Tools You’ll Need

Before we get started, there are a few things you’ll need to succeed with SEO on your WordPress site:

• Quality hosting: Slow hosting makes applying all other SEO strategies more challenging. At WordPress.com, we pride ourselves on providing lightning-fast hosting for WordPress websites (more on that below). That said, even if you’re using another hosting provider, you can still use the tips in this post. 
• The right plugins: WordPress SEO plugins are available for almost every SEO task you need to execute. We’ll mention several throughout this post. WordPress.com users on the Business plan or higher can install plugins.
• Time and patience: Good site SEO takes effort, but the rewards are worth it.

What Makes WordPress.com Awesome for SEO?

Some people say WordPress.com is limited. We disagree. Here are five features that make WordPress.com SEO-friendly right out of the box:

• Fast and secure hosting performance means your site always loads quickly (which search engines and users love).
• Automatic version updates keep your site running on WordPress’s latest and best-performing version.
• Built-in Jetpack CDN (and the option to use Cloudflare) improves your site speed and performance by caching content closer to users, optimizing file delivery, and reducing server load.
• XML sitemaps are automatically generated and added to your site, providing search engines like Google with a structured, computer-readable list of your crawlable and indexable content.
• The ability to add plugins on the Business plan and above gives you even more flexibility in the tools you add to optimize your site.

Not sure what all of this means yet? Don’t worry. Throughout this post, we’ll explain everything you need to know.

1. Start By Installing an SEO Plugin
2. Make Sure You’re Using the Latest Version of WordPress
3. Research the Keywords People Use to Find Your Site
4. Keep Your Site Structure Organized
   1. Avoid Duplicate Categories and Tags
   2. Make Your Top-Level Menu Easy to Navigate
   3. Make Sure Your Footer is Organized
   4. Add Internal Links Between Related Pages and Posts
5. Fix Broken Links and Close Navigational Dead-ends
6. Consolidate Duplicate Content
7. Use a Good Permalink Structure
8. Add an XML Sitemap
9. Optimize Metadata
   1. Write Title Tags That People Want to Click On
   2. Add Descriptive Meta Descriptions to Pages and Posts
10. Make Images Search Engine-Friendly
    1. Include Keywords in Image File Names
    2. Use Descriptive Alt Text
11. Indulge Your Site’s Need for Speed
    1. Choose a Fast Hosting Provider
    2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
    3. Choose a Well-Designed WordPress Theme
    4. Compress Images for Faster Loading Speed
12. SEO Tips for Blog Posts
    1. Write Unique Content
    2. Include Keywords Naturally
    3. Choose Header Tags Carefully
    4. Use Concise Sentences and Paragraphs
    5. Display Excerpts Instead of Full Posts
13. Measuring Results
14. Now Get More Traffic

Start By Installing an SEO Plugin

A good SEO plugin is essential to good site SEO. SEO plugins make it easy to execute various tasks that will ensure your site is search engine-friendly. 

Here are three SEO plugins that we recommend (along with a tutorial from each brand on how to use them):

• Yoast (tutorial)
• All-In-One SEO (tutorial)
• Rank Math (tutorial)

These plugins unlock tons of functionality that we’ll reference throughout this tutorial. That’s why we recommend installing one of these plugins first (if you haven’t already).

Make Sure You’re Using the Latest Version of WordPress

When WordPress websites encounter technical issues, using an outdated version of the WordPress software is a common cause. This is because newer software versions typically ship with performance and optimization updates.

WordPress.com automatically updates your site to the latest version of WordPress, so if you’re hosting your WordPress website with us, you can rest easy. If you’re using another hosting provider, check to see whether they handle updates for you, or if you’re responsible for keeping your site up to date.

Research the Keywords People Use to Find Your Site

Keywords are the terms people use to find content on search engines, so keyword research is the process of identifying the terms and phrases you should include in your posts and pages so users can find your content in search results.

You can see where this is going: including relevant keywords makes finding your content easier.

There are many free and paid tools you can use. We recommend these three free options:

• Google Keyword Planner: This tool can show you how often keywords are searched each month.
• KeywordTool.io: You can figure out keyword ideas based on Google Autocomplete results using this free tool.
• Answer The Public: You can enter a topic in the search and quickly generate tons of related keywords to help you build a well-rounded piece of content around the main topic.

These tools are only as good as your ability to use them. Fortunately, the fine folks at Ahrefs (a paid and robust keyword research tool) have assembled an excellent beginner’s guide to keyword research. Throughout the rest of this post, we’ll tell you when, where, and how to apply keywords too.

Tip: Your site should have only one page or one post per keyword. If you have two or more pages whose content is too similar, it can confuse search engines and cause them not to rank either page. It can confuse users too, making it unclear which page best addresses what they’re looking for.

Keep Your Site Structure Organized

Search engines reward well-structured sites that help users find key pages easily. That means it’s important to organize your site’s structure and navigation.

Avoid Duplicate Categories and Tags

WordPress uses categories and tags to organize blog posts. Let’s define their roles:

• Categories organize all posts within a topical area: For example, a cooking blog might have categories for Recipes, Restaurant Reviews, and Cooking Utensils.
• Tags organize specific groups of posts: For example, the same cooking blog might have tags for restaurant reviews in specific cities (i.e., Chicago and New York City) or reviews of specific utensil brands (i.e., Le Creuset and KitchenAid). 

Categories and tags are both useful for organizing content. However, avoiding duplication in the names of your categories and tags is important. There are two reasons for this:

1. They confuse users: If two things look the same, a reader might waste time thinking there’s a difference and have trouble telling which one will contain the content they’re trying to find.
2. They confuse search engines: When you have an identical category and tag, WordPress will create duplicate archive pages for both. This makes it harder for search engines to understand your site, leading to lower rankings (and less traffic).

Fortunately, these issues are easy to avoid when you follow these tips:

• Use categories for primary navigation: This ensures every post is organized.
• Be disciplined with tag usage: Avoid using tags that exactly match any category. 
• Consider setting tag archive pages to nofollow: This means telling search engines to ignore (and not rank) your tag pages. This makes absolutely certain that tag archive pages will not conflict with category archive pages in search results. Only do this if you’re comfortable with losing your tag pages in search results (your category pages will still be eligible to rank). You can apply this setting with Yoast, AIOSEO, or Rank Math. 

Tip: Be careful using SEO plugins to nofollow or noindex portions of your site. It’s easy to accidentally block pages you want search engines to find.

Make Your Top-Level Menu Easy to Navigate

Menus are essential for helping users navigate your site. They’re also helpful for search engines to understand how your site is structured (and to determine whether your site offers a good user experience). 

When designing your menu, group relevant pages together. For example, if your site sells products, you might have a menu item labeled Products, with links to each category of products underneath.

Make Sure Your Footer is Organized

Add links to your important pages in your site’s footer as well. Organize them so child pages (subpages) are listed underneath parent pages (top-level). This will keep your footer links clearly structured to match your page hierarchy, making it easy for users and search engines to navigate your site structure.

Add Internal Links Between Related Pages and Posts

Search engines use internal links, links between your content, to understand how pages are related to one another. When a page has many relevant links that help users navigate to the page, search engines recognize its importance 

• Add links between related pages: Ideally, all pages grouped together in the same columns in your menu should also be internally linked within their content.
• Add links between related blog posts: This helps readers find more interesting content to read on your site while helping search engines understand what your posts are about.

Add links from your blog to your landing pages: It’s especially important to add links back to pages where a user might sign up for your service or make a purchase.

Tip: As a best practice, set internal links to open in the same window—external links should open in a new tab.

Fix Broken Links and Close Navigational Dead-ends

Broken links between pages frustrate users and make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl through your site. Fortunately, it’s easy to find and fix broken links by using a broken link detection plugin. Then, update the links so they point to relevant posts or pages. That’s it!

Consolidate Duplicate Content

Do you have two or more pages that serve the same purpose? Consider consolidating them into one authoritative page to reduce confusion for search engines and users. 

Use a redirection plugin to re-route the duplicative pages to the one you want to keep. This prevents bots and readers from getting confused about which page to rank and read.

Use a Good Permalink Structure

Permalinks control how URLs are formatted on your site. It’s important to structure them so search engines can easily crawl them. We recommend including the following items in your permalink structure for blog posts:

• Dates: Include date information if you value accurate historical preservation. Otherwise, remove them. This makes it easier to update content in the future without confusing search engines.
• Post category: Categories help search engines understand the relevance of the page.
• Post name: By default, this will include the page headline. 

The post name field controls your URL slugs. No, we’re not talking about slimy gastropods. On every post and page you publish, edit the slug to include your primary keyword, and remove all extra words. This helps bots understand what the page is about (and rank it accordingly).

As a reminder, this applies to permalinks for blog posts. For pages other than your homepage, WordPress.com will create a slug that matches the page title (which you can edit, of course).

Tip: WordPress.com users need the Business plan or higher to change the permalink structure.

Add an XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are files in your site’s code that list all the important pages on your site to help search engines crawl and understand your content. WordPress.com automatically generates one for you, so if you’re a WordPress.com user, your homework here is done.

If you’re using WordPress with another hosting service, never fear. You can add an XML sitemap with an SEO plugin like Yoast, AIOSEO, or Rank Math.

Optimize Metadata

When it comes to websites, you’ll sometimes hear people refer to “metadata.” This term could mean several different things depending on the context, but in general, it refers to data about a webpage that helps search engines and readers understand its context. 

Here are ways you can optimize your post or page metadata:

Write Title Tags That People Want to Click On

Title tags are short lines of text that tell search engines and users what a page is about. They appear in the top line of text in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Here are some tips for writing effective title tags:

• Keep them under 60 characters: If they’re too long, search engines will truncate them. Use a free SERP preview tool to see how they will look before you publish them.
• Include your primary keyword: This is what your page is all about, so be sure to include it in the title tag.
• Make sure they read well: Try reading your title tags out loud. If they sound clunky or don’t make sense, try writing them again. They should sound natural, as searchers will largely decide whether to click on your content in search results because of your title tags.

Add Descriptive Meta Descriptions to Pages and Posts

Meta descriptions are short summaries of a page’s content. They appear underneath clickable links on SERPs.

