WordPress provides unique and attractive options of responsive themes and layouts, which can be used to build news or magazine websites of all shapes and sizes. As these websites deal with the huge amount of content being updated countless times in a day, through multiple authors and editors, it becomes imperative to optimize WordPress for news and media websites with the help of various tools and plug-ins.

The ability of the WordPress themes to present the information in structured way helps the news websites to engage new readers, but to retain and maintain the relationship with the readers, you have to regularly optimize WordPress speed.

 

List of different plugins and services to optimize WordPress for news and media websites:

WordPress is home to thousands of plug-ins and tools that can act as quick fixes and aid in optimizing the website speed. These plug-ins and services are available for all the different stages beginning from content creation to publishing, from website hosting to setting up backup.

Enhanced performance of Optimized news websites will influence the rankings in search engines, also helps to gain more page views and to improve the active reader base. To maintain user engagement and quantify reach to readers, has generated need to optimize WordPress for news and media websites.

WordPress news website owners can’t be complacent even when the website is doing good for some period of time, it may be an alarm to do some research and digging inside the deep catalog of free plugins available in that time period, to deliver to the reader’s satisfaction in this rapidly changing digital world.

1: Web Hosting Service

Website hosting may be defined in simpler terms as making your website available to the public worldwide through the internet. After buying some space on a web server, you store all the web pages and data in that allotted space, your website becomes hosted and is visible and accessible to everyone.

Now get a 20% Off on your first payment with the most trusted hosting service – WP Engine

There are many web hosting services available in WordPress, but to select the better option is as per your requirement and only after comparing the features of the best hosting services. Greater clarity on “What Is Web Hosting and its types?” is must so that you can zero down on a particular host.

•  Managed WordPress hosting

 

 

 

• Shared Hosting

 

 

• Virtual private server hosting

 

2: Editorial Workflow

Generation of quality content depends upon strict content management procedures as a part of your content strategy. It is the toughest challenge to set up a content management procedure, as there will be infinite scenarios. But picking the right model may give you best results.

The definition of editorial workflow or content publishing workflow is not just limited to creation, editing and publishing of content. Each step has a deeper and complex meaning. The roles and responsibilities are involved in each step with number of members participating in the workflow.

News websites with heavy content updating and publishing per day requires such content strategy with evolved and simplified model of editorial or content publishing work flow. The amount of content flowing in and out of these huge news websites requires a smooth and efficient flow of communication where numerous editors and authors are interacting with each other throughout the day.

Potential steps involved in web/blog content publishing workflow for news websites:

 

The journey of content doesn’t end here. Publishing is just another regular step to show that you have something live for readers. Regular readers will be aware of what has been published, but it should reach to other readers too.

 Steps to follow after the contents are published:

• Promotion of post through various channels.
• Continued monitoring and improvement of content.
• Moving it into archives.

The basic steps mentioned above are not the concrete rules to follow but to be aware of the smooth execution of efficient content creation and its publishing.

Let’s take a peek into few plug-ins involved in the overall process of Editorial Workflow, that may help the news websites consisting multiple writers and editorial staff:

Oasis Workflow: An organized workflow plug-in to automate your WordPress editorial process.

Co-schedule: Perfect fit for the multiple author blog and for handling huge amount of content. It has drag and drop editorial calendar, view and filter what’s happening in your blog. Allows you to share on social media.

Zedity: Drag-and-Drop plug-in to create content with much ease and simplicity.

Easy Content Templates: It lets you define content templates to quickly apply to new or existing posts or pages.

 

Yoast SEO: It is one of the best SEO plug-in available in WordPress plugin directory. It helps you to write better content, optimizing it technically, with main focus on page/post ranking and searchability.

WP Quick Front End Editor: It has a user friendly interface which offers quick editing to front-end section of website, including pages and posts.

Well, everyone wants plug-ins to optimize the speed of the website and to save time. Let it be plug-ins to manage an editorial workflow or to create and publish different type of content, WordPress has a list of hand-tested plugins.

 

3: User Experience and Design for News websites

Content marketing is a successful strategy and approach if it achieves its objective of increased engagement with active readers and visitors.  Active readers always want new and updated content on the website they frequently visit. One must understand that there is no dearth of matter or good and updated content availability online.

 

Few points to be noted on user engagement:

• It’s all about quality rather than quantity. Understand the reader’s preferences, what type of content the visitors want to read, so that content can be tailored as per their interests.
• Users have different interests and they don’t like to search about their topic in a pool of content. Segmenting the content according to the user specific interest, may do the trick.
• Always engage readers or visitors through your comment section by acknowledging their comments.
• News or magazine websites must have a “Subscribe” option on their home page to collect the email address of the interested readers when they subscribe to receive newsletters and communicate with them frequently with new posts and news.
• Integrating social media on your posts. Users may choose to share your content on different social media platforms.
• Scaling the pages to load faster and navigating through the sites much easier.

