer interface makes it easy to add code for applications like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, and custom CSS to your WordPress site’s header and footer and other areas of your website.
Easily add code like Google Analytics to your site using WPCode’s Global Header and Footer screen.
You can also use WPCode to insert custom code for running different applications on your site (e.g. email newsletter forms) and then insert these into your posts and pages using a shortcode.
WPCode lets you add PHP code snippets (with smart code validation to prevent PHP errors), JavaScript code snippets, CSS code snippets, HTML code snippets, and text snippets with full conditional logic.
Add custom code snippets to WPCode and insert these into your posts and pages using a shortcode.
Use this plugin to save time inserting scripts that need to go into either the Headers or Footers section of your website and manage all your header and footer scripts and other custom code snippets from a single screen.
Some examples of codes you may want to add using this plugin include inserting:
Google Analytics tracking code.
PHP Code Snippets or JavaScript code snippets without modifying your theme’s functions.php file.
Facebook Pixels code, Google Conversion Pixels code, and other Advertising Conversion Pixel Scripts with conditional logic.
Google AdSense Ads code, Amazon Native Contextual Ads code, and other Media Ads code.
Site Verification Meta tags for Social Media, Google Search Console, and other Domain verification scripts.
Add Rich Text Ads and Content Snippets automatically on posts & pages.
This plugin is quick and easy to set up, offers a ready-made Code Snippet Library and Custom WordPress Code Snippet Generator, and lets you add unlimited code snippets. You can also export/import code snippets,
The WordPress Block Editor is part of WordPress’ Gutenberg project, which aims to redefine what is possible with the WordPress CMS.
Many new blocks are being developed to extend the power of the WordPress CMS and CoBlocks is an example of this.
CoBlocks is an innovative collection of page-building WordPress blocks for the new Gutenberg WordPress block editor.
CoBlocks turns Gutenberg into a true page builder.
It provides many additional blocks and true row and column building for a true page builder experience for Gutenberg.
CoBlocks adds true row and column-building capabilities to the WordPress block editor.
CoBlocks’ additional blocks include:
Accordion Block
Alert Block
Author Profile Block
Carousel Gallery Block
Click to Tweet Block
Collage Gallery Block
Counter Block (New!)
Dynamic Separator Block
Events Block
FAQ Block
Features Block
Food & Drinks Block
Form Block
Gif Block
GitHub Gist Block
Hero Block
Highlight Block
Icon Block
Logos & Badges Block
Map Block
Masonry Gallery Block
Media Card Block
Offset Gallery Block
OpenTable Reservations Block
Post Carousel Block
Posts Block
Pricing Table Block
Resizable Row/Columns Blocks
Services Block
Shape Divider Block
Social Profiles Block
Social Sharing Block
Stacked Gallery Block
CoBlocks provides many additional blocks to the WordPress Block Editor.
As well as providing many additional blocks, CoBlocks also gives you custom typography controls that let you design web pages and control typographic elements including fonts, sizes, weights, transformations, and more.
Additionally, here are some other useful WordPress plugins that will help you manage your site and its content more effectively:
Smush – Image Optimization
Smush – WordPress image optimization plugin.
Smush is an easy-to-use plugin with an intuitive dashboard and advanced settings that speeds up your website’s loading time, improves its performance, and prevents your website from becoming slow and sluggish.
It does this by optimizing your website’s images, making them smaller in size without sacrificing quality. This results in faster loading times and improved website performance.
With Smush Pro, you can optimize unlimited images in bulk at once with just a few clicks and use features like lazy loading and automatic compression to further improve your website’s speed. Plus, with Super Smush multi-pass lossy compression, you can save up to 2x the space without sacrificing image quality.
Smush Pro also offers a CDN for faster optimization results and can preserve image EXIF data.
By using Smush Pro, you can experience faster load times, reduced server space usage, and better web accessibility for all of your site’s users.
Hummingbird is a powerful performance and optimization plugin for WordPress that will help improve your website’s speed and performance.
Hummingbird Pro offers advanced features such as minification, GZIP compression, browser caching, and image optimization, which can help to significantly improve website speed and performance.
