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When it comes time to write a new blog post, article, or other piece of content, we often default to our habitual writing platform. For many, this means drafting in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or another separate writing program before copying and pasting into WordPress. However, writing your blog posts in WordPress brings significant advantages that can save considerable time and effort compared to composing elsewhere and transferring the text.
In this article, I cover:
- Version control in WordPress
- Avoiding formatting issues by writing blogs posts in WordPress
- SEO optimization
- Ease of adding links, meta data and more
Overall, writing blog posts in WordPress streamlines your workflow, enhances your content, prevents formatting mishaps, and sets you up for search engine success. While offline writing is sometimes unavoidable, direct drafting in WordPress should be the default whenever possible.
Version Control
When writing blog posts and other content, it is common to save multiple drafts along the way before arriving at the finished product. However, managing these drafts can quickly become confusing when relying on external programs. Saving different versions in Word, Google Docs, or elsewhere makes it easy to lose track of which one is current.
In contrast, the built-in version control in WordPress neatly organizes your drafts and always surfaces the most recent. To access previous versions, you simply click on “Revisions” and can view or restore any past drafts. This simplifies the writing process and prevents you from accidentally using or sending an outdated draft.
Additionally, WordPress makes it easy to collaborate with editors and proofreaders on a post without fussing with attachments and duplicates. You have a few options:
- Publish as a password-protected page. Viewers can read but not edit.
- Use the Public Post Preview plugin to share unpublished drafts.
- Grant “Editor” access to allow editing suggestions directly.
By writing directly in WordPress, you maintain one central, up-to-date draft for efficient editing and review. The revision tracking also covers you if major changes are ever needed–you can roll back to a previous version with ease. Make sure your website database is backed up on the right intervals!
Read next: How many drafts are needed to drive content performance?
Avoid Formatting Issues
One notorious speedbump when copying writing from other apps into WordPress is formatting glitches. When you paste text elements from Word, Google Docs, or other external platforms, extra code and styles often hitch a ride over. This can bloat your WordPress post with messy HTML that causes trouble.
Sometimes this merely requires cleaning up some junk code after the fact. But in some cases, pasted over formatting can break your site’s CSS, interfere with plugins, or otherwise corrupt things.Troubleshooting these issues is a drag and wastes valuable time.
By writing your initial drafts directly in the WordPress post editor, you sidestep any formatting transfer issues since everything uses native WordPress code right from the start. This prevents corrupted HTML, style conflicts, and other quirks that can come back to bite you when copying writing in from the outside.
Sometimes, the extra code messes with how text and other elements look.
You avoid the need for any extra cleanup steps before publishing. While you can use Workaround like stripped-down copy/paste options or text editors to mitigate problems, it’s better to avoid bugs altogether by simply drafting in WordPress innately.
SEO optimization
With search engines being most people’s gateway to content, optimizing your writing for findability is essential for blogs and websites. WordPress has great SEO capabilities out-of-the-box, and plugins like Yoast SEO turbocharge these even further.
Yoast gives you an instant content analysis on elements like keyword usage, title optimization, readability, and more. This allows you to tune your draft for search visibility directly as you write. Having this insight natively as you compose your first draft makes it easy to tweak things on the fly for better optimization.
Here is a quick SEO workflow using Yoast:
- Decide on a core keyword early on reflecting the post’s main topic.
- Plug this keyword into Yoast and set as your focus term.
- As you write, refer back to Yoast for feedback.
- Polish draft to resolve any warnings before publishing.
Following this process, your posts will naturally end up robustly optimized based on Yoast’s best-practice criteria. This includes elements like prominent keyword placement, sufficient keyword density, readable content flow and layout, effective preamble text, and a layered informational hierarchy.
Doing SEO natively from the first draft saves having to retrofit an existing piece–much easier to bake it in from the ground up!
Link Insertion and Metadata
When writing content, links serve the dual purposes of providing value to your reader while also strengthening your website’s internal linking–both important for SEO. By drafting directly in WordPress, inserting well-optimized links is seamless through its linking tools.
When pasting copy over from other platforms, any existing links may get stripped out or broken in transition. But with WordPress you can define links as you compose text right from the outset. This also makes it easier to include useful link metadata like descriptive anchor text and title attributes.
Beyond just connecting links, WordPress offers various other built-in options irrelevant to standalone documents. For instance, assigning categories and tags to enhance findability, setting featured images to display with posts, and defining excerpts for previews.
Initially drafting in WordPress makes supplying this type of supporting metadata much more natural compared to tacking it onto a document created externally. You can provide a rich contextual framework for your content from day one.
Conclusion
In summary, bypassing your traditional external writing platform in favor of crafting blog posts in WordPress comes with multiple workflow enhancements:
- Retain better control over version history.
- Avoid formatting hiccups when transferring text.
- Optimize for SEO starting from initial draft.
- Take advantage of native linking and metadata options.
Together this saves time, smooths your process, enhances content, and sets you up for search visibility–not bad for one simple change! While offline writing remains necessary at times based on connectivity limitations, whenever possible, your first draft should live directly in WordPress for efficiency and quality.