Little Known yet Useful WordPress Features

Little Known yet Useful WordPress Features

In this digital era, every business requires a strong online presence if they want to excel. But nobody has spare time to learn web development. Thankfully, we have CMS solutions like WordPress which can build websites, blogs without any core development knowledge. In fact, you can get your own business website running in a matter of hours with it. It is growing at a rapid rate and continuously changing. The reason behind its great success is its ease of use and availability of awesome features. However, there might be some features which get overlooked since it is not possible to promote all the features it contains. Therefore, by utilizing these features, you can setup a blog or a website for your business.

It is the most effective web solution widely used across the globe these days. It boasts many features out of which are still not tried even by most of the experienced bloggers. In this blog, we will discuss some less-known features of WordPress which you probably didn’t know existed.

Here is the list of obscure WordPress features mentioned below:

1. Image Editing

Users usually think that WordPress comes with basic image editing features. But that’s not true. It allows its users to add images to the posts and pages. For this, you can simply visit Media » Library page and then click the image you want to edit. This will give the image details popup from where you can edit the whole image.

In the editing mode, you can rotate, crop or resize an image. Also, you can flip an image in both vertical and horizontal directions. These image editing WordPress features come in handy.

2. Link Creation

WordPress 4.5 has introduced inline link-editing in the visual editor for its users. Either you can select website builders or do it on your own in order to make a link. For this, you just need to select a text and press CTRL+V(on mac) for pasting the URL. The visual editor will automatically convert it into a link.

3. Widgets Accessibility

It sounds exciting if you can easily drag and drop widgets into sidebars. But for many of its users, it is difficult to drag or drop items using a trackpad or mouse.

However, WordPress comes with a hidden accessibility mode for widgets. With this accessibility mode, it becomes easier for users to add widgets without dropping or dragging the items. By using Screen Options button on the Appearance » Widgets page, you can activate the accessibility mode for WordPress widgets by just clicking on it.

4. Screen options

Whenever you are logged in as admin in the WordPress panel, you must have noticed the Screen Options button on some pages. With this screen options button, you are allowed to show or hide items on the main screen by doing it on the WordPress admin screen. So, if you are looking to build a blog and want to display cool things on it, then you can easily unlock such functionalities by using this option. Also, it allows you to simplify the admin pages like post edit screen to meet the smooth workflow.

5. Secret Options Page

WordPress comes with a hidden feature of master page for all your blog options. This page is kept hidden in order to make sure that users would not mess things up here. However, you access it by visiting this URL: http://example.com/wp-admin/options.php

Put your domain URL in the place of example.com and you will see a page with a long list of options.

6. Embed Videos, Links and Multimedia

Now, all WordPress sites provide embed functionality to its users. After login into WordPress panel, all you need to do is to paste a URL from one of the popular websites like Twitter, Instagram, Youtube in the writing section of the post. After this, WordPress will automatically embed it for you. Moreover, you can also paste URL from another WordPress site into your post and it will automatically get embedded into the post.

7. Dashboard Widgets

WordPress users are usually redirected to the dashboard page in WordPress admin panel when they log in. This page consists of various handy shortcuts pointing to different sections of the website. These sections are further divided into different boxes. These boxes are called as dashboard widgets. You can drop or drag them in order to rearrange items on the WordPress dashboard. You can use Screen Options button if you want to show or hide these boxes.

8. Some Keyboard Shortcuts

To write a blog using WordPress is the only time-consuming task than others. That’s why WordPress developers are finding ways to improve the writing experience in it. So, WordPress comes with a wide range of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to write faster. Besides this, you can also use Markdown like formatting shortcuts. You just need to enter the formatting shortcuts and WordPress will automatically convert them into HTML. The list of such keyboard shortcuts is given below:

  • By using 1. or 1) will start an ordered list.
  • By using * or – will start an unordered list.
  • By using > will transform into a blockquote.
  • By using # will transform into h1. ## for h2, ### for h3 and so on.

9. Live Preview of Themes

Frequently changing WordPress themes may have unwanted consequences on your websites. So, it is necessary for every WordPress user to go through a set of instructions before changing any WordPress theme. One of the best things you can do to avoid such consequences is to test the new theme without activating it. For this, you need to install the new WordPress theme and then go to Appearance » Themes page. After this click the “Live Preview” button on it.

WordPress will automatically launch the theme customizer showing the preview of the website using the respective theme.

10. Split A Post Into Multiple Pages

WordPress gives you facility of splitting a lengthy post into multiple pages. For this, you just need to add <!–nextpage–> tag in your post and WordPress will automatically split it into two pages. You can use the tag again for splitting it into more pages. This feature is useful for those users who don’t want to scroll much in order to read lengthy posts.

Conclusion

So we have seen the list of those WordPress features that most people do not know about. Then tell us, which ones do you like the most? Also, is any of these surprised?

If you know other incredible features that I have omitted from this list, you can mention them in the comments section. The rest of the readers will love knowing about some more unknowns.