WordPress How To: Formatting Posts

This article will outline best practices for formatting and publishing WordPress posts, specifically here on Fae’s Journal. Guest authors on Fae’s Journal can use this post to format their work, so think of this article as part in-house Standard Operating Procedure and part general guide for anyone who uses WordPress. It’s a public post because of its general usefulness. That being said, some of the information here is only useful for guest authors on Fae’s Journal.

WordPress How To: Title Formatting Guidelines

Post Titles and How To Optimize Them

Here on Fae’s Journal, authors will search for ideal focus keywords and keyphrases and include them in the post title. And anyone with a WordPress site will benefit from this simple procedure. A focus keyphrase is the topic of the page and what your post is about. Including the focus keyphrase for your post helps search engines understand how to list your post where it should be displayed in search results.

Yoast SEO

We use the Yoast SEO tool to help find ideal keyphrases. In the post interface, the Yoast plugin is located at the bottom of the input area and can be used to look up potential keywords to decide upon the best focus keyphrase. Depending on the length of the post, the focus keyphrase should then be repeated throughout the post several times in a contextually logical way.

But Not Too Much

Just like Goldilocks, too much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing. Your post should not be overloaded with the focus keyword or phrase. In general, if the post is longer, it should have more instances of the focus keyphrase. But a short article once or twice is okay.

Focus Keyphrase in Headings

It’s a good idea to have the focus keyphrase in headings as well as embedded within paragraphs, too.

WordPress How To: Paragraph Formatting Guidelines

Gutenberg Blocks

The WordPress Gutenberg editor allows you to easily format your posts. Gutenberg works by chunking the parts of your post into blocks, which allows for great flexibility and customization possibilities. One major benefit of using this editor over a more traditional editing method is that elements can be moved around easily, posts look good regardless of what sort of device it’s being accessed on, and on the admin side of things, it requires fewer plugins to run your WordPress installation.

Use Headings to Outline Key Points

Use headings to split up the post into manageable paragraphs. It’s best to have headings that outline the general points of the article, so they can see if the paragraph that follows is pertinent to their needs.

Headings Make the Article Easier to Read

The goal of breaking things up is to make your articles easy to read and digest in small bites. Studies have shown that most of the time, people don’t read the whole article. Their eyes scan over a webpage to find keywords and important information, tracking key points instead of reading word for word. Shorter paragraphs help people identify important information.

Pull Quotes and Quotes Can Be Used in Moderation

People are not likely to read your content completely or linearly. They just want to pick out the information that is most pertinent to their current needs.

Kate Moran from the Neilson Norman Group

What Is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

Paragraphs should not exceed 300 words. If your paragraph is longer, find a place to split it into two paragraphs. No one likes a tl;dr situation where there is a wall of text. So split those paragraphs up!

WordPress How To: Image Formatting Guide

WordPress Image Size Limit

The WordPress limit for image size is 2560px by 2560px. However, there is a balance to be found. Serving high-quality images while maintaining a low screen load time must be taken into consideration. I often use sites such as CloudConvert to compress image files to make them smaller while maintaining high-quality resolutions.

Aspect Ratios

With modern web pages, made to display on computer and mobile screens, using aspect ratios to scale images to ideal sizes is the best practice. We use the Kadence theme on Fae’s Journal, and images are scaled to the ratios in the image below. WordPress will center images to their absolute center. So, it’s best to start with the aspect ratio you will scale to in mind when making graphics.

Featured Images

On Fae’s Journal, featured images should be used with every post. Not every WordPress theme uses featured images. But we use it here. Featured images are the images that are displayed on homepage and on pages linking to articles. So if your WordPress site uses featured images, upload them in the left menu of the post interface. You can also set an exerpt below the featured image, if your theme is set to display excerpts of posts.

Font Formatting Guide

For graphics and PDFs, we use the following fonts and colors. The color scheme on the site is similar to the color scheme used for graphics. But for the site, making sure the color scheme works for websites is more important than pretty colors.

For web fonts and color schemes, it’s important to ensure the color palette is high-contrast and visible to users. A high-contrast color palette uses colors that are visually distinct. High contrast makes it easy for the eye to distinguish between various elements. Can users see the difference between the normal and link text? Is the hover text ok? Does anything clash?

Next WordPress How To: Categories, Tags, and More

I am going to continue this How To series with a post about categories, tags and some specific Yoast SEO stuff.