It also includes a performance report that examines the same vital components of your website as Google PageSpeed Insights and gives you an overall score out of 100, as well as scores for aspects of your site that you may want to consider fixing, including render-blocking resources, server response time, image optimization, and minification.
Other benefits of using Hummingbird Pro include uptime monitoring, which keeps an eye on your site around the clock and notifies you if anything goes wrong, including slow response times, server errors, and pages disappearing.
Defender is a plugin that provides complete security for WordPress sites.
Defender offers a range of features such as scheduled security scans, vulnerability reports, safety recommendations, blacklist monitoring, and customized hardening for your site.
Defender Pro also includes secure cloud-based audit logs so you can see every change made to your site, plugin and theme code file change detection, and automated scans and reports with va checklist of all issues that need fixing.
Defender Pro deters hackers with IP banning, login lockout, updating security keys, two-factor authorization, and more. It prevents brute force attacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting XSS, and prevents hackers from exploiting WordPress vulnerabilities.
Defender Pro also offers a range of benefits such as easy installation, one-click security tweaks, disabling trackbacks and pingbacks, hiding error reporting, preventing information disclosure, preventing PHP execution, changing the location of WordPress’s default login area with login masking, enabling round-the-clock firewall protection, setting up login lockout, automating blocking of bot IPS with 404 detention, blocking users based on location with geolocation IP lockout, blocking or allowing IPs with IP Banning, and enabling two-factor authentication.
SmartCrawl is a powerful plugin that helps optimize the on-page SEO of your website for search engines, improve your online presence, increase website traffic, and create better user engagement.
SmartCrawl offers a range of features that help optimize your website for search engines, including automated SEO scanning, real-time keyword and content analysis, detailed audits and reports, and one-click recommendations.
With SmartCrawl Pro, you can create targeted content that ranks at the top of your favorite search engine. It also allows you to fine-tune your title and description on each post and page, create comprehensive sitemaps for your site, verify your site with Google and Bing, connect to a free Moz account for SEO reporting, and enable automatic internal link building.
SmartCrawl Pro is easy to use and comes with a setup wizard that walks you through the most important settings. It also offers multiple keyword analysis, additional SEO recommendations, the ability to disable SEO and readability analysis in the post list, and more.
Forminator is a versatile form builder plugin for WordPress.
Forminator is an easy-to-use and feature-rich form builder plugin that lets you create a wide range of forms, from simple contact forms to complex order forms with payment collection, polls, quizzes, and more.
Forminator Pro includes extra features such as forms that let you collect eSignatures.
Hustle is a lead generation plugin that lets you create effective pop-ups, slide-ins, and embeds for your site.
Hustle is a plugin that provides unlimited pop-ups, slide-ins, email opt-ins, and social sharing modules for marketing campaigns.
With Hustle Pro, you can create and customize modules to grow your email list and increase subscribers, leads, and customers by displaying targeted ads with unblockable popups, slide-ins, opt-ins, and embeds.
Hustle Pro seamlessly integrates with over 1000 third-party applications and provides conversion reports with configurable metrics.
Use Snapshot for safe, convenient, and space-efficient WordPress backups.
Snapshot is a backup plugin for WordPress that allows you to create and manage backups of your website’s data and store these on-site and off-site with FTP and SFTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, and WPMU DEV cloud.
Snapshot Pro lets you restore a website easily from the admin dashboard, even when the site is down or locked up.
With Snapshot Pro, you can create unlimited snapshots, schedule backups, and customize what’s backed up. You can also store unlimited snapshots, auto-remove old backups, set backup intervals, and download log files.
The plugin is also flexible when it comes to backing up WordPress, allowing you to back up a single install of WordPress or, back up the main site and sub-sites of a Multisite network separately.
You can also manage snapshots directly in the WordPress dashboard or use the plugin in conjunction with WPMU DEV’s managed backups to save backups to multiple locations, creating redundant backups and ensuring no loss of content in the event of a hack or error.
Branda is a white-labeling and admin-customizing plugin for WordPress that allows you to customize every aspect of WordPress, from the front end to the back end of your website.
