This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, the 13 year old web developer and programmer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Today I want to tell you some very simple tips to keep your WordPress site running smoothly and easy ways to keep readers coming back.

First you should always keep your site running well.

• Try to avoid things like “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon!” for pages or new site features.
• Keep everything organized.
• Set categories to divide your posts, don’t cram everything in one page and create multiple pages for more organization.
• Make everything obvious, don’t keep your visitors guessing where the Contact page is.
• Always make sure your site is actually fast and not keeping your visitors waiting at a white page, 6 seconds waiting is fine in life but online it’s like an eternity.

For more in depth help on speeding up your site take a look at my tutorial by clicking here (see there’s another hint, “by clicking here”, easy and simple).

Next keep your readers interested and intrigued about your content.

• Always post top quality content.
• Don’t post about your cat, new boyfriend/girlfriend, or that awesome YouTube video you saw recently.
• Short isn’t bad, sometimes short stories that are to the point are better than long lengthy stories full of unneeded details and side stories.
• Make your articles into a series, keep your readers guessing on what your next article is about, but don’t write enough information in one article or the post is basically obsolete.
• Stick to one niche in your blog. If your blog is about blogging tips, why are you posting about that new computer that just came out?
• If you have a lot to say, say it. Don’t just write the bare minimum as long as the content is relevant.
• Most readers simply scan anything you write, so adding pointless information (even if it somewhat pertains to the article) doesn’t help much.

For some more simple ways to keep your readers visit my tutorial by clicking here.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day! Also a big thanks to Kyle Eslick for having this awesome site.

I’ve been heavily involved with WordPress for a couple years now and it has been fun to watch WordPress grow in popularity. Blogs have started to devote more time to covering WordPress and new blogs specifically focused on WordPress have been sprouting up everywhere. As a result, there is a lot of great work being produced. Here are a few WordPress posts that I really enjoyed:

• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins - I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing more WordPress plugins designed specifically for CMS functionality.
• 63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files, and Cheats - This site was lucky enough to have several posts featured here and there is a bunch of other great works here to look through.
• WPDesigner explains how to style individual posts using the post ID. This is an older post, but one I just discovered and I think it goes a long way towards showing you how to style individual posts. This is a great method to improve specific posts that are important to your blog such as an eBook you released, a download page of some sort, etc.
• Sizlopedia explains how to easily post using the WordPress Bookmarklet. I would guess most people are aware of the bookmarklet, but may not know how to put it to use.
• Another classic post by WPDesigner, this one explains How to Display a WordPress Login Form In Your Sidebar. I’m not sure how many people want to do this, but I suppose for a blog with several regular authors this could be useful towards the bottom of your sidebar where it wouldn’t bother your readers.
• Performancing provides a WordPress hack explaining how to build a photo or movie gallery.   This is something I’ve never really had an interest in doing, but some of you might have.
• Miriam at WordPress Garage explains how to make the WordPress editor stop changing your code.  It has never really bothered me, but I see a lot of people complaining about the code formatting that happens automatically.