 

Recent development in enhancing user experience:

• Instant articles: News websites can directly publish their articles and post on Facebook’s social media platform, instead of depending on their social media frenzy readers to share. Authors or editors of a news website can publish instant articles on Facebook through WordPress using the new plug-in easily and without facing any issue.
• Responsive Themes: People are turning more towards their mobile phones, tablets and other similar devices to access and read the content, as it is feasible to gain information anytime and anywhere. Normal websites are not coded to load and scale in mobile phones. A new initiative known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the solution to this problem being faced by many. It is easy to integrate AMP with WordPress and gifting users the similar browsing experience with quick page loading time on their mobile devices and tablets.

 

Let’s take a look at some interactive WordPress news themes that has rich user experience:

Travelify: It is a responsive theme. Best suited for travels blogs and adventurists, who would like to share pictures in a simple way. It has multiple page layout, featured slider, custom menus and background.

Activello: It is SEO friendly, wonderfully designed, flexible, colorful and vibrant theme. This theme has several customization options and features WooCommerce integration.

Dazzling: It is a mobile friendly and responsive flat design WordPress WooCommerce theme. It offers broad and full screen slider.

MH Newsdesk lite: It is coded with keeping SEO best practices in mind. It is a dynamic news wordpress theme with responsive design, provides flexible layout options and theme customization option.

Dynamic News Lite: It is a responsive theme, well suited for news and magazine websites. It has featured post slider. It allows you to customize theme with the help of customizer.

These are just few options from the WordPress theme directory. However, it has a pool of WordPress news themes that you can compare and select according to your need and requirement.

 

Top news and magazine brands using WordPress themes:

The NEW YORK TIMES

 

TIME INC.

 

CNN

 

MTV Newsroom

 

THRIVE Magazine

There are many other big brands that are using WordPress on their websites and are part of notable WordPress users community.

 

4: Content distribution and syndication

Till now we have been discussing content promotion through user engagement, as it could be searched and shared across popular social media networks if the user thinks, it is worthy. Content distribution takes more targeted approach let it be a specific person or group of people.

A lot has been debated over the difference between content promotion and content distribution. While the content promotion depends upon the organic search, content distribution depends upon 3 types of distribution channels: Owned media, Earned media, and Paid media.

 

 

Content distribution tools to boost traffic:

Mailchimp: Email marketing is one of the most important tasks in content distribution strategy. Mailchimp is the best brand out there for email distribution.

Reddit: It is an online bulletin board system, where the community members can post quality content. They are further organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”.

Content syndication: is more automated way of sharing your content. It could be treated as an extension to content distribution strategy.

News and media websites are extensively content driven and are updated quite regularly. Content syndication helps these content pieces to be replicated and published quickly and instantaneously, on multiple social media sites, news aggregators and article site, without your direct interference.

It is a win-win situation for both the transmitting as well as receiving websites. Transmitting websites are able to reach wider audience, whereas receiving websites receives the fresh burst of content.

 

Few content syndication plugins to optimize WordPress for news and media websites:

Syndicate Out: is a plugin which syndicate all posts in a category to all WordPress blog. Reliability on RSS feed is not required as blog owners can create automatic aggregating or category specific blogs from different blog sources.

 

Syndicate Press: It allows you to include feeds directly into your WordPress posts, pages, or anywhere in your theme.

ThreeWP Broadcast: It automatically shares content by multi-posting between multi-site blogs.

 

5: Backup

WordPress website backups are critically essential. Taking backups of website data gives you a peace of mind. In today’s digital world websites are prone to get hacked and the hackers may delete your data or the hosting service provider may delete it accidentally.

Although, many backup plugins are available in WordPress, but the best would be to use a WordPress backup service like BlogVault. It offers real-time WordPress backup service and it has many features to take advantage of. To know more about BlogVault, follow the below link:

WordPress Backup Service – BlogVault Review

One must be very careful in selecting plugin, as you may be tempted to use many plugins, but plugins stuffing may not help you in optimizing the speed and achieving the desired result for your website. Choose one, but the best plugin that fulfill all the requirements.

As more visitors are turning to news or magazine websites, they need something different every time to engage and retain more visitors, updating and introducing new plugins and services is the only solution to optimize WordPress for news and media websites.

Here are two clients of ours which runs news media website in the legal space:

                     

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Do you need help in building WordPress news and media website? Let us know.

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