2021 has finally arrived! Now is the time to set new year’s resolutions for not only your personal life, but your professional life too. As site owners, you must regularly maintain your WordPress site to ensure it’s successful, functional, and competitive. There are countless articles about tips and best practices for helping your site succeed. With so much information, it can be overwhelming when you just need quick and easy tips that get results. Luckily, this article will discuss the top tips your WordPress site should follow in 2021. Keep reading to learn more.

1. Spruce Up Your Site Design

If your WordPress site is a few years old, it may be time to give it a fresh design. This doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch. You can make minimal design changes, so your site stays current, relevant, and appealing for your target audience.

Here are some design trends to consider for 2021:

  • Minimalist site design: An effective minimalistic design appeals to your target audience and helps them focus on your site’s purpose and content. Key features include plenty of white space, a simple navigation menu, and flat graphics.
  • Overlapping content: You can add creativity to your content by playing around with various colors, shapes, and images. This can take your site to the next level. For example, place a colorful shape behind one of your site images to create a focal point on your page. Be careful not to overdo this, so you don’t distract visitors from your site’s purpose.
  • Dark mode: There is an increasing popularity in sites with light (default) and dark modes. A dark mode is ideal for looking at a site for a long time, especially in the evening. WordPress has taken notice, as you can now find themes with dark modes.
  • Section Scrolling: Move aside, parallax! While similar to parallax scrolling, section scrolling provides a smoother and more pleasant user experience. Rather than move the whole web page when scrolling, section scrolling allows you to browse one section of a site at a time. This design feature doesn’t require a sticky menu as you don’t need to scroll up and down the site to find the navigation menu. How awesome is that?

2. Use a Security Plugin

Website security will be an ongoing topic in 2021 for good reason. An estimated 30,000 new sites are hacked daily, which usually represents small businesses. Since web security threats will continue to target site owners, it’s recommended that you use a professional-grade security plugin for your website. These are typically not free, but are a worthy investment for your site’s overall success. Additionally, ensure that your hosting provider offers security defense measures to monitor and alert you of any cyber threats or attacks. Your site’s security should always be a top priority, 24/7.

3. Familiarize Yourself with the Gutenberg Editor

In 2008, WordPress released version 5.0, which included the Gutenberg Editor. While the well-known Classic Editor plugin will continue to be supported until December 31st, 2021, it may be a good idea to start getting used to Guttenberg. This will help you get used to the look, feel, and functionality of this new editor, such as using blocks to create content. As always, it’s important to create a backup of your site before making big site changes. You can also set up a staging site. If something goes wrong with the new editor, you can simply backup your site, or if using a staging site, not worry at all because it will not impact your live site.

4. Optimize Your Site

Optimizing your WordPress site is essential for reaching your target audience, ranking well on search engines, and staying relevant in a competitive digital market. Site optimization is all about using tool and strategies to increase your site’s performance, traffic, conversions, and revenue. If you don’t have a good hosting provider, this is the perfect opportunity to upgrade to a better provider for 2021. You will be amazed at how much better your WordPress site will run in terms of how fast pages load, how secure your site content and data is, and how reliable your site. is.

5. Ensure Your Site is Updated Regularly

This is a tip that should always be practiced, as site maintenance requires regular updates. This includes updating everything from your applications (plugins, widgets, etc.), site themes (parent, child, etc.), and WordPress itself. The developers behind these technologies are constantly testing and updating their products and services, to ensure that they work well with your WordPress site. We all know how frustrating it is when you discover an outdated or broken plugin that is conflicting with other applications or worse, breaks your site. You can help prevent this by regularly updating your site. If you don’t have the time, you can also hire WordPress experts that will maintain your site’s plugins and code, so it runs smoothly, 24/7.

This wraps up my top tips for your WordPress site in 2021. While there are plenty of other tips, these are some easy and effective solutions to keep your site a success. What are your top tips for your WordPress site this year? If you are searching for the perfect website solution for your business, look no further than Awesome Website Guys. We would love to be your new digital partner!