Last updated on March 31st, 2023
Nowadays, the web is an essential place to acquire and share knowledge in the design industry. There are thousands of available codes and plugins online that you can use. There are endless online blogs that provides tricks and hacks on how to maximize these codes and plugins as well as shortcuts on how to start a blog and a website design should coordinate with your business or personal objectives.
It is easy to incorporate countless features in WordPress to enhance your website or blog. It’s also a good idea to create a child theme when customizing your site.
Here Are 6 Simple Tricks and Hacks to Make Your WordPress Website or Blog Look Better
1. How to Remove and Change the “just Another Webpress Site” Tagline
Your WordPress website should coordinate with your business or personal objectives. It is important to make it look as professional as possible and this means removing some default things or features that comes with WordPress.
The tagline “Just Another WordPress Site” automatically appear in newly created WordPress websites. It can be found under the site title on the frontend part of your website. To change it simply log in to your site, click on Settings and you will get the General Settings page where you can edit the tagline and your website’s title. After you’re done editing, just click the Save Changes button and your changes should go live by then.
2. Adding Author’s Bio on Blog Posts
WordPress blog themes do not provide a lot of ways to customize your profile in the admin area. If your website or blog is multi-authored, placing the author’s bio at the end of their individual posts is a way to give them recognition and provide information to your visitors about that author without the need to create a page dedicated to them. You can add an author’s bio by using the following technique below:
First step is to add the code below in your functions file:
function wpb_author_info_box( $content ) {
global $post;
// Detect if it is a single post with a post author
if ( is_single() && isset( $post->post_author ) ) {
// Get author’s display name
$display_name = get_the_author_meta( ‘display_name’, $post->post_author );
// If display name is not available then use nickname as display name
if ( empty( $display_name ) )
$display_name = get_the_author_meta( ‘nickname’, $post->post_author );
// Get author’s biographical information or description
$user_description = get_the_author_meta( ‘user_description’, $post->post_author );
// Get author’s website URL
$user_website = get_the_author_meta(‘url’, $post->post_author);
// Get link to the author archive page
$user_posts = get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( ‘ID’ , $post->post_author));
if ( ! empty( $display_name ) )
$author_details = ‘
‘;
if ( ! empty( $user_description ) )
// Author avatar and bio
$author_details .= ‘
‘;
$author_details .= ‘
‘;
} else {
// if there is no author website then just close the paragraph
$author_details .= ‘
‘;
}
// Pass all this info to post content
$content = $content . ‘
‘;
}
return $content;
}
// Add our function to the post content filter
add_action( ‘the_content’, ‘wpb_author_info_box’ );
// Allow HTML in author bio section
remove_filter(‘pre_user_description’, ‘wp_filter_kses’);
Now to make it even nicer, you can use this basic custom CSS:
.author_bio_section{
background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #F5F5F5;
padding: 15px;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}
.author_name{
font-size:16px;
font-weight: bold;
}
.author_details img {
border: 1px solid #D8D8D8;
border-radius: 50%;
float: left;
margin: 0 10px 10px 0;
}
3. Remove Log in Hints
It is vital to keep your WordPress website secure from hackers. This may not be an issue for some users but for people who are careful to avoid the potential dangers in their account’s privacy and security this trick will be a great help. WordPress will show a default error message when someone tries to enter incorrect information in the login page of your website. This can be used as a hint to guess your username, email address or password. To hide these error messages, simply open your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plguin and add the following code:
function no_wordpress_errors(){
return ‘Access Denied!’;
add_filter( ‘login_errors’, ‘no_wordpress_errors’ );
This code will override the default error message and you can also custom the message as a filter to login errors. We suggest the use of FTP client in editing source code through text editors like Notepad in order to easily undo the changes you’ve mistakenly made.
4. Disable WordPress Core Auto Update
Updating regularly is good for the security of your WordPress website. But some plugins may not work properly with the latest version of WordPress, so if you’re one of those users who use a lot of plugins in your website, it is a good idea to update manually. To disable the automatic updates in WordPress, just add the code define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false ) in your wp-config.php file.
5. 100% Image Quality
To save space and bandwidth, WordPress by default uses only 90% quality of images. This may not be a problem for some people, but if it is necessary for your website to have excellent images, the code below is the solution on how you can modify its value.
add_filter( ‘jpeg_quality’, ‘smashing_jpeg_quality’ );
function smashing_jpeg_quality() {
return 100;
}
6. Adding Shortcodes to Widgets
WordPress widgets by default, does not have the ability to manage WordPress shortcodes. Shortcodes are helpful in changing long lines of codes with a little line between square brackets. To give widgets the ability to regulate shortcodes use the following tweaked code: add_filter(‘widget_text’, ‘do_shortcode’)
We hope that this article provided you with some useful WordPress tricks that you can use to enhance your website or blog.