Archives for February 2017

How to Embed Social Media in your WordPress pages or posts

Peter Shilling · Feb 23, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Adding social media content to your WordPress post or page is a great way to showcase social commentary, display testimonials or highlight something that your own channels have recently shared. You’ll see this in action in many news sites these days, as they include Tweets from famous or influential people within their content. With WordPress, it’s incredibly easy to add thanks to the oEmbed feature.

Here’s how to do it

First, go to the page or post that you want to add the social content to. In the content editor, create a new line where the inserted social content can go.

Then, go to the specific social post that you aim to embed and copy the URL from the browser. Paste it into the content area, but be sure it is not hyperlinked. If it is an Instagram post, a tweet from Twitter or content from Vine, Reddit, or YouTube, WordPress will automatically turn the URL into an embed.

If you check out the live preview in the visual editor you’ll see the social post embedded – and no further styling is needed!

Here’s an example, a tweet from us back in January that we’ve embedded here.

On our blog today: "#WordPress hosting: it needs to be as fast as you can get!" read it here > http://t.co/6EpAz4txwj
— The DMA (@the_dma) January 13, 2015

If this doesn’t work, or if you’re trying to embed a Facebook post, use the embed shortcode around the URL, like the example below:

[ embed] https://twitter.com/the_dma/status/554858024398249984 [/embed]

This is the same functionality that makes it easy for you to embed videos into your posts.

Please note that if the social content that you initially linked is deleted, it will no longer show (perhaps showing “this content has been removed by the user” copy in its place. Also, some content on social media may be visible to you, but not all users on that platform. If the user that shared the content has a privacy feature of some sort, not everyone may be able to see this content in your post or page.

To test that the content is available generally try accessing your blog post in a web browser that is not signed in to your social accounts.

To see the latest list of social media platforms that allow for this automatic embed, visit the WordPress codex and navigate to “Okay, So What Sites Can I Embed From?”

No company WordPress blog? Are you missing a valuable business opportunity?

Peter Shilling · Feb 10, 2017 · Leave a Comment

A WordPress powered website has the ability to achieve so much for your business. All too often business owners aren’t aware of the full potential. In every WordPress site, lurking under the hood, you have a valuable marketing resource at your fingertips. The blog.

Sure, many sites have similar types of content. The business history, information about your team, your products or services. However, it’s a blog that allows you to add new fresh content regularly to your website.

Need some convincing? Let’s quickly cover four points that will change your mind.

1. Searchability or SEO (Search Engine Marketing)

Once you have a presence on the web in the form of your website, Google will start to recognise your page content. If you’re adding regular content to your blog, Google will see this in a very positive light. Your site’s visibility for the specific search terms you are focusing on should improve and this will hopefully land you some first page rankings on your designated search terms.

2. Showcase your expertise

It’s one thing to have pages on your website detailing your services and products. It’s another to actively demonstrate to your customers that you know what you’re talking about! A company blog is a great way to achieve this. By updating customers on the latest industry developments, news, hints and tips, case studies of your latest work. There’s so many great content ideas. With an active blog you’ll be well placed to appear as experts or thought leaders in your business space.

3. Your business is current and approachable

There’s nothing more telling than landing on a company’s website and seeing their last blog post was two years ago. Potential customers will immediately assume you have nothing important to say, or you’re not the sort of business who actively engages with their clientele (even if the reality is you’ve been too busy to blog!) Blog posts needn’t be essays, in fact the average blog post is around 300 – 500 words.

4. Your company blog can act as a sales tool

A blog shouldn’t be overly sales orientated in nature. However, by pushing your latest blog news to your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or in your email newsletter, it can become a way to engage with existing clients and attract new ones. It can act as a reason to start a conversation, breed loyalty and grease the wheels for your sales staff.

What do you think? Hopefully it adds up for you and your business. If you need some more ideas on how together started, check out this post from a while back “Breathe new life into your WordPress site: start blogging”

We regularly write about content marketing here on The DMA blog, check out some more related content here.

How To Get Feedback From Your Readers – WordPress Comments

Peter Shilling · Feb 9, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Here is the scenario: you have a WordPress site that has a Blog. You regularly update and write about the topics on trend for your audience. In your opinion, you provide great educational material however you only receive some or no engagement. No comments, no likes and no shares on social media.

