Whether you’re new to WordPress or it’s been awhile since you’ve published new content and need a refresher. Here are 4 simple editing tips using the WordPress text editor to help with publishing content.
Paragraphs and Sentences
Rule of thumb when writing web content is to keep paragraphs to a maximum of 5 – 6 sentences or less. This helps the reader to scan the content easier on the page.
Shift + Enter will start a new line of text while keeping in the same paragraph.
While hitting Enter creates a hard return and starts a new paragraph.
Quickly Create Subheadings
Subheadings are another great way to help make your content reader-friendly by showing the different decision points on the topic. This also improves the page’s SEO as search engines look at subheadings for keywords about the topic to help index the page in search results. Subheadings are normally recommended to be an h2 heading tag.
To quickly create a heading, start by typing two hashes ## followed by the heading title and hit enter. This will convert the number of hashes to an h2 heading tag. Continue to increase the number of hashes to the size heading you want, this ranges from h2 down to h6 being the smallest heading tag.
Email and Phone number links
With the improvements to the text editor in WordPress creating links, linking to email and phone number is a very simple process.
Type the email address in the editor then highlight the address and click on the chain icon. This will automatically add the mailto: needed for an email link to work.
If you want to use a word or phrase in the content to link the email address. Then select and highlight the word or phrase click on the chain icon. In the link field pop up type mailto: followed by the email address afterwards, ie mailto:email@yourdomain.nz and click the blue submit button.
Phone Numbers
For phone numbers, use the same process for linking a word or phrase to an email address. But instead of using mailto: this is replaced with tel: followed by the phone number ie tel:032100000.
Remember to include the area code and include the country code if your business deals with a lot of international calls.
Now when the customers view your website on their mobile, they can tap the phone link and their phone will begin to dial your business.
Missing tool icons from the text editor?
This common one can catch some people out when new to WordPress. They go to publish content and find options missing from the text editor’s toolbar. By clicking on the toolbar toggle icon in the toolbar area this will reveal or hide extra options.