Here’s how to write meta descriptions that make users want to click:

• Keep them concise: 120 to 150 characters is a good length for meta descriptions. If they’re too short, search engines may not use them. If they’re too long, they’ll get cut off.
• Use persuasive language: Tell the reader what makes your page or post valuable and interesting.
• End with a call to action: Encourage the reader to click through to your site.

Make Images Search Engine-Friendly

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. Since search engines can’t “see” images, they need help understanding their relevance to your content.

Here are some ways to make your images search-ready:

Include Keywords in Image File Names

Before you upload images to your posts and pages, give them a clear file name that includes relevant keywords. Follow this structure using dashes (rather than underscores): a-good-keyword-that-describes-this-image.jpg.

Use Descriptive Alt Text

Search engines use alt text to better understand what images are about, and screen readers also use them to help users with visual impairments understand your images through words.

Alt text should accurately describe the elements in your images—think number of people, activities depicted, colors, and textures.

For example, take this picture:

Good alt text for this image might look something like this: Two small golden retriever puppies sitting in the grass with orange flowers around their paws.

Our support guide will show you where you can edit image alt text on WordPress.com sites.

Indulge Your Site’s Need for Speed

Everyone loves fast-loading websites (including search engines). Give your site a tune-up to make sure it’s as quick as possible using these strategies:

Choose a Fast Hosting Provider

Slow loading speeds are often caused by slow hosting, which negatively impacts user experience. 

Want to know how fast your site loads? Use our free WordPress Page Speed Test tool to find out:

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content delivery networks (CDNs) use remote servers worldwide to cache and serve website files from locations close to your users. This helps your pages and media load faster.

All WordPress.com sites come with an excellent CDN from Jetpack. You can also choose Cloudflare, another popular option, as an alternative on the Premium plan and above.

Choose a Well-Designed WordPress Theme

Outdated themes are a common cause of WordPress performance problems. Fortunately, all WordPress.com websites have access to tens of thousands of high-quality themes that will load quickly. If you choose a theme from a third-party store or developer, buy one from a reputable vendor by reading reviews and ensuring you’ll get top-tier support.

Tip: WordPress.com users can upload third-party themes on the Business plan and above.

Compress Images for Faster Loading Speed

Image files can be large and hard for web browsers to load. Compressing images helps them load faster. 

You can compress images manually using an image editing tool. An image compression plugin that reduces file sizes without reducing quality is a more convenient option. Here are a few options to check out:

• ShortPixel
• Smush Image Optimization
• TinyPNG
• Image Optimizer

SEO Tips for Blog Posts

Blog posts have some specific considerations to keep in mind for SEO. Let’s look at a short list of additional tips that can help your posts rank better and get more traffic.

Write Unique Content

Don’t copy content from other sites. If you want your content to rank, don’t write it all with AI either. Publish original content that serves user needs, and search engines will reward you. 

This advice applies to other pages on your website too. All of your content should be original.

Include Keywords Naturally

Keywords help search engines understand your page’s topic and ensure it matches what users are searching for. They’re also crucial for users, as they should align with their intent and needs.

Just don’t go overboard trying to fit keywords everywhere you can. Keep your writing natural and focused on human readers. The folks at Copyblogger have an excellent guide on how to do this well.

Choose Header Tags Carefully

Header tags impact readability and SEO by making pages and posts easier to read and understand. When writing posts and structuring content on pages, follow this header hierarchy:

• H1: The page title or headline
• H2: Major subpoints on the page or post
• H3: Supporting sections for each H2 subsection
• H4: Use sparingly, if at all

Your header tags should also be nested—don’t jump from an H1 directly to an H4. 

Use Concise Sentences and Paragraphs

The classic best practice of writing for the web says to keep sentences under 25 words long and paragraphs under three sentences. These aren’t hard and fast rules, but this guidance can make your writing easier for readers to digest and find the answers they’re looking for. 

You can also use the Jetpack AI Assistant to catch issues with your writing and make your content clearer and easier to read.

Display Excerpts Instead of Full Posts

WordPress allows you to display entire posts or post excerpts on blog archive pages. Showing excerpts only improves rankings and makes these pages easier to navigate.

From My Home, click Settings → Reading. Then, next to “For each post in a feed, include,” click Excerpt:

Measuring Results

You’ve learned tons of WordPress SEO tips to bring more people to your site in this post. How will you know whether your work was worthwhile? 

Use these analytics tools to measure performance:

• Jetpack Stats: This plugin is easy to use and included on every WordPress.com website. It’s also available for all WordPress sites on other hosts via Jetpack.
• Google Search Console: Use this free tool to find data about how users find your site, straight from Google. Learn how to connect it to your WordPress.com site, then learn how to use it. 
• Google Analytics: This tool is free and easy to connect to WordPress.com websites. It can contain a lot of website data, but it’s worth learning how to use it. Fortunately, Google offers an excellent (and free) beginner’s guide to Google Analytics.

Now Get More Traffic

There’s always more to learn about SEO, but by this point, you have the essential knowledge to help your WordPress site rank and gain traffic. Do the right things consistently, and eventually you’ll join your favorite sites at the top of the SERPs.

WordPress SEO success starts with fast and dependable hosting. Get started with WordPress.com or move your existing WordPress site today.

This post will cover all the ingredients you need to get started and set yourself up for long-term food blogging success. 

What is a Food Blog?

A food blog is a broad category of websites focused on sharing food-related content. Some food blogs focus on creating original recipe content and offering their cooking know-how, others celebrate food aesthetics through high-quality food photography or catalog their food experiences by providing restaurant reviews or sharing culinary discoveries abroad.

Choosing a Food Blog Niche

The first step in creating a successful food blog is choosing a niche within the food blogging space. Choosing a clear niche ensures your content stands out and attracts website visitors who share your interests. By keeping your blog laser-focused, you can become a trusted expert and go-to resource on the web.

When it comes to finding the right niche, the menu is limitless. We’ve compiled a few ideas below to get you started.

• Cuisine: Focusing on your culture’s cuisine or cuisine you particularly love and have experience making can allow you to become an authoritative resource for culture-specific recipes and advice on sourcing specialty ingredients or brands.
• Lifestyle: Lifestyle choices can significantly impact how you cook and eat. Whether you are a van life enthusiast, an elite athlete, or a homesteader with kids, you can use the core elements of your lifestyle to build a unique brand that explains the how and why behind your food content.
• Geographic location: Whether you are writing local restaurant reviews or highlighting popular recipes from your region, a location focus provides specificity to your content, photography, and branding. With more than half of Google searches being locally focused, it may be easier to build a strong but dedicated local following.
• Dietary restrictions: Online recipes have become an important resource for people with food allergies or food sensitivities. Focusing on common food sensitivities like nuts, dairy, gluten, or sugar can help you build a large audience while digging into less-common food allergies can attract a smaller but highly dedicated community.
• Lifestyle diets: Unique diets often call for ingredient swaps or tracking specific metrics that may not be included in standard recipes. If you follow a diet like paleo or keto, you can serve a similar niche of people who cook often and seek specialized recipes and advice. 
• Kitchen setup: Do you have a tiny kitchen, hot plate, outdoor kitchen, or other unconventional kitchen setup? Writing about cooking within unique constraints can provide practical advice for others navigating similar situations.

You can also combine several niches—like a blog focusing on recipes from a specific culture that have been altered to be entirely gluten-free—to create a truly original brand. 

Whatever niche you choose, it should be something you are passionate about and can continue to write about over time. Readers and search engines love content rooted in experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, so use your experiences with food as your guiding force.

Setting a Goal for Your Food Blog

When starting a food blog, you must have a clear goal so that you can focus your time and resources accordingly. A clear goal will also help you determine what success looks like for your blog, helping you stay motivated and organized as you get it up and running.

Here are some common goals food bloggers have for their websites:

Sharing Your Passion For Food

If you’re writing your blog simply to share your love for food but don’t care about monetizing, you might focus on building a strong narrative voice and an engaging community space. Your blog posts should focus on sharing your personality and story and leaving room for readers to comment or engage directly. 

Some goals might be making new connections with your followers, publishing a certain number of monthly posts, or creating a digital archive of your top-loved recipes.

Food Blogging as a Side Hustle

If you hope to make money from your food blog but don’t plan on making blogging your full-time job, you probably want a site that can grow over time. Be clear about what monetization strategies you may want to pursue: do you plan to make money through affiliate links or via an online store? Or maybe you want to run ads on your site or accept donations from your readers.

Even if you start with a simple website, make sure that your platform can support these features down the line.

It takes time and consistency to build a following, especially if you have another full-time gig. Set reasonable, time-based goals for launching your site, creating content at regular intervals, and sustainably growing your audience.

Food Blogging as a Full-Time Business

If you plan to run your blog as a full-time business, you may want to invest more in it upfront so you can monetize your site immediately. You will likely need higher-level website features, such as a store, contact forms, advanced analytics, and an optimized theme to support your content creation, marketing, and sales. 

You may have marketing and monetary goals for your blog, like getting a certain number of monthly page views, growing your followers cross-platform, or having a certain number of sales or partnerships in place each week or month. 

Food Blogging as a Portfolio-Builder 

If you’re a chef, food photographer, or other food-focused professional, you may create a food blog to find new work opportunities. In this case, your portfolio or work product would be at the center of the site, and your website might have a stronger focus on personal branding. 

Your goals might include having a clean online presence to share with potential employers or keeping a regularly updated catalog of your best work.

Choosing a Blogging Platform and Hosting

Once you have a clear picture of your blog and your goals, it’s time to choose your blogging platform. We recognize this can be daunting, especially if you’ve never built a website. However, WordPress.com is here to support you every step of the way.

Website Building Blocks

To start creating your blog, you’ll need three things:

1. A website host: Your website is stored on a server via a website host. Most new website owners choose managed hosting, which handles both server setup and the day-to-day management of your website, including security, uptime, and regular updates.
2. A Content Management System (CMS): CMS software allows you to create, edit, and publish content online without code. We (obviously) love and recommend WordPress for this—more on that in a second.
3. A domain name: Your domain is your website’s address on the internet. For example, “yourgroovydomain.com.”

These are the essentials for all food blogs, and luckily, you can get them all at WordPress.com!

