Top 10 Unknown Hidden Features Of WordPress

WordPress is the most popular and commonly used CMS (Content Management System). There is no second thought about why most bloggers use WordPress.  Though Blogger is also a good alternative, I personally prefer WordPress. If you want to know key points in both platforms you can read Self Hosted WordPress VS Blogger – Which CMS To Choose. Now coming to our article – This article lists unknown hidden features of WordPress. If you are using WordPress for a long time then you may know these hidden features. But most WordPress beginners might not know these hidden and unknown features of WordPress. These handy features can be overlooked but it can help you to use WordPress in a better way. Though the WordPress Dashboard is simple and so informative providing the basic functionality you need to build your site. But still, there are many hidden features that you might not have noticed or taken advantage of.

10 Unknown Hidden Features Of WordPress

• Screen Options

Screen Options is often overlooked by WordPress users. This option is present at the top right corner of the dashboard. It is responsible for controlling what dashboard elements are visible by default. There are many hidden features available under the Screen options tab such as Excerpts, which will allow you to create extract of your posts, Slug, for editing the URL of the post and including desired keywords and making it SEO friendly, Author, for changing the post’s author if you have many contributors, etc, Discussion feature to update your preferences for pingbacks and trackbacks, allow Comments box to disable comments for any particular post.

In Comment Page, you can also set your preference to show or hide ‘Author’ or ‘In response to’ options as shown below –

These features are hidden as many are unaware or they don’t know how to utilize it.

• Next Page Tag

Have you ever come across a situation where you wanted to split the page into different Web pages so that is has pagination – either to split a long written article or while using photo gallery? What you did then? What if we say you can do this using one word/tag? Yes! All you have to do is:

• Open the Post
• Click on Text option from Visual/Text
• Select place where you want to split the page and insert pagination and insert <!–nextpage–>
• Done

You can use this feature to split a long post to make two, three, four, or more pages out of the single post. When you view your post on your site, the multi-page links appear as links at the bottom.

• Sticky Posts

Sticky Posts is one of the unknown hidden features of WordPress. This is used when you want your post to get extended exposure. All you have to do is – click the “Edit” link from your post’s Publish widget and check the Check the box that reads “Stick this post to the front page. As the name suggests, It will “stick” the post to the top of your homepage; where it belongs.

If some of your posts are more popular than others and these help in driving a lot of traffic to your blog, you should use the advantage of the Sticky Post feature.

• WordPress Master Options Panel

This page has a combination of all of your settings for your blog. You can have a look at this. Do not modify anything until you are very sure about your action.

Also Read: Why to Use WordPress For Making Website

• Handling Post Revisions

WordPress keeps all the post revisions history. You can compare the current version to previous versions to see exactly where changes occurred. This feature can be helpful if you have made unnecessary changes and now you want to roll back your changes to an earlier version. You can see the number of revisions in Publish block in the right sidebar when you are on the Edit Post or Edit Page screen.

You can also see your post revisions with below your post with the exact time when the revision was saved.

Though this is a good feature but if you have lots of revisions for posts it will eat up a lot of your database space. You can completely turn the post revisions feature off but it is good to keep that feature ON but limit the number of post revisions to keep. For this you need to write the following line of code in your “wp-config.php” file to limit the number of post revisions:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 2);//You can use any number

• Schedule posts

Schedule Posts is another hidden feature of WordPress. Do you not get the regular time to update your blog? Do you get time only on weekends to update? But for better optimization of the blog, it is important to regularly update your blog or with a certain period of time. This feature is a boon for those WordPress bloggers who fall under this category. By default, WordPress publishes an entry shortly after clicking a “Publish” button. If you are also not able to update your blog regularly and sometime when you are free you write multiple articles, then instead of publishing multiple articles on the same day, you should schedule these articles to publish on the certain interval of time.

Scheduling post for can be enabled by clicking the Edit link next to the Publish Immediately option, which is located in the Publish section to the right of your post-draft. Select the time and date when you want the post to go live and click OK. The Publish button will now read as Schedule. Click it to activate your scheduled settings. You can always update the timing by clicking the Edit link once again.

• FullScreen Mode

WordPress provides full-screen mode to ease bloggers in writing their articles. Sometime, it is very burdensome to write long articles in the text editor. To avoid distractions you can open the editor in full screen:

• Formatting Removal

WordPress is the best CMS because of its features. As most of us first write our articles in some editors – MS Word/Writer, etc. When we copy our article from these editors it copies the unnecessary formatting and styles. To remove those additional formatting it provides formatting removal option.

Just highlight the offending text and hit the button shown in below screenshot. Any strange formatting will immediately vanish.

Import/Export data

WordPress also provides the option to import and export entries, comments, media, and taxonomy, allowing you to quickly move your important data between installations. You can also import posts and more from external systems and data types, such as Blogger. But you cannot import or export plugin and widget data, you will have to configure these elements manually.

Show/Hide Widget

WordPress has the ability to show/hide the widget. Sometime you may want to show the widget on a particular time on your blog. Using this option, you can choose a widget to be shown on a particular category or page.

So now you know these WordPress features, start using them. Do you know any other unknown hidden features of WordPress, comment below to help others? Also, share your feedback and views on this article.