If you’ve ever used WordPress, you probably know its famous WYSIWYG content editor. This is basically where you type your posts and pages’ content. What you may not know is you can do a whole lot more things with this WordPress WYSIWYG editor, apart from the basics such as changing its colors and centralizing the text. It’s more powerful than you probably thought. Here are some examples:
Set “Continue Reading” for your posts
As you may already know, WordPress by default displays all your posts (including its content) in a reserve-chronologically on your homepage. So if you have some 1,000 or 2,000-word posts, you’ll see a super long homepage like this:
Imagine you have a few posts like that, your homepage will become too long to glance through. What you might want to do instead is to shorten your posts’ displayed content to probably an introductory paragraph. If your readers are interested, they can click on “Continue reading” or your posts’ title to read more.
So how can you do this?
- Place your cursor at where you want to end your introductory paragraph and put the “Continue Reading” link
- Under your WordPress WYSIWYG editor toolbar, click on “Insert Read More tag”
You should be able to see this
- Click “Update” to update your post’s content.
Now you’ll see your homepage becomes much neater:
Insert Youtube videos into your posts/pages
Here’s how you can insert Youtube videos into your WordPress post in the right way:
- Copy your Youtube video URL, which should looks something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esgs5XqLW2Q - Paste it directly to your WordPress WYSIWYG editor (in the “visual” tab)
There you go. Now you should be able to see your video’s preview directly on your editor:
You don’t need to keep switching between “Visual” and “Text” tab. Everything is done within the “Visual” tab. As a content editor and website owner, you probably never ever want and need to switch to the “Text” tab if you do everything in the right way.
Distraction-free writing mode
Entering “distraction-free writing mode” could help you focus 100% on writing your content without any user interface distraction.
What else?
What if you want even more? What if you want to be able to change your text’s font-size, make subscript and superscript text? Well, it’s totally reasonable. But what if I tell you, you can even search and replace; create and edit your own tables inside your posts’ editor? What’s more, you can even add, remove and re-arrange buttons on WordPress WYSIWYG editor toolbar. It will be awesome, won’t it?
What you need to do is just install this plugin called “TinyMCE Advanced“.
To install TinyMCE Advanced plugin,
- Go to Plugins > Add new
- Type “TinyMCE Advanced” into the “Search Plugins” box at the top of the page
- Click on the “Install” button on the first result box
- Click on the “Activate this plugin” link
Once you install and activate the plugin, you can set your editor’s button preferences at “Settings > TinyMCE Advanced”.
I recommend you to add on “Font Sizes”, “Superscript”, “Subscript” and only buttons you think you will use them often. Don’t just add all the buttons into your WordPress WYSIWYG editor toolbar. Unnecessary buttons will confuse and distract you and eventually reduce your productivity when writing content.
Remember to tick on the “Replace font size settings” as well as we should use pixels (px) instead of points (pt) for website text.
There are a couple of more tips & tricks that will help you become more productive when creating content for your website.
Upload & Insert images & files into your posts or pages
- Point your cursor to where you want to insert your images or files
- Click on “Add Media” button
- Choose “Upload Files” tab (if it’s not selected yet)
- Drag or click on “Select files” to upload your images or files
- Once they’re uploaded, click on “Insert into post”
You should always upload images that you’re gonna insert to your articles using this “Add Media” button as those images will be attached to your WordPress posts/pages where you can actually create an attachment gallery based on what you’ve uploaded.
You shouldn’t go to Dashboard > Media to upload your files or images. So far I find no reason for me to do so as all my files or images are (and should always be) inserted from, and therefore, attached to either a post or page.
Set featured image for your posts/pages
Featured image is like a graphic representation of your posts or pages, which is different from images that you insert to your posts/pages using “Add Media” button.
To set featured image for your posts/pages, simply click on the “Set featured image” link at the bottom right of your posts/pages; upload your image as you’ve done before; finally, click on “Set featured image” button.
Many themes make use of your posts/pages’ featured image. By default, they would display your featured image on top of your post’s content like what you can see in this post.
Although not compulsory, you should, whenever possible, find a relevant image for your posts and set it as a featured image.
Preview your post
“Preview” feature will come in handy when you want to preview your posts/pages first before publishing them. In this preview mode, you can double-check your articles’ grammatical errors and spellings before showing them to your readers.
Scheduling your Posts and Pages
Another great feature of WordPress is you can actually schedule your posts in advance. Imagine you’re gonna travel to the US next week probably with no laptop and internet access but you don’t want to miss your weekly posts either. What you can do now is to schedule them to be published next week.
Simply click on the “Edit” link near the “Publish immediately” at the top right corner and change the publish date to when you want to publish it.
That’s it. Your posts will be automatically published for you when the time comes while you just enjoy your times in the US 😉
Congratulations! This is everything you need to know to manage and organize your entire WordPress website content efficiently and effectively.
There are of course some other concepts and functions that you should know as well to optimize your WordPress websites such as Widgets and Menus. But those are trivial. We’ll go through those concepts one by one when we really need them.
Remember, at the end of the day, your content is what pre-sells your visitors.
Content is King!