Why Choose WordPress for Your CMS?

WordPress is a publishing software that doesn’t compromise on flexibility, customization, or long-term growth. 

The WordPress Editor offers drag-and-drop tools that enable anyone to build a website on the platform without needing to write code. There are also tons of pre-designed WordPress themes for food blogs, allowing you to find a brand-worthy professional design and quickly customize it to your needs.

Unlike CMS competitors like Squarespace or Wix, WordPress is an open-source software that enables flexibility and content ownership. In addition to themes, you can access a massive library of free and paid plugins, which help expand your website’s functionality to meet your needs as your blog grows. Plus, with WordPress, you fully own your content and can take all of your content with you if you change hosting providers.

Why Choose WordPress.com For Your Hosting?

WordPress.com is for bloggers like you: our comprehensive WordPress hosting offers everything new (and veteran!) bloggers need out-of-the-box to quickly and confidently launch their blogs and takes care of the technical website management for you so that you can focus on creating content.

With managed features like security, no traffic caps, ample storage capacity, enhanced performance, automatic updates, support, domain names, themes, plugins, and more, we’re a one-stop shop to get you started on your food blogging journey. 

With WordPress.com, you’re joining a huge community of active bloggers and site owners. You can find support and advice on our forums and take advantage of our step-by-step guides and articles (like the one you’re reading right now!) that will help you make the most out of your blog from day one. We also have an excellent support team.

Our hosting plans scale with your needs, supporting everything from free personal bloggers to large food blogging businesses.

Choosing a Name for Your Food Blog

Your blog name should be short, memorable, and most likely food-related. Make sure it’s both easy to spell and pronounce—this increases the odds that your followers will remember your blog and spread the word with their friends and families.

Stick with straightforward spellings for your blog name, as unusual spellings can create confusion and require verbal explanations like “it sounds like food, but with an e at the end!” 

Another important factor in choosing your name is checking whether your domain name is available. Domains with a .com ending are the most popular (as they’re the most memorable) but can be more expensive or difficult to acquire.

If your desired domain isn’t available, you can use other options like .net and .blog. You can also consider a different or more specific name to avoid creating confusion or driving traffic to a competitor’s website. 

Use our domain search tool to find an available domain, or select a domain during your WordPress.com registration process (most domain names are free for the first year when you buy a paid hosting plan with WordPress.com!).

Selecting a WordPress Theme for Your Food Blog

WordPress offers a wide range of free and paid website templates (called themes) to suit every visual style. WordPress.com releases fresh themes every month for all types of bloggers, including specialized designs for food-themed blogs.

When choosing a theme for your food blog, look out for ones that are:

• Responsive: Responsive theme elements change size to adapt to your readers’ screen width, ensuring that your content is always legible and nothing gets cut off at smaller screen sizes. All themes on WordPress.com are responsive, and you can check by clicking the Preview button on a theme page and using the dropdown menu to view the theme at different aspect ratios.

• Mobile-friendly: More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so ensure your site is optimized for mobile. Your site should also load quickly when accessing it with mobile data, so keep these factors in mind to ensure your site loads quickly for your readers.
• Food blog specific: Some themes are designed specifically for food blogs. These themes may include pre-built recipe pages and food-blog-focused navigation. While all themes are fully customizable, getting your blog up and running may be easier if you choose one with elements that suit your blog’s specific needs.

Premium WordPress.com themes are included in our Personal plan and above.

Essential WordPress Plugins for Food Bloggers

WordPress provides an excellent base for your food blog, and plugins can spice things up by adding additional features to your website. While there are many plugins available, we recommend starting with those that support growth, speed, and recipe creation. 

When choosing plugins, look for options with good reviews and a large number of active downloads. It’s also helpful to check when the plugin was last updated, as that can indicate whether it’s being actively maintained to be compatible with the most recent versions of WordPress. 

With WordPress.com, you can use plugins on the Business plan and above. 

SEO Plugins

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools help make your website more easily readable to search engines like Google. Since most users don’t look beyond the first few search results on a search engine, it’s essential to consider how search engines parse your blog’s content so that it will rank higher in relevant search results. 

Many SEO plugins take the guesswork out of SEO by providing step-by-step walkthroughs and automatically updating your site schema behind the scenes to meet evolving SEO best practices. Some popular options include Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, and Rank Math.

WordPress.com also has built-in SEO capabilities with Jetpack for WordPress on the Business plan and above.

Recipe Plugins

Recipe plugins give you an easy-to-use recipe template for your blog posts, your readers a visually consistent and organized recipe format for each of your recipes, and search engines the structured data they need to display your recipes accurately in search results.

You can learn more about the wonderful world of recipe plugins here, but some good options are WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes, and Create by Mediavine.

Image Compression Plugins

Oversized images can slow down your website’s loading time, causing impatient users to abandon your site before it fully loads and ultimately reducing trust in your content. Image compression plugins automatically optimize your food glamour shots and process photos for faster loading speeds. ShortPixel and Smush Image Optimization are two popular image compression plugins.

You will also want to manually optimize your images for quicker loading using our guide on image optimization.

Social Sharing Plugins

Social sharing plugins help you easily share your content on social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, encouraging readers to subscribe to your content on every platform. Building a cross-platform brand can grow your base and drive long-term engagement. 

Some popular social plugins to simplify sharing across your accounts include AddToAny and Blog2Social. 

With WordPress.com, you get built-in social features for auto-sharing your posts to your social media channels and allowing your readers to share your content on social media with just one click. Plus, with tags, you can add your posts to WordPress.com’s relevant Reader channels to give your content added visibility.

Writing a Blog Post: Planning Your First Posts

Once you’ve defined your niche and goals, start by creating a few core recipes or food-related articles that represent your blog’s style—this is your opportunity to hone in on your blog’s unique voice and tone. 

Weaving personal stories and practical cooking tips into your recipes creates a distinctive voice that sets your blog apart from generic recipe websites. You’ll develop a stronger connection with your audience and a memorable brand by leaning into something uniquely you. 

Research suggests that blog posts around 2,000 words rank better in Google Search. But quantity doesn’t always equal quality. There’s a food-worthy SEO acronym to remember as you whip up new posts: E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Keeping these aspects in mind while creating your content will ensure that your blog posts are highly relevant and helpful to your audience.

Starting with your first post, you’ll also want to establish some structure for your content. Consider using categories (like dessert, breakfast, dinner) to create sorting and filtering options that are relevant to your specific content. As your blog grows, this will help readers quickly find the content they want. 

Making Your Blog Stand Out: Visuals and Food Photography 

Since digital readers are very visual and associate good photography with quality content, having high-quality images in your posts is important. Consider getting a good camera, like a DSLR, mirrorless camera, or high-end smartphone to improve your photo quality.

For food photography, diffused, natural light works best. To create ideal lighting conditions, shoot by a window away from direct light. Hanging a sheer white curtain in your window will also help create a diffused look. If shooting your photos during daylight hours isn’t an option, you may want to consider investing in an artificial lighting setup.

You’ll also want to reduce visual clutter and keep the focus on the food: use neutral backdrops and simple props for a professional look. Most importantly, the food should look appetizing, so focus on presentation, texture, and color. Start photographing just your dish and add one prop at a time.

It’s important to be thoughtful with staging, framing, and lighting your images, but tweaking in post-production tools like Lightroom, Snapseed, or built-in WordPress tools can help take your photos to the next level. 

Five Tips for Running a Successful Food Blog

There’s a lot to consider when starting a food blog, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider these quick tips: 

1. Focus on quality and unique content: Thoroughly test your recipes and products before publishing, and don’t forget about E-E-A-T! Sharing original recipes, personal insights, and valuable tips will help you build connections with your readers.
2. Know your audience: The culinary interests of a single adult will be much different than those of a large family feeding young kids. Busy people want quick recipes that require little cleanup, while gourmands want recipes that help them build new skills. Establishing a core audience will provide a compass for your content creation.
3. Post consistently: Set a content schedule that works for you, whether daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, and stick to it! It can take time to build a following, but consistency ensures you’re laying the groundwork for your long-term success.
4. Promote your content: Share your content on sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook to bring new readers to your site. Use SEO best practices to attract organic traffic from search engines, and engage in existing online communities related to your food niche to build your personal brand and provide the content the community needs.
5. Be patient: It takes time to build a flourishing blog and to discover what works best for you. Know that you have time and space to grow into your brand, so give yourself grace as you get up and running.

Ready to Get Cooking? 

With a little help from WordPress.com, anyone can create a high-quality food blog. From technical expertise to design and writing tips, we’ll be your sous chef on your food blogging journey. If you’re looking for even more resources, check out our companion post on how to start a successful blog. 

If you’re feeling ready to dip your spoon in, create your food blog with WordPress.com today.

Here’s how it all came together:

How It Started

At the start of 2025, my team at Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company) had taken over responsibility for updates and maintenance of the WordPress.com Developer Docs.

As part of this process, we met with Alexa, a content marketing manager for WordPress.com, to chat about processes and guidelines around this handover.

Toward the end of the meeting, Justin Tadlock, my team lead, asked a simple question, “Is there anything else we can help you with?” Alexa replied, “I have a question, but it’s unrelated to the docs. Do any of you know if a calendar view of GitHub Issues is possible?”

The Problem

Alexa explained that her team uses GitHub Issues and Projects to manage content publishing, a common practice in software companies. 

The process generally worked well but was missing one critical piece for visibility into scheduled content and content gaps: a calendar view. Their team couldn’t view these content issues in a monthly calendar to get a quick snapshot of what was planned for the month ahead, as the GitHub Projects view only offers a roadmap-style view—helpful for developing software but not ideal for content planning. Nick Diego was in that meeting. You probably know Nick from his Revolutionize Your WordPress Development with Cursor AI video.

Since leadership at Automattic encouraged us to explore AI tools like Cursor, Nick and I had spent the past few months experimenting and had some fantastic successes, building everything from WordPress plugins to a desktop app for viewing a local WordPress debug log. 

If you’ve never heard of Cursor, it’s an AI-powered code editor. Forked from the popular Visual Studio Code editor, Cursor takes the idea of AI-assisted coding to the next level by adding a ChatGPT-like agent to the mix. This AI-powered chatbot interprets your written prompts into working code. This concept has become so popular it even has its term—vibe coding, or using a large language model for coding.

