Easy And Effective Ways To Customize Your WordPress Website

A lot of your business’s success depends on its web presence. However, it’s not enough that customers can find your site’s content. To attract customers and retain their business, a part of your marketing strategy needs to be dedicated to your own website.

The best feature of WordPress, as opposed to just about any other platform available, is that it gives you the freedom to customize/design your website completely. In general, everything is possible, and the more you know about the subject, the easier it is to change the look and general functionality of your website. In WordPress, it’s easy to customize and only requires knowledge of a couple of tools from there. The goal of this article is to point you in the right direction, so you can easily start your new website on WordPress.

Options For Customizing a Theme

Before we jump into the article, let’s start making changes to your theme. But, first, it pays to understand the main options and whether they suit your situation or not.

Here’s an outline of the options available to you-

• If you want to add functionality to your theme, just install a plugin.
• Use the custom-make in your WordPress admin screens to customize fonts, colours, and maybe layout, too, depending on your theme.
• If you’re working with a page builder theme, use its features to customize the design of your site.
• If you have installed a framework theme, use one of the available themes to customize your site and any customization options feasible on the admin screens.
• If your theme is fixed, you’ll be comfortable doing it, editing the theme’s code directly.
• If you want to edit the code of a third-party theme, create a child theme.

If you want to edit the code, there are numerous options available to you, from using the block editor to the customizer right through to editing the files.

Do You Need to Customize Your Theme?

Sometimes you don’t need to customize your theme at all; alternatively, you need to install a plugin. Themes prescribe the design of your site: the way it looks and the way it displays content. Plugins add extra functionality. If the changes you want to make are focused on functionality rather than design, consider installing a plugin yourself. This could be a plugin you need to write, one you download from the plugin directory, or one you buy.

Good examples of what you would use as a plugin instead of a theme include:

• Adding widgets.
• Registering custom post types and taxonomies.
• Creating custom fields.
• Adding some extra features like a store or SEO enhancements.

Why Do Most People Build a WordPress Website?

The are several WordPress reasons to use online platforms, and that includes-

• It’s fairly easy to install and set up because users don’t start from scratch when starting with WordPress, which means they just need to add content and customization. WordPress is attractive to users of all skill levels.
• It’s customizable- WordPress offers various ways to customize your website with themes.
• It has a lot of plugins- Plugins can help you do everything from using Google Analytics to increasing the design control you have for your website.
• It has a large community and support- Since several people use WordPress, there is a large online community to find answers or pick up tips.

Some Ways To Customize Your WordPress Website

Pick a new theme

The quickest way to make a dramatic change to your site is to change WordPress themes. You can switch themes instantly, and you’ll get 10,000 WordPress themes to choose from. You could easily spend days browsing and reviewing themes. The next easy way to make a huge change to your site’s design is to switch from your latest posts to a static page on the homepage.

Create a custom homepage

You can use Elementor to design a custom homepage. In case you’re not familiar with it, Elementor is a page builder plugin, and as the ‘page builder’ part implies, you can use it to create entirely custom pages. To make a custom page, you need to add the widgets you want to the page content. After that, you can browse the pre-built homepages, insert your favourite, and then swap out the text and images for a perfect fit.

Change the number of posts per page.

WordPress displays ten posts on your main blog pages, archives, tags, categories, and date archives. Visitors will scroll past ten posts in a single swipe. Your website will perform better if you include more posts, like 16 or 20, instead. You can also visit the reading settings menu and quickly change the number of posts per page with this setting. When someone reaches the last of your posts, they can click on the pagination to find more, but there’s another customization that’s better than simple pagination.

Use consistently featured images

Just to make sure we’re on the same page, you can use this option in the sidebar of any post or page to add a featured image. Featured images will help each post get more attention and more clicks, which means more subscribers and readers. WordPress users always think about one post at a time as they select featured images, and it makes their blogs look disjointed. So when selecting featured images, make sure you keep a consistent look.

 Add social sharing buttons

Social sharing buttons should be added to your posts, like this-

When someone clicks one of these buttons, it opens up a new tab with the post filled in and ready to be shared. Scriptless social sharing includes the essential features and nothing more. It loads super fast and works great on desktop and mobile. With all the new traffic you’ll be getting, you’ll want to make a few more customizations to make your site more profitable.

Create a landing page

A landing page is a page on your site that visitors land on. Additionally, you send new traffic here to convert them into subscribers and customers. If you’re successfully getting new traffic to your website, it’s time to put up an offer on a landing page and send visitors there. One trick with landing pages is that you either remove all navigation or restrict the navigation on that page. To do this, you’ll need to know how to create custom menus.

Add a breadcrumb trail

You’ve probably heard of the fairytale Hansel and Gretel. But, as you may also recall, they drop breadcrumbs while they travel through the forest, leaving a trail they can follow to find their way back home. Web designers adopted this same term for the trail of links sometimes added below the header.

If you installed the Yoast SEO  plugin recommended earlier in this post, you don’t need to do much else. Just click this option to turn it on from the settings menu. All of our themes are compatible with Yoast’s breadcrumb trail, but you may need to check with your theme developer if the breadcrumbs don’t show on your site.

Source: SE Ranking

Customize the WP admin

At first, you didn’t know this, but you can change the colour palette of the admin dashboard from the profile menu. Moving on, the colour schemes there probably don’t match your brand perfectly. To get full control over your admin interface, check out the WP custom admin interface plugin. You’ll have a huge amount of control over the design of your site’s admin interface. For e.g., you can create a new colour palette that can be selected from your profile menu. If you’re looking to control the admin interface, this is the way you can do it.

Add an author box

Adding an author box means something like this-

Author boxes are great for building brand awareness for two reasons. First, they get your name and face in front of visitors. Second, you can add a short bio that helps you add even more personality and relatability. Additionally, you can link to any pages you want. Since the author box shows up after the post content, visitors seeing it have just finished reading a post, which is a great time to associate yourself with that content. There are quite a few author box plugins available, but that one gives the best balance of flexibility and out-of-box quality, in my opinion.

Control which pages widgets display on

Widgets are awesome, but sometimes you want to add a widget to your sidebar, but don’t want it to display on every page of your website. After you install widget options, you’ll see this new section added to every widget.

You can add widgets to entire page types at once, like all categories, or choose specific categories or even individual pages. Furthermore, you can easily flip the rules between including vs. excluding the widget on the selected pages; this plugin gives your site incredible flexibility.

Customize the footer text

WordPress themes include a short design credit at the bottom of the site. While removing this text without writing code is often impossible, some themes like Ignite include a simple option in the customizer to change the footer text. You can include any text you want, buy many websites, and opt to include the company name, the current year, and a copyright icon. You can use your emojis to add a copyright symbol, or just copy this one to your clipboard.

Conclusion

This blog has covered everything you need to know to customize the look and feel of your WordPress site. Using the customizer, theme options, menus, and widgets, and page builders are incredibly powerful tools and will be sufficient for a lot of people. These options are a key part of WordPress strength- there’s something for everyone, and, of course, if you don’t want to do the work yourself, you can hire somebody to do it for you. This post has been getting too long as we have added additional ways to customize a WordPress website.