How are you to know if anyone found this topic helpful? How can you leverage your audience to understand if you are creating content that was helpful and engaging enough? Interesting enough that they had to leave a comment or share? Here are a few helpful and easy tips to create engagement with your audience and encourage them to leave feedback, good or bad. Then you can work towards creating more content that is specific and well received time and time again.

Enable WordPress comments

Firstly, make sure that comments have been activated. Might seem like an obvious thing but if you are new to Blogging, you may not have realised this is something that has to be manually activated. For WordPress; Go to Settings> Discussion, then check off the “allow people to post comments on new articles box”

If you then visit one of your blog posts you should see that comments are now available for your visitors.

Pose questions for readers

Throughout the Blog post, pose questions which can probe the reader to put themselves in your shoes or even share their experience with a similar situation. Get them to share their experience with the same issue and their resolution to it. Talk about it knowledgeably but at the same time, also ask if others have experienced it in the same way or any different.

A way to create this kind of engagement is by creating a call to action. For instance, if you want to hear about their experience, ask them exactly that at the end. i.e. If they had a similar situation resolved in the same way for them or if they have been in the same predicament and done things differently. Ask what the result for them was? Really encourage readers to share their trials and tribulations through a similar situation.

User contributions to content

Another way you could encourage readers to engage on your Blog is to ask for contribution to your ‘seemingly’ unfinished post. This is particular good for posts where you have listed your steps in a number sequence. The trick here is to ask your readers to add on to the list. Making them feel that they are contributing to the article for the good of other readers.

You must also interact!

Lastly, make sure you are getting back to your readers comments in time so they know you took the time to review. You should receive an eMail when a new comment has been made on your website, follow this up, reply and keep the engagement going!

Improve WordPress Performance by optimising images

Peter Shilling · Feb 9, 2017 · 3 Comments

There are a lot of of variables that affect WordPress performance. The hosting environment, the way it’s been developed and the content that is placed in it are just three factors that spring to mind. Let’s focus here on the images inside your WordPress site, this tends to be the place where performance gains can regularly be achieved.

Why does speed matter so much?

It’s important for the search optimisation of your site that it loads as quickly as possible. Google uses the page loading time as a ranking factor these days. Faster pages given a boost and slower pages marked down in search rankings. Google wants to deliver a search user a good experience and online that means a fast experience.

Your website’s performance is also important from a user perspective. More and more users are accessing websites from mobile or tablets devices using 4G data. Optimised images will be smaller and be delivered more quickly in these situations.

Images, the low hanging fruit

Generally when we look at optimising a WordPress site, the images are an easy win. Optimising those can make the overall weight (in kb) of a page to be less. Allowing it to be served to a user’s browser more quickly. Often WordPress will try and compensate for large images. They may look to be the right size but could be far too large in pixel dimensions or in actual file size.

In a perfect world each image that is uploaded into your WordPress site would have been lovingly cropped and compressed to make it as small as possible (in file size). Tools like Photoshop allow you to compress images as you’re saving out files. In reality this does not always happen.

Large images are ok

It does not meant that you can’t use large (in pixels) images in your site. Just that they have to be compressed before you to. The image below is a reasonable size yet it’s only 90kb in file size.

We routinely use large image across the headers of sites that might be twice as big as this but not much more in actual file size.

ShortPixel: a simple solution to the image optimisation problem

There is a solution to large images that have previously been uploaded into WordPress. Solutions like ShortPixel aim to solve the problem. This is a plugin for WordPress that we use regularly to help reduce the file size of images. It works inside the WordPress media library to give you a lot of control over the optimisation of images. In simple terms what it does is compress an image and re-saves the optimised image back into your media library.

It does all of this is a safe way. The original images are not lost, they’re stored in case you need to restore them or access them in future. There are also settings that can compress the images in a lossless way. This will result in a result that is not as marked but will guarantee the image looks exactly the same as the original.

The tool can be used to clean a media library of bloated images but also to keep things lean going forward. Once activated ShortPixel can be configured to automatically optimise new images that are uploaded into your WordPress library.

If you’re already a DMA client using our Managed WordPress hosting chat to us about enabling the service on your website. Otherwise head to the ShortPixel website to learn more.