We were both inspired by an Automattic Town Hall in December, where one of our engineering leads used Cursor to automatically generate a pull request for a project he was working on.

Now, I can’t say this for sure because it was across the digital divide of Google Meet, but I’m almost sure Nick and I looked directly at each other and had the same thought at the same moment. 

“This is not that hard to solve with AI.” Nick was the first to express this idea, so we spent the next few minutes chatting about it. We both agreed that the only challenging part would be figuring out the right way to query the data we would need to fetch the relevant GitHub Issues from the project view; building the actual calendar app would be pretty easy.

Fortunately for us, our colleague Birgit Pauli-Haack was also on that call. She mentioned that, yes, GitHub Projects have a publicly queryable API. However, it was not a REST API but a GraphQL API. She had explored querying GitHub Project data with some success, but she hadn’t dived into something like this before.

Sitting on that call and listening to all this information, I felt like generating a calendar view for these GitHub Issues would be doable and relatively straightforward. I just had to:

1. Figure out the GraphQL query.
2. Use Cursor to build a web app around it.

How hard could it be?

Perplexity to the Rescue

The first thing I had to do was figure out the GraphQL query, and I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of GraphQL is limited.

I have written tutorials on using GraphQL to build static frontends for WordPress websites, also known as “Headless” or “Decoupled” WordPress sites. In that process, I used the WP GraphQL plugin that our colleague Jason Bahl developed; however, I’ve never used it in a production environment or used it to build a web app.

So I wondered if I could take a shortcut in this learning curve with AI and craft the GraphQL query without understanding it deeply and completely.

Then I remembered that WordPress.com had partnered with Perplexity. Perplexity is similar in many ways to ChatGPT, but it describes itself as an AI-powered answer engine that lets you research the web.

What I like about Perplexity is that when it outputs the generated AI response, it also includes all the sources of information it has used. If the answer you get from Perplexity isn’t quite what you were looking for, you can open the source links to do further manual research.I also needed a way to test and validate the GraphQL query that Perplexity would provide. Fortunately, GitHub has a GraphQL API Explorer, which allows you to authenticate with your GitHub account and run valid GraphQL queries on any private or public GitHub repositories you can access.

It took me a total of two Perplexity Threads (back-and-forth conversations with Perplexity) to figure out the GraphQL query. The first Thread was me asking it to build basic versions of the query, running them in the explorer, and then I fine-tuned the query based on the data from the explorer. After three rounds of fine-tuning, I started a new Thread and created a more specific prompt, using all the lessons I’d learned from the previous Thread. Testing that query in the Explorer returned the exact data set I’d need for the web app.

The Cursor Build

The next step was to begin app development with Cursor. One of the things that I discovered early on (both through Nick’s video and this Twitter thread) was the idea of using Cursor to generate an instructions file. The idea is to have a “conversation” with the Cursor agent and share the basic requirements of the application.

You then instruct the agent to write out those requirements to a requirements.md markdown file. Next, you ask the agent to go through the requirements file itself and ask you any clarifying questions about the requirements. As you answer the clarifying questions, you instruct the agent to update the requirements file.

Once you have the requirements file, you instruct the agent to create the instructions.md file based on the requirements file, which outlines the steps needed to build the application.

Because I already had the GraphQL query, I also added it to a file in the project directory. Armed with my requirements.md file, instructions.md file, and the file containing the query, I instructed the Cursor agent to start building the app step by step, following the instructions.

In about two hours, I had a working prototype. I returned to Perplexity once or twice to help me solve something that Cursor couldn’t do on its own. I wrote no other code beyond running one or two terminal commands to set up the project directory and its dependencies or running the development server to serve the app for testing.

It took me maybe another hour to polish the app the following Monday morning (mostly adding colors and making GitHub Issues clickable). By midday, I felt I had something very close to what Alexa’s team needed.

All that remained was to find an internal location to host it, which ironically took longer than the app build because this was so new.

By Wednesday, I shared the link with Alexa and my team in an internal post.

Everyone was really happy with the outcome. Alexa and a few of her teammates tested it out and picked up one or two small issues.

One of those bugs was interesting; it seems that Alexa saw all the items in the calendar one day before they were due to be published. I fed this info back to the Cursor agent, and it confirmed this was due to some timezone-related bug, which it promptly fixed.

One week later, we had a working GitHub Projects Content Calendar.

Final Thoughts

With all of the AI tools available today, software development is at an inflection point. 

I felt the same way when Google introduced its search engine and Gmail. This is probably how people felt in 1886 when the first practical modern automobile was invented. 

LLMs and AI agents will definitely change how we develop software, from speeding up how we learn new things to assisting us in our actual development. 

I don’t believe they will replace the need for human developers because if we don’t use them responsibly, we’ll end up with mountains of inefficient code. But it’s certainly possible today to build things with a higher success rate than it used to be. Based on my experience creating the content calendar app, I made another GitHub-related web app that lets you view any GitHub issues assigned to you across all your GitHub repositories.

As someone who works across multiple repositories, I’ve wanted a dashboard like this for years—and I was able to build it myself!

Getting used to how these tools work also has other benefits. For example, you may have noticed that this blog post includes links to my colleagues’ online accounts or products’ websites. I added all these links simply by exporting the content to a markdown file and asking Cursor to “look for all proper nouns in the text, find the online URL for each one, and add the link to the proper noun.” 

I needed to spot-check the links, but finding and linking them myself would have taken me half an hour. I did it in minutes with Cursor.

If you’re a developer, I encourage you to experiment with these tools. Your next great product idea may be easier to build than you think!

But even if you understand why you need a business website, choosing which platform you’ll use to build it can be overwhelming.

In this post, we’ll explain why WordPress, the world’s largest open-source website software, is the best option for small businesses that want to establish a sustainable digital presence that can grow with their brand.

10 Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Small Business Site

WordPress is an open-source publishing platform that powers over 43% of the internet. There’s a reason that WordPress has endured as the most popular website-building software:

1. No Coding Required

Creating a professional WordPress website requires zero coding skills. With block-based themes, anyone can build a website using intuitive drag-and-drop tools and a visual interface showing how your website will appear to visitors. 

WordPress’s large library of drag-and-drop elements offers a ton of flexibility without compromising on web best practices: blocks are responsive, automatically adjusting to look good on any screen, and follow the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards. 

Need help getting started? You can find tons of tutorials and guides online—including guides and tutorials created by WordPress.com. 

Prefer to work with an expert? You can hire a WordPress.com professional to build you a site for as little as $499 + hosting or work with a qualified WordPress partner agency to build you a one-of-a-kind website. 

2. Thousands of Customizable Themes Make Design Easy

WordPress themes are ready-made website designs that instantly give your site a professional look. Each theme contains a comprehensive design package—including color schemes, typography, and pre-designed page layouts—to give your website a cohesive look and feel. There are thousands of WordPress themes, ranging from free to premium, so it’s easy to find a design that suits your brand’s visual identity.

With 97% of people researching local businesses online before visiting, a well-designed and professional website significantly increases the chances that potential customers will walk through your door

WordPress.com offers users even more options, with additional themes created by our in-house developers, including many themes designed specifically for online businesses. 

If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, anyone on a Business plan or above can buy and install third-party themes, offering endless options for customization and design.

3. Plugins Make It Simple to Extend Your Site’s Functionality

If you need a feature or tool that isn’t available out of the box with other visual website builders, your only choice is to hire a developer to build you a custom solution.

WordPress offers a better option: plugins. Since WordPress is an open-source platform, any developer can build plugins you can download to extend your site’s functionality—think of them as apps for your website. With thousands of free and paid plugins available, endless opportunities exist to customize your website’s functionality to meet your personalized needs.

Popular plugins give small business websites additional functionality like:

• Contact forms: Enable customers to complete and submit digital forms on your site.
• SEO: Increase your search rankings by optimizing your content.
• Ecommerce: Sell products directly on your website.
• Booking and scheduling: Allow clients to book appointments or consultations online.
• CRMs: Manage customer data directly through WordPress.
• Email, social, and marketing: Streamline your communications across every platform.
• Payment processing: Accept online payments or donations.

The Jetpack plugin automatically includes a suite of added functionality—such as spam filtering, analytics, and marketing—for all WordPress.com users. Additional plugins are available on the Business plan and above. 

4. It’s SEO-Friendly

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies and best practices designed to help your website and content rank higher in search results, making it easier for potential customers to find you. While SEO can be complex, WordPress is built to support strong SEO, supporting optimization necessities like sitemaps and meta tags. 

Businesses can also utilize powerful free and paid SEO plugins to help their site rise above the competition. WordPress.com customers on the Business plan and above can rely on Jetpack’s built-in SEO features for optimizing meta descriptions and title structure (or can download an SEO plugin of your choice). 

5. You Fully Own Your Site and Content

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that it is completely open-source, meaning you have complete ownership of your website and everything on it. Unlike proprietary platforms that may claim rights to content and designs you create on their platforms, WordPress sites can be easily backed up, exported, and ported from one host to another without limitations. With WordPress, your content is yours—period.

For small businesses building their digital footprint, this ownership provides long-term security. You’re investing in building a digital brand that is entirely under your control rather than renting an online space on someone else’s platform.

6. It’s Secure and Keeps Your Information Safe

Depending on where you host your business’ WordPress site, robust security features should protect your site. For example, every WordPress.com site has built-in security features like SSL, DDoS protection and mitigation, and barriers against brute force attacks. 

WordPress.com users get even more security features out-of-the-box with Jetpack for WordPress.com. Even businesses with Free plans get great benefits with Jetpack, including built-in spam protection and site activity logs, with additional security features included at higher tiers. 

7. It’s Simple to Set Up Access for Multiple Users

Running a business means delegating responsibilities, and WordPress makes creating multiple logins easy for managing different aspects of your site. The platform’s robust user management system allows you to create multiple users with varying permission levels, from Administrators who can make site-wide changes and handle site billing, to Contributors who can only draft content.

This means your marketing team can update your blog, your sales team can manage product pages, and your customer support team can respond to inquiries—all without compromising the security of your site. As your business grows, this flexibility becomes increasingly valuable, ensuring that everyone on your team has everything they need and nothing they shouldn’t.