Branda Pro offers a wide range of features, including the ability to reorganize the admin menu and bar, create custom login, maintenance mode, and coming soon pages, personalize widgets, add new help content, create a custom color scheme, add custom CSS, choose a new email template, edit the author box, create a personalized cookie notice, personalize the database error page, add header and footer content, control comments, select a new favicon, and set text replacement rules.
With Branda Pro, you can completely white-label WordPress with over 30 modules for customizing the dashboard. This is useful for WordPress developers and design agencies, or if you plan to provide WordPress sites to other users fully branded as your own (or just want to customize your own site).
Shipper is a WordPress plugin that helps you migrate WordPress sites from one host to another, simplifying the migration process, and saving you time and money.
The plugin offers two forms of migration: API Migration and Package Migration. API Migration transfers everything directly to the new site using a secure API, while Package Migration creates a package of the site’s files and databases that can be manually uploaded to the new host.
Shipper also offers pre-flight checks and helpful hints to speed up the migration process, as well as accurate ETA’s and calculated website sizes. Additionally, Shipper Pro handles moving local to production, development to live, and offers password confirmation to protect connected sites from hackers.
There are a number of WordPress CMS plugins you can use to automate tasks in your Content Management System and make running your WordPress site easier and more securely.
We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and learning how to use these to manage your WordPress CMS more effectively.
The above is just a small sample of plugins you can use to enhance your WordPress CMS.
If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:
WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.
Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on using WordPress as a CMS.
Learn about many powerful and time-saving plugins you can use to manage content more effectively on your WordPress site.
WordPress Plugins
Learn about many powerful and time-saving plugins you can use to manage content more effectively on your WordPress site.
WordPress plugins can significantly extend your WordPress CMS’s functionality and capabilities.
To put it simply, anything you can imagine doing on your WordPress website, you can do using a WordPress plugin.
Do you want your website to be able to do XYZ?
We guarantee you there’s a plugin for that!
One of the benefits of using WordPress as a Content Management System with WordPress plugins is that almost all plugins provide a centralized management screen (usually in their settings area) that gives you complete sitewide (i.e. global) control over that particular functionality.
For example, an advertising plugin not only lets you control the content in your advertising banners, text links, etc. from a central location, but also where, how, and when these banners display on your site.
This can be incredibly time-saving, especially if you have a website with lots of pages and you need to update the content in an ad banner or replace the banner with a new banner. With a WordPress plugin installed, you can simply manage your entire site’s advertising campaigns with just a couple of clicks.
Similarly, you can manage content on your site using plugins like:
Forms
Media
Sitemaps
Maps
Calendars and Events
Bookings and Appointments
Courses
Downloads
Embedded content from external sites
Membership sites
eCommerce content (e.g. products and product images)
And a whole lot more!
Many WordPress plugins allow you to insert a shortcode wherever you want the content or functionality to display on your site, so there’s no messing with code and no need to edit the content on individual pages (or remember where you have added that content).
Are you beginning to see how powerful using plugins can be for making content management more effective?
Note:While WordPress plugins help to save time and make managing your site easier, many plugins also require sourcing, inputting, using, and storing specific types of content to provide their functionality.
This content, like all other content on your site, also requires management, documentation, and storage.
Keep this in mind as you go through the various plugins listed in each of the sections below and refer to the documentation section for more details on the types of content that you will need to manage when using different kinds of plugins.
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A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that allows users to easily create, manage, and publish digital content, typically for websites.
WordPress is:
On this resources page, you will find a comprehensive collection of tools and resources for creating, promoting, and managing your content effectively.
Sending and receiving files to and from other users, transferring files between different devices, and uploading or downloading files or media from various computer devices to your website, server, or remote storage services are all essential aspects of managing your content effectively.
An efficient 
Depending on the kind of content you publish, you may need to edit your content regularly to keep the information relevant and up-to-date.
There are many WordPress plugins you can use to help you plan, organize, curate, protect, and even create content for your site.
There are many different ways for your visitors to engage with your business through your website.
This section provides examples of various WordPress media plugins you can use to manage files in your content and on your site, like:
WordPress offers many powerful built-in features for managing and organizing your website and its content.