8. You Can Move Your WordPress Site Between Hosts

Unlike websites built on proprietary software like Wix and Squarespace, WordPress websites can be easily moved between hosts without having to be rebuilt. This flexibility means you can always move your website to a new hosting provider.

Already have a WordPress site? Consider switching to WordPress.com for top-of-the-line performance and support. Our site migration service makes the transition smooth and hassle-free, ensuring your business website stays online throughout the entire process.

9. There’s a Massive Community to Support You

When you choose WordPress, you’re joining the largest website community in the world. That means there are endless opportunities to learn, troubleshoot, grow your skills, and build community with like-minded users. 

WordPress offers public forums where developers and users alike come together to answer questions, and WordPress.com also provides its own dedicated forums where our active community is always on-hand to help. These communities can be invaluable resources for small businesses without dedicated IT staff to answer urgent questions about their websites. 

Want to take things offline? WordPress also hosts in-person events and gatherings all around the world. 

10. Why WordPress is a Smart Investment

Building and maintaining a professional business website doesn’t have to break the bank. WordPress is maintained by a huge community of dedicated designers, developers, and community builders, so the software itself is free, meaning you get a ton of value for just the price of hosting and your domain name.

Many small businesses choose a managed hosting provider like WordPress.com that will maintain your website for you. WordPress.com offers high-value plans for every budget, starting with Free plans and scaling up to support businesses of every size. 

Why Choose WordPress.com for Your Small Business Website?

While WordPress itself is a powerful platform, WordPress.com offers specific advantages that make it an exceptional hosting choice for small businesses:

WordPress.com is Lightning Fast

When choosing a hosting provider, you need to consider how fast your website loads for users. Slow-loading sites create a poor experience for visitors and can hurt your search engine rankings. WordPress.com consistently ranks among the fastest providers in third-party speed benchmarks, outperforming many competitors in load time.

This means your customers will always enjoy a fast experience on your site, reducing bounce rates and improving conversions. Our infrastructure is optimized specifically for WordPress, ensuring your website will experience peak performance without requiring any technical knowledge on your part.

Maintenance Done For You

One of the biggest challenges for small business owners is finding time to maintain their website. Because WordPress.com is managed hosting, you don’t need to perform routine maintenance yourself. 

We automatically run all the necessary updates, including security patches, WordPress core updates, and plugin updates. WordPress.com also has 99.999% uptime, so you don’t have to worry about your site going down. 

This hands-off approach means you can focus on what you do best—running your business—while we ensure your website stays current, secure, and professional.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Growing businesses shouldn’t be penalized for success. While some hosts charge you more money when your web traffic grows, WordPress.com will keep you online for one price, no matter how much traffic you receive.

This predictable pricing is crucial for businesses that may suddenly experience a surge in visitors, whether because you’re running a promotion, experiencing seasonal traffic spikes, or receiving an unexpected shout-out from a publication or influencer. You can rest easy knowing that you’ll never face surprise charges or experience declining site performance at the moments when your website matters most.

Customer Support

Even with the most user-friendly platforms, questions will inevitably arise. Our comprehensive support platform is there for you, offering tons of step-by-step guides, AI-powered answers, and for paid plans, live customer support. We’re here to ensure you can successfully build, launch, and grow your new website. 

From technical issues to guidance on best practices, our experienced support staff can help you overcome obstacles and make the most of your WordPress.com website.

Get Your Business Online with WordPress.com

In today’s digital world, having a strong online presence isn’t just an option for small businesses—it’s necessary. WordPress offers the perfect balance of power, flexibility, and ease of use, making it the ideal platform for businesses of all sizes.

With WordPress.com, you get the benefits of managed hosting, top-tier performance, and expert support. And because WordPress is so flexible, you can start small and add features as your business grows, ensuring you’re never paying for more than you need.

Ready to take your business online? Build your site with WordPress.com today and join the millions of successful businesses that trust WordPress for their online presence.

How do others do it? How do they write post after post, and it always comes out right? Why can’t you seem to do the same?

Here’s the secret: all successful bloggers have a process. They follow repeatable steps that result in a polished, high-quality post, almost like it’s on autopilot.

Here’s our step-by-step guide to writing blog posts that will wow readers, please search engines, and help you grow your blog.

1. Choose a Topic That Stands Out

The first question is what you’re going to write. You want to cover topics that meet the interests of your audience. Otherwise, why would they frequent your blog or find your posts in their search results?

There are several ways to uncover topics:

• Do keyword research: Find phrases your audience types into search engines to learn what they are interested in. You can use tools like Keywordtool.io, Ubersuggest, Semrush, or Ahrefs for that.
• Look at trending topics: What’s something everyone in your industry is talking about right now? Providing a resource about that topic may be timely and helpful for your readers. 
• Check your competitors: Look at existing blogs and blog content. What are others writing about? Are there any gaps? Is there anything you can add to the conversation?
• Lean on your interests and experiences: Choose a topic that excites you and that you know a lot about. When you talk about something personal, your enthusiasm will shine through and help you be authentic. 
• Read forums: Check Reddit, Quora, and other online communities to see what people in your area of expertise want to know more about.
• Look on social media: Keep your ear on conversations happening on social platforms to find topic ideas.
• Cover reader comments and questions: Gather ideas from comments or emails from your existing audience.

When deciding on a topic, try to find a fresh angle and include your unique insights to add value beyond basic information.

By the way, if you come up with more than one topic, feel free to add the others to your editorial calendar so you can come back to the others later.

2. Adopt a Reader-First Mindset

Blogging is all about your audience. Who you write for should always be at the forefront of your mind when writing a blog post because it’s their questions you need to answer.

To be able to do that, you need to get to know your readers. Writing a blog post is like buying a birthday present; it’s much easier when you know the person you want to give it to well.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Who is this content intended for? 
• Who will benefit from this post?
• How do they feel about the topic and why?
• What are they most interested in?
• What questions do they have?
• Which problems are they trying to solve?
• What have they tried before, and why hasn’t it worked?

By clarifying these questions, you can put yourself in your readers’ shoes and deliver what they need.

3. Determine the Type of Blog Post You Will Write

You can cover a given topic in many different ways, but the right approach depends on the topic, audience, and outcome you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to educate, entertain, persuade, engage, inform, or something else entirely?

There are a ton of different blog post styles, but here are a few common ways to structure a blog post:

• List posts: A blogging classic, and for good reason. These types of posts are easily digestible by your readers because the topics are naturally divided into numbered sections. This article is a good example of that!
• How-to guides: These provide your readers with step-by-step instructions for how to achieve a desired outcome.
• Personal stories: You can share personal experiences and lessons learned through these types of posts.
• Case studies: Report on a product or service and how it helped produce a certain outcome, usually for a customer.
• Feature articles: Provide an in-depth analysis of a singular topic, like our post about PHP.
• Interviews: Talk to someone who knows more about a topic than you, or interview several people for an expert roundup.
• Product reviews and comparisons: Evaluate a product or service, or compare several with one another.
• News articles: Provide time-sensitive updates on your industry or your company.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and you can also combine post types. For example, how-to articles are also often list posts.

If you’re not quite sure which post type best suits your topic, check out which formats are already ranking for that keyword.

For example, when you google “bread baking,” most of the results are recipes. If you want to appear in search results for this keyword, you will likely also want to post a recipe with your own spin.

4. Craft a Compelling Headline

In Ogilvy on Advertising, legendary advertiser David Ogilvy wrote that five times more people read a headline than the body copy.

That means, your headline is the main element that decides whether someone clicks on your post in search results or on social media.

For that reason, you should spend plenty of time crafting it, writing several iterations and trying different angles, formats, and wording.

Here are some tips for writing an effective headline:

• Be descriptive, as readers should be able to clearly understand what your post is about from that headline alone (or intrigue them enough to click through to read the whole post)
• Use emotional, curiosity-driven, or benefit-focused wording to hook readers
• Keep it concise, ideally under 60 characters, so your headline doesn’t get shortened in search results
• Include numbers in your headline. They set clear expectations and make information appear more easily digestible.
• Use brackets and parentheses to provide additional information and context as well as make your headline stand out visually
• Mention your main keyword/topic, preferably toward the beginning, so anyone skimming search results can easily tell what your post is about

Here are examples from our blog that use these principles:

• 11 Website Layout Examples for Every Type of Page
• How to Get Web Design Clients: 12 Practical Tactics That Work
• How to Create a Website Mockup in 5 Easy Steps (+ Examples!)

A good way to get started is to familiarize yourself with common headline formulas. You can also consider using a headline analysis tool like those by CoSchedule or Sharethrough.

Finally, if you’re struggling with writing an intriguing headline, you can revisit it after you finish writing the blog post. Sometimes that’s easier because you’ll have a better sense of the main message, key takeaways, and tone. With that clarity, you can craft a headline that grabs attention and accurately reflects the value in your post.

5. Outline Before You Write

Creating an outline means laying out a roadmap for your work; you can draft its overall structure and evaluate your main points.

An outline makes your blog post writing much easier because it’s a lot more comfortable to work alongside a roadmap than it is to try creating a ready-to-publish blog post out of thin air.

To set up your outline, first plan your main sections, like the introduction, main points, and conclusion. If you’re blogging on WordPress, you can easily do that with headings directly inside the editor.

Use H2 for main sections, then break them down further with H3 and H4s. Switch on the Outline feature in Document Overview in the top-left corner for an overview.

Then you can brainstorm the content in each section. Jot down important items as bullet points or lines of text. Make sure you cover every important aspect of your topic, adding your unique experiences or perspectives to each point. Optionally, include links to sources or examples you are going to use to support your ideas.

Finally, examine your outline for logical flow—each section should naturally lead into the next.

6. Write an Engaging Blog Post Introduction

The best way to draw readers into reading your blog post is to start with a hook. Hooks can come in the form of an interesting idea, a bold statement, a question, a story, or a relatable scenario. 

Jon Morrow, who is one of the most prolific bloggers out there, definitely manages to do that with his introductions.

Once you have hooked readers, convince them to keep reading by clearly stating what they’ll gain from your post. This makes it much easier to move them on to the main event.

Be aware that readers are busy, so keep your introductions concise and free of fluff.

Sometimes it’s helpful to write your introduction last; having the main body of your post ready can help you have a better understanding of what to say in the beginning.

7. Develop the Main Body with Actionable and Unique Insights

The body of your post is why readers came to your site in the first place. It’s where you address what’s most important to your audience—their problems, questions, objections, and fears.

Your first job is to simply fill in your outline. Build out the points you noted with examples, resources, and additional information. 

It’s not just about what you say but also how you say it. To make the main body most effective:

• Strive for clarity and a logical order.
• Explain concepts and jargon not everyone may be familiar with.
• Link to trusted sources to support your arguments.
• Include links for additional resources where readers can go to learn more about the topic.
• Provide examples and personal anecdotes to clarify and amplify.
• Plan space to use visuals to further enhance your message.

8. Keep Your Writing Conversational and Authentic

A blog post should feel like a conversation with a friend—write the way you talk. Write your blog posts the way you talk, and let your tone, humor, and quirks shine through. This introduction for a post on Pinch of Yum is a great example.

Bringing warmth and humanity into your writing helps readers connect with the real you instead of a fake blogger persona. In contrast, stiff and formal language makes your writing dull, lifeless, and hard to read.

A great way to make writing relatable is to tell personal stories. Make points by sharing anecdotes about yourself and your friends or family. Communicate your own struggles or what event made you want to look into this particular blog topic. Discuss how you were feeling and take readers on an emotional journey.

Finally, keep it simple. Simple writing is clear writing. Avoid the urge to use long paragraphs and complicated words.

You will find that writing simply is its own challenge that takes plenty of practice, but it makes your blog post more accessible and personable.

9. Edit Ruthlessly (More Than Once!)

The essence of writing a high-quality blog post is editing and rewriting. That also means you shouldn’t despair if the words don’t come out right the first time around. The first draft doesn’t matter; it’s only supposed to give you a starting point, not a finished product.

When editing, be sure to:

• Correct spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Cut unnecessary words and fluff.
• Strengthen clarity, logic, and flow.
• Ensure everything is factually correct.
• Add links and other important elements.

Reading your blog post out loud mirrors how readers process it in their minds. It helps you get a better sense of how the text sounds, if it flows well, and if it’s clear.

In addition, because editing is so important, it’s best if you do it more than once. Each additional pass strengthens your blog post.

For best results, put some space between writing and editing. Come back to your article the next day with a fresh mind and some distance. In addition, you can use tools like Grammarly or Hemingway for some automated help or ask someone you trust for their input.

10. Format Your Blog Post for Visual Appeal

The presentation of your content matters as much as what you say in it. If you write your blog post in a way that it’s overwhelming to look at, it turns readers away before they have time to give it a chance.

One part of the presentation piece is formatting your post for readability by:

• Using short sentences and paragraphs.
• Including bullet points, lists, and tables.
• Using enough headings and subheadings.
• Bolding or italicizing text for emphasis.

Healthline does this very well—shorter paragraphs encourage readability and bold text draws your eye to important text.

In addition, your blog post shouldn’t be a text-only experience. Enhance it with relevant visuals to help break up the text, make your post more engaging, and clarify key points.

Consider adding some of the following visual elements to your blog posts:

• Screenshots
• Photos
• Stats and graphs
• Quotes
• Infographics
• Embedded social updates
• GIFs and video embeds

When you’ve finished formatting your post, scroll through and see how it makes you feel. And don’t just do this for the desktop version—also check how it looks on mobile, as many readers will visit your site on their mobile devices. In fact, the majority of internet traffic now comes from smartphones so your blog post also needs to be readable and appealing on small screens.

11. Optimize for SEO Without Overstuffing

Polishing your blog post for search engines helps readers find your content when they search for specific topics or keywords. 

Good SEO means mentioning your main keyword naturally and including variations, synonyms, and secondary keywords. Additionally, include links to relevant posts and pages on your blog, as well as to credible external sources. It helps you establish your expertise and gives readers natural next steps if they want to learn more.

After that, it’s important to optimize the parts of your post that appear in search engines:

• Post URL: Make the URL short and descriptive, divide words with hyphens, and include your main keyword (e.g., yourgroovydomain.com/chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe).
• Title: Your title tag could be your headline, or you could further optimize it for search results. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can easily optimize your post’s title tag with the Jetpack plugin.
• Meta description: This is text that may appear beneath the post title in search results. Use it to accurately summarize the post content and include the main keyword to encourage readers to click through to read your full blog post.
• Image alt text: You can use this to describe image content for search engines and accessibility. 

But don’t overdo it. Over-optimizing will do more harm than good. Write your blog post for people first, meeting their needs and search intent.

12. Add a Conclusion With a Strong Call to Action (CTA)

You have multiple ways to finish your article:

• Give a summary: Sum up the key points you covered in your post.
• Provide a takeaway: Leave readers with one main idea, often an angle you established at the beginning of the article.
• Redirect readers: Link to another article on your blog so readers can dig even deeper into the topic or a related topic.
• Leave a bonus tip: Offer one final tip to readers as they apply the knowledge in your post.

In addition, you should leave your audience with a call to action. After all, the goal of a blog post isn’t to just attract traffic—you’re usually trying to achieve an additional outcome, like building leads, growing your newsletter, or selling a product.

But to do that, you need to clearly and explicitly tell readers what you want them to do. This is known as a “call to action” and might prompt readers to:

• Leave a comment.
• Share the article.
• Sign up for your email newsletter.
• Download a free resource.
• Read more blog posts.
• Check out your shop.

You can also have more than one CTA that may take one of these forms:

• A heading
• Simple text
• A button (for example, using social sharing plugins and the Sharing Buttons block)
• A form
• An image

13. Publish and Promote Your Blog Post Strategically

At this point, your blog post should be ready to go live and be published.

Publishing content is just one half of running a successful blog—the other half is promoting your content. Without a plan to spread the word, your blog post is less likely to get the traffic it deserves. 

We have 21 different ways to increase blog traffic listed here, but here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Share on social media: Post key insights on social networks with a link to the original post. Use appropriate hashtags, attractive visuals, and other ways to increase reach and attention. Automating social sharing makes this a lot easier.
• Send your new post in a newsletter: If you already have an email list, be sure to let subscribers know about your latest post.
• Share it in relevant communities: There are many places where members of your audience congregate, including Discord, Reddit, Slack, Quora, and Facebook groups.
• Repurpose your article: Turn your blog post into other pieces of content to increase reach. This could be a LinkedIn post, Bluesky thread, script for a video, slide deck, infographic, or Medium article.

Part of content promotion is also keeping existing blog posts up to date. You spent all this time getting each article ready for search engines—it would be a shame to just let it slide into obscurity over time.

Therefore, regularly revisit older posts and update them with the latest information, improve the writing, and use newer visuals. This keeps them fresh and relevant as well as helps you retain search engine positions.

14. Track Performance and Improve

The final step in writing a blog post is tracking its performance and iterating on it. For this purpose, you can use analytics tools like:

• Jetpack Stats
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics

They allow you to track search engine performance, views, reader engagement, conversions, comments, shares, backlinks, and more. This helps you understand what kind of content resonates most with your audience and what doesn’t.

This is invaluable information because you can use it to grow your blog. Figure out what makes existing posts work and apply that knowledge to refine your content strategy and blog writing process.

What Kind of Blog Post Will You Write?

Writing a gripping and informative blog post is neither an accident nor raw talent. Most of it simply comes down to knowing what your readers need and applying that knowledge. The rest is just practice.

Use the blueprint above as a basis to step up your blog post game. Add to your own blueprint as you continue to write blog content by integrating your own insights and findings to make it your own. 

We want to hear from you! Leave a comment below—what’s the top tip you’ll apply to your next blog post, and what will you write about?

What Are Title Tags?

A title tag is a line of HTML that labels what a website page is about. Search engines use them to understand the topic of a page or post. They are an important ranking signal that Google, Bing, and other search engines use to understand and rank website pages.

Search engines also use them to populate the blue links you see in search results: 

That’s not the only place you might see a title tag. Some browsers also display title tags in tabs. Here’s an example from Firefox, where the cursor hovers over the tab to reveal the full title tag:

If you’d like to find the title tag on a page you’re viewing, you can also right-click on the page, click View Page Source, and then use CTRL-F to search for “title”:

Why Do Title Tags Have So Much Power?

Search engines are all about gathering and organizing information from across the web. In order to do this, they need an easy way to quickly determine what a web page is about. 

Search engines use title tags in a similar way to how libraries use card catalogs, which help organize large collections of books and documents with key information.

What are the Benefits of Optimizing Title Tags?

By default, WordPress will use the H1 heading (which is typically the headline) for the title tag on pages and posts. However, there are several reasons why you might choose to optimize your title tag so they aren’t exactly the same as your headline (for example, if your headline is too long). Here are a few key benefits:

• Improve search engine rankings: Sometimes, your headline might not be optimally written for search engines. Making some strategic tweaks can help improve rankings.  
• Improve click-throughs: If your headline is too long to show in search engine results, then it’s possible fewer users will click on your result.
• Increase your traffic: Higher rankings and improved click-through rates equal more traffic for the content you worked hard to create.

You can optimize title tags on WordPress using a plugin—more on that in a bit.

What’s the Best Way to Write a Title Tag?

Even though title tags should be relatively short, there is an art to writing them well. Fortunately, it isn’t difficult to master best practices.  

Aim for Around 60 Characters

Google cuts off title tags that are more than 600 pixels wide. This is usually equal to around 60 characters. Since you probably can’t visualize what 600 pixels looks like on your own (unless you are an actual superhuman robot), you might need a tool to help while you’re writing.

Fortunately, several free title tag testing tools let you preview how yours will appear in search results. Here are a few options:

• Spotibo Google Search Results Preview Tool
• Mangools Google SERP Simulator
• To The Web Title Tag Tester

Include Keywords

If you’re aiming to drive traffic from search engines, then your title tags should include relevant keywords. These are terms a searcher might use to find your content. A well-written headline should cover this requirement.

Some sources say you should include the keyword you want to rank for at the beginning of your title tag. Realistically, somewhere between the beginning and the middle is best. If you have to make a trade off, prioritize readability rather than trying to force your keyword into the beginning.

Keep Them Consistent with Your Headline

A good title tag should reflect the headline (or H1 heading) on the page. If it’s not possible to fit the entire headline under the character limit, then shorten it as best you can. Avoid writing a title tag that sounds drastically different from your headline.

Make Sure They’re Unique

If two pages have the same title tag, search engines will not be able to tell them apart. That could cause the search engine to not rank either page for the intended keyword. If they’re too similar, they may also struggle to understand what the actual difference is between the two pages.

Note: If all the content on two or more pages or posts is identical, then you have an even bigger problem called “duplicate content.” You can fix this issue by ensuring your pages and posts offer unique value to readers.

If you need to have duplicate pages for any reason, use rel=canonical tags to tell search engines which of the pages is the “original” or the one you want to rank. Yoast and other SEO plugins can help you set rel=canonical links.

Ensure They Sound Natural When You Read Them Out Loud

Remember that title tags don’t just have to communicate to search engine bots. They also need to be easily readable for users. Try reading your title tags out loud (or at least back to yourself in your head) to make sure they read well and aren’t over-optimized for search engines. 

How Can You Edit Title Tags on a WordPress Website?

By default, WordPress uses the H1 title of a post for the title tag. While this is a quick and convenient solution, it isn’t always the most effective.

There are several ways you can customize title tags on your WordPress website. Let’s look at several different SEO plugins that enable this feature.

Note: WordPress.com users can enable the following features and plugins on the Business plan and above. All WordPress.com sites come with Jetpack pre-installed.

Editing Title Tags With Jetpack

WordPress.com users (as well as WordPress users with other hosts using the Jetpack plugin) can edit title tags using the SEO Title field. From the editor, click the Jetpack logo in the upper right corner, then scroll down to SEO Title:

Editing Title Tags With Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s easy to use and enables tons of SEO functionality, including writing title tags.

If you have the plugin installed, when viewing a post or page in the editor, you’ll see Yoast SEO at the bottom of the screen:

Here, you’ll see several different fields. Let’s break down what’s happening with each one:

• SEO Title: This is where you can enter a custom title tag. By default, it auto-populates with templated placeholders that will automatically include your page headline, the name of the page, a separator ( – ), and the title of your site.
• Slug: This controls how the slug will appear in the post or page URL.
• Meta Description: Short (160 characters or less) summaries that appear under title tags in search results.

There’s nothing wrong with using Yoast’s default templates for title tags. But it doesn’t typically yield optimal results for a few reasons:

• They end up being too long. When you add your page name and site title, you might not have many characters left over for your page headline or relevant keywords.
• They include extraneous information. People already know they’re on your website or blog. It’s usually not necessary to include your site or brand name in every title tag.
• They might not read well to users. Due to both factors listed above, they may get cut off in search results or read awkwardly.

Fortunately, you can simply delete the default placeholders, and enter your own title tag. You can also edit title tag templates to control how title tags auto-populate on your site. Yoast has excellent documentation on how to do this.

Editing Title Tags With Rank Math SEO

Rank Math is another plugin similar to Yoast SEO. It’s another reputable option that offers some different features. Much like Yoast, there is a lot that Rank Math can do. For our purposes, we’ll focus on title tag editing.

First, you’ll want to download and activate the Rank Math SEO plugin. Then, when viewing a post or page in the editor, you’ll see the Rank Math icon at the top of your screen. Click it to open Rank Math:

Next, click Edit Snippet:

You can now edit your title tag, permalink, meta description, and other relevant SEO metadata:

Editing Title Tags All In One SEO (AIOSEO)

Last but not least, let’s look at All In One SEO. This is a time-tested WordPress SEO plugin that’s full-featured and easy to use. Similar to Yoast, it allows you to edit title tags directly in the editor while editing a post or page:

Improve Your Rankings and Get More Traffic

Title tags are small but mighty page elements that help ensure your content is seen and clicked in search results, so be sure to give them the time and attention they deserve by using a proper SEO plugin and optimizing the character length.

Looking for lightning-fast WordPress hosting that’s optimized for search engines out of the box? WordPress.com is an excellent choice thanks to its built-in Jetpack-powered SEO capabilities and full plugin support on the Business plan and above. Whether you’re a hobbyist, blogger, or business owner, see what makes WordPress.com the best place to host your WordPress site.

Born and raised in Manila, I can’t even begin to describe the thrill of seeing the global WordPress community descend onto the busy, raucous streets of my hometown. Out of nearly 1,800 attendees, about a third were local, coming from all parts of the Philippines, across the 7,107 islands that make up the archipelago. 

Filipinos love WordPress; on WordPress.com alone, they represent hundreds of thousands of new signups every month, consistently ranking the Philippines as one of the top five countries in the world for new WordPress users.

The Philippine International Convention Center, a 1970s-era Brutalist behemoth of a structure, served as the official venue for WordCamp Asia 2025. We shared its massive halls, vaulted ceilings, and bright red carpets with local university graduation attendees, but the sprawling complex allowed for plenty of room to spread out. 

Matias Ventura, lead architect of Gutenberg, kicked off the official conference schedule with a thoughtful and inspiring keynote sketching out an exciting future for WordPress that centers the user and delivers a friction-free, intuitive experience. 

A jam-packed schedule of workshops and talks followed, where attendees could hear Elementor’s Miriam Schwab discuss the basics of GPL, learn from digital marketer Chiaki Kouno about what having a truly successful “multilingual” WordPress site really entails, and pick up tips from Keiko Muto on how to get started with building an accessible site—plus so much more. 

On Friday night, the WordPress.com team hosted a meet-and-greet happy hour where we had the privilege of meeting with local and regional WordPress.com users. Special thanks to Nicole King, Carlo Carrasco, George Buid, Ajit Bohra and his colleagues from LUBUS, Vivek Jain and his crew from rtCamp, Tom and Vicky Morton, and Dika and Diane Fei for spending the evening with us. 

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg closed out the three-day festivities with a Q&A in Meeting Room 1, an oddly generic name for such an immense, elegant hall. It’s also known as the Rizal Hall, which seems more fitting. 

Jose Rizal, after whom the room and a million buildings, schools, streets, even entire cities in the country are named, is our de facto national hero. He was a 19th-century writer, doctor, and polymath whose writings helped inspire and ignite the Philippine Revolution in 1896 against the Spanish colonial authorities. What better place to close a conference dedicated to the freedom and democracy of open source than in a soaring hall named after the man who dedicated his life to pursuing freedom of speech and assembly for all? 

By the way, if you missed the conference, we’ve got your back! Most workshops and talks, including both keynotes mentioned above, are now available to view on the official WordPress YouTube channel. 

Think you might want to join us for WordCamp Asia 2026? We’d love to see you! WordCamp is open to all, so whether you’re a developer, a marketer, a designer, a support engineer, a blogger, or just curious about what this WordPress thing is that you’ve been hearing so much about, WordCamp was created for you. Check out the WordCamp Central site for more information about local and regional WordCamps. 

And if you’re in Asia and want to experience the excitement of WordCamp Asia next year, start planning now: we’ll see you in 2026 in Mumbai, India!

What Happens When You Register a Domain?

Similar to when you buy property like real estate or a car, you must register your purchase. Domains are registered with the nonprofit organization that coordinates the domain system, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). As part of your registration, you must provide ICANN with personal information including:

• Your full name
• Physical address (home or business)
• Phone number
• Email address
• Business or organization name (if applicable)

By default, this information is added by ICANN to WHOIS, a publicly accessible database with contact information for domain owners across the web. Anyone can use a WHOIS lookup tool to find information about a website’s owner.

In the early days of the internet, WHOIS was a useful tool for developers to collaborate with other domain owners, drive internet accountability and transparency, buy and sell domain names, and direct legal communications, such as digital copyright infringement cases. However, as the internet has grown from a niche community space into a global economy with billions of users, the WHOIS database has become a growing security risk for domain owners.

Luckily, many internet domain registrars, including WordPress.com, offer some level of domain privacy—also known as “WHOIS privacy”—to keep your personal information safe. 

What is Domain Privacy?

Most people purchase their domains through domain registrars, companies that register and manage your domain on your behalf. In addition to helping you find and purchase your web address, your registrar manages the DNS connections between your domain and services like your host and email provider.

When you add domain privacy through your registrar, your registrar replaces your personal registration information in the WHOIS database with proxy contact information that directs communication to the registrar’s privacy service. When someone searches for registration information about your domain, they’ll see: 

• A proxy organization name.
• A generic address and phone number that redirects to the registrar.
• An email forwarding service that filters out spam while ensuring legitimate messages about your domain (like legal outreach) make it to your inbox.

When you register a domain through WordPress.com, domain privacy is free and your WHOIS record will contain information for one of our three privacy services, depending on your domain’s registrar of record. If someone searches for your domain using a WHOIS lookup tool, they will see that privacy service’s contact information listed on your domain record.

For example, when I looked up one of my domains registered with WordPress.com using a public WHOIS database lookup tool, the registrant contact listed was Knock Knock WHOIS Not There, LLC (see what we did there?). 

Without domain privacy, my name, address, phone number, and email address would be shown instead.

Why is Domain Privacy Worth Having?

As the internet has grown, so have privacy risks and spam. WHOIS was designed to be transparent, publicly accessible, and easily queryable by engineers, making it particularly easy to scrape domain holders’ names, emails, mailing addresses, and phone numbers. 

Free domain lookup tools, which allow anyone to type in a website’s address and receive their full ICANN contact record, also make it easy for any individual to quickly find details on a particular domain holder. 

These factors make WHOIS a potential target for data miners and bots, which could put domain owners at risk of: 

• Spammers: Automated bots or people using digital tools can scrape WHOIS data, leading to issues like email spam, texts, and robocalls.
• Scammers:  Scammers will often use information like your home address and phone number in phishing schemes. Using the information they already have, they will pretend to be one of your legitimate service providers—like your post office or bank—and attempt to get you to share your login credentials.
• Identity theft: Cybercriminals can try to use data from WHOIS to impersonate website owners in fraud schemes, like applying for credit cards or loans.
• Targeted doxxing and harassment: If you run a blog or organization that deals with controversial topics or sensitive issues, critics could use WHOIS lookup tools to find your email and physical addresses, which can lead to forms of harassment.
• Unwanted marketing: While it is technically illegal, companies may scrape WHOIS data or buy scraped domain data to send unsolicited business offers, often in the form of cold calls and ongoing marketing emails.

ICANN faces mounting pressure over the WHOIS database, which many feel opens domain owners to unnecessary privacy risks. New data protection laws, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have already made strides in protecting EU domain holder’s information. If you live in the EU or are registered as an EU company, you probably have some default protections automatically enabled by your domain provider.

What is Data Scraping, and How Does Domain Privacy Counter it?

Data scraping is a process where someone uses an automated tool or writes code to quickly extract and download a large amount of data from a website. The more standardized a website’s data structure is and the fewer protections the site uses to limit bots (like CAPTCHA or rate limiting), the easier it is to scrape.

Since WHOIS is publicly available and designed to be easily searched, it is particularly vulnerable to this practice. Some WHOIS lookup tools even allow bulk searches, meaning that a scammer can extract thousands of domain owners’ contact details in minutes.

How Does Domain Privacy Differ Across Registrars? 

Not all domain privacy offerings are created equal: some registrars only offer domain privacy for an annual fee, while others have pieced-together offerings, allowing you to mix and match services like identity protection or email forwarding for an added cost.

At WordPress.com, we believe internet privacy should be a right, regardless of location, not an add-on, which is why domain privacy is automatically included when you purchase a domain through WordPress.com. 

This service includes both a proxy address in the WHOIS database and digital and physical mail forwarding for relevant requests via WHOIS (please note that this is for domain-related requests only, please do not list this contact information on your website!). 

How to Ensure Your Domain has Privacy Protection

Depending on where your domain is registered, your domain privacy settings may look a little different. There are a few places you may be able to verify that your domain has domain privacy enabled, including any domain registration emails you receive and your domain record on your registrar’s website.

If you still have questions, you can email your domain registrar for confirmation on whether or not your domain has domain privacy enabled.

Verifying Privacy Protection on WordPress.com

Depending on your location, domain privacy for domains registered on WordPress.com may be activated by default.

If you aren’t sure whether you have domain privacy enabled, you can check by following these directions or visiting our support article:

1. Visit your WordPress.com dashboard.
2. Click Upgrades → Domains (or Hosting → Domains in WP-Admin).
3. Select your domain. 
4. Navigate to Contact Information.
5. Check that the option “Privacy protection on” is shown. If the toggle is switched off, click it to turn on privacy protection for your domain.

If, for some reason, you’re uninterested in domain privacy protection or you’d like to transfer your domain to another registrar, you can also disable your domain privacy on the same page under Contact Information.

Keep Your Personal Information Private with Domain Privacy

With growing cyber threats and data privacy concerns, domain privacy is no longer just an optional feature—it’s a necessity. With WordPress.com, you can rest easy knowing you have free domain privacy without hidden fees.

In addition to protecting your personal information, WordPress.com domains offer a suite of great benefits, including blazing-fast DNS, free SSL certificates (aka even more domain security!), and super competitive pricing.

While many registrars have been raising their domain prices year-over-year, WordPress is committed to offering affordable plans for the long haul. Our prices are some of the most affordable on the market, averaging just $13/year for popular .com, .net, and .org addresses.

Anyone can host a domain through WordPress.com—even if you host your website on another platform. To sweeten the deal, WordPress.com users with a paid hosting plan get a domain name free for a year when they purchase or transfer an existing domain. Transferring is super easy—check out our domain transfer guide. 

Ready to secure your domain (and your information)?

More Space, More Sites, More Possibilities

We made substantial improvements to Preview Sites, giving developers more room to create and experiment:

Eight Times More Storage Per Site

We’re dramatically increasing the storage capacity from 250 MB to 2 GB per Preview Site. This added space means you can now work with larger themes, more media assets, and richer content during your development process.

Double Your Preview Sites

We’ve removed the limit of one Preview Site per Studio site, and we’re doubling the number of preview sites you can run simultaneously from five to 10 sites. This expansion allows you to:

• Maintain different versions for A/B testing.
• Manage multiple client projects concurrently.
• Run separate test environments for different features.
• Review and compare your most recent changes.

Shorter, Personalized URLs

We’ve created a new, more concise URL structure that’s unique to each user, making links easier to share. Now, every URL begins with your username and excludes random words, reinforcing your identity and reducing confusion. 

Same Reliable Timeline

Preview Sites will continue to be available for seven days after your last update, providing you with the perfect window for development, testing, and client reviews.

Why Preview Sites?

The name change from Demo Sites to Preview Sites better reflects how developers use this feature in their workflows. Whether you’re showcasing works-in-progress to clients, collaborating with team members, or testing new features that need to be accessed online, Preview Sites are a quick and reliable way to share your work.

Each Preview Site is hosted on WordPress.com, giving you a publicly accessible URL that you can share with clients and colleagues. In a few minutes, you can generate a link to your local site that stays active for seven days—perfect for gathering feedback and iterating on your designs.

Start Using Preview Sites Today

These enhancements are now available to all Studio by WordPress.com users. The transition from Demo Sites to Preview Sites will be seamless, with all of your existing Demo Sites automatically converting to the new system with the increased storage capacity.

We’re excited to see what you’ll create with these expanded capabilities. Download Studio today and start exploring this enhanced Preview Sites feature!

Why Did We Redesign Our Blog?

A blog is your home on the Internet. Like all homes, they eventually need to be tidied up. That was certainly the case for this very blog you’re reading right now. While we were busy working on our product and other priorities, we realized it was time to give our blog a refresh.

We’re blogging and design nerds, so a blog redesign is something we would do for fun. Rest assured there were much more important reasons to redesign our blog though. Blogging is what we do, so our blog should be exceptional, right? With this thought in mind, our marketing, design, and engineering teams collaborated to create the best blog experience possible. 

Now, you might think you can learn everything there is to know about this redesign just by looking at it. However, there are some subtle details and improvements that may be easy to miss. Let’s look at some redesign details we’re particularly proud of and share some simple tips you can use to improve your own blog (with advice straight from our own design team).

What’s Improved on the WordPress.com Blog

We know what you’re thinking: “Okay, but what does all this mean for me?” If we were you, we’d be asking the same question. Here are some enhancements made to our blog that make your experience better.

A More Engaging Appearance

The WordPress.com Blog was visually outdated and no longer matched the branding of the rest of our site. We modernized our design and post layouts to bring them up to our 2025 design standards.

Here’s a snapshot of our old single-column homepage design:

It was clean and simple but bland. The article description font for text below headlines was difficult to read, and the small image thumbnails didn’t do justice to our sharp header designs that had already been using some of our refreshed design standards. There was room for improvement here. 

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s what our new and improved blog homepage looks like:

The clear header section places our most recent posts front and center, while the multi-column layout makes it easier to find more content you might be interested in. You’ll also notice a consistent approach to visual styling, ensuring design elements and images look their best.

A More Useful Navigation Structure

Our previous blog homepage design featured a single column with a simple search bar. The new design implements a streamlined menu for better organization and easier navigation:

This may look like a simple design, but that simplicity is intentional. Each category has been strategically considered to effectively group content together into the fewest buckets possible.

At the bottom of the blog home page, we also include a section for popular content. This ensures that posts receiving high engagement get extra visibility:

An Easier Reading Experience

Redesigning the WordPress.com Blog wasn’t just about appearances though. We made several improvements that make content (like this post) more comfortable to read:

1. Making our font selection consistent with the rest of our website
2. Ensuring those fonts are web-friendly
3. Choosing colors that are not only consistent but support easy readability

More Clear Calls to Action 

We work hard to create content that makes you say, “This blog post was so good, I need more of it in my inbox.” Now, every post has a clear subscription banner across the bottom. We’ve also made it easier for readers to find where they can start a new website or blog of their own (for readers who are just getting started).

Six Tips to Improve Your Next Redesign Project 

If you’re thinking about redesigning your own blog or website (or for a client), we have some additional advice to share. 

1. Set Clear Expectations with Clients

Our blog redesign project required a high level of collaboration between teams and stakeholders. If you are redesigning a blog for a client, ensure that both sides understand the goals of the project. Here are some items you should be sure to document:

• Your clients’ goals and priorities
• All high-level tasks to implement the redesign
• Expected initial launch date
• Timeline for improvements and iterations after launch 

Then, throughout the project, regularly review and update this document to ensure alignment and track progress effectively. This will help keep the project on track and avoid disappointment.

2. Create a Checklist of Design Tasks

Before you start working, create a more detailed checklist of all the steps you need to follow. Break out this list into two sections:

1. Steps that need to be completed before launch
2. Steps that can be completed after launch

This will help you prioritize the work that needs to be done at a granular level.

3. Optimize for the Right Things

Even the best-looking design is wasted if a site doesn’t function well. Prioritize performance: optimize assets, use lazy loading, minimize JavaScript and CSS, and implement caching where possible. This will help make sure your client’s site works as well as it looks.

To get some WordPress and site-specific performance recommendations, be sure to use our free Speed Test tool.

4. Test, Test, Test

During development, start and maintain a record of pre-launch and post-launch testing items. This will ensure smooth deployment (and help you catch bugs before your client or their users do).

5. Determine How Much Existing Code and Content Can be Reused

Redesign projects can be a lot of work. Fortunately, you might not have to redesign everything on your site or blog. Clearly define what parts need to be fully redesigned and what can be kept or inherited from other products for common patterns. For example, with our own blog redesign, we were able to keep the existing pattern for comments.

6. Implement a Clear Feedback Process

We believe feedback is a gift. When someone calls attention to something you can improve on, they are trying to help you be better. Establish an easy process for your client to review designs and provide constructive feedback throughout the process (and not just at the end). This way, your client will feel valued, and the end product will be more likely to meet their expectations.

Ready to Redesign Your Own Blog?

If you’re inspired to redesign your own blog, follow our detailed guide (it’s geared toward full website redesigns, but much of the advice is still applicable). Or, if you’d like to start a blog (or help a friend start one of their own), we have another guide that can help you do that too. Here’s to making the Internet a more beautiful and useful place, one blog at a time.