As a professional web developer, it becomes quintessential to perform the development process within a short time span. In fact, the main objective of a developer is not only to develop a WP website but also to complete the procedure quickly and efficiently.
Time-saving is one of the foremost priorities of a developer that can help enhance the overall productivity. And one of the productivity tips from the developer’s point of view is the epidemic usage of the exciting WordPress shortcuts.
WordPress is the prominent blogging and CMS platform that also offers a wide range of keyboard shortcuts to help you boost your productivity rate expeditiously. Through this blog, we will highlight some of great and time-saving WP keyboard shortcuts. But before diving into this, let us understand why content formatting plays a crucial role.
Content Formatting 101
The presentation style of your website’s content plays a key role in determining the conversion rates and viewer’s engagement. Systematically formatted content with the pertinent headings, bold and italics, block quotes, induces the interest of the targeted readers. Thus, it is important to format the content in an engaging and intellectual way.
Bold Text
Highlighting the text in bold quickly grabs the viewer’s attention to your site’s content. When you are glancing through pages and for that matter you see a sentence or phrase that are highlighted in bold, it quickly appeals to your eyes and you start reading those highlighted sentences.
Italics
Italics play a crucial role by allowing your readers to briskly grasp what is being referred to in the content. It enables the reader to automatically highlight on the italicized word.
Bullet Lists
Bulleted lists drive the eyes of your reader. With the help of bullet format, you can convey the desired message to the viewers very easily and swiftly. Such text is easier to read and always easier to remember in this format. However, there are certain tips that you should keep in mind while using bullets:
- Keep the sentences short and relevant
- Make sure each sentence carries the same scale of importance
- Don’t use too many bullets
- Start each sentence with the same part of speech
WordPress Shortcuts
WordPress appears with a “What You See Is What You Get” editor. It is one of the collective excellent text editors which is used to fortify a plethora of rich text activities that includes bullet points, highlighting text, block quotes and headings.
Do you know that the WP keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+K” opens the hyperlink dialogue box and by entering the URL, your text gets hyperlinked without using a mouse click. Isn’t it amazing that you can manage your text efficiently without wasting your precious time.
Essential points
Many of the themes and plugins in WordPress sum up their own shortcode buttons to the visual Editor, which is very helpful for most of the developers.
- You don’t have to install any new theme or plugin that can add extra buttons in the Visual Editors.
- If you are using a Mac, then there is no use of Ctrl key. Replace the Ctrl key with the Command key in the keyboard shorts.
Launch Visual Editor
You need to launch a Visual Editor in WordPress by creating any new page or post.
Once creating a page/post, you need to see all the formatting tools that are already available in the WordPress Visual Editor. By clicking Toolbar Toggle button, you can easily showcase or hide the toolbar that contains the other necessary formatting buttons.
By clicking on the “? Button”, you can see the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box.
Heading Shortcuts
You can use these shortcuts for the different headings from H1 to H6. It saves your time as you don’t need to select the sentence. You just place your cursor on the appropriate sentence and apply the keyboard shortcut and you can easily highlight the selected sentence. (If you are using Mac, then you have to use Option+Command in the place of Ctrl)
- Heading 1 => Ctrl+1
- Heading 2 => Ctrl+2
- Heading 3 => Ctrl+3
- Heading 4 => Ctrl+4
- Heading 5 => Ctrl+5
- Heading 6 => Ctrl+6
Basic Editor Shortcuts
In this, you have to select the sentence, phrase or word that needs to be highlighted. Following are the basic editor keyboard shortcuts used by all web developers.
- Cut => Ctrl+X
- Copy => Ctrl+C
- Paste => Ctrl+V
- Underline => Ctrl+U
- Italicize => Ctrl+I
- Bold => Ctrl+B
- Select All => Ctrl+A
- Strikethrough => Alt+Shift+D
- Undo => Ctrl+Z
- Redo => Ctrl+Y
Exceptional Editor Shortcuts
With the use of such advanced editor shortcuts, you can save a lot of time and complete your work with efficiency.
Text Alignment Shortcuts
Align Right => Alt+Shift+R
Align Left => Alt+Shift+L
Justify Text => Alt+Shift+J
Align Centre => Alt+Shift+C
Link Modification Shortcuts
Insert Link => Alt+Shift+A
Remove Link => Alt+Shift+S
5 Amazing Unknown Keyboard Shortcuts
Add/Remove Code Tag => Alt+Shift+X
Insert Page Break Tag => Alt+Shift+P
Insert More Tag => Alt+Shift+T
Insert Blockquote => Alt+Shift+Q
Insert Image => Alt+Shift+M
WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts that are barely used:
Open Spell Checker => Alt+Shift+N
Help => Alt+Shift+H
Enter Distraction-free writing mode => Alt+Shift+W
Save Draft => Ctrl+S
Show/hide the Kitchen Sink => Shift+Alt+Z
Distraction Free Writing Mode
This mode has the ability to shroud everything that can come between your writing. The Distraction free writing mode also offers amazing keyboard shortcuts:
Enter/Exit Mode => Alt+Shift+W
Narrow the Editor => Ctrl + ‘-‘ (Simply press Ctrl-)
Reset to Default Width => Ctrl+0
Widen the Editor => Ctrl + ‘+’ (Simply press Ctrl+)
Comment Moderation Keyboard Shortcuts
Filtering the daily comments from the posts is one of the irritating and time-consuming activities. But with the help of keyboard shortcuts, you can easily moderate the comments publish on the WP blog or post.
Enabling Keyboard Shortcuts for Comment Moderation
In order to utilize these shortcuts, you need to enable the “Shortcuts for Comment Moderation” option in the WP admin account.
Note: By default this option is inactive. To make it active, you need to follow these steps:
- Go to WP Dashboard > Users > Your Profile
- Check the box Enable keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation
- Click on Update Profile
Comment Navigation Shortcuts
You need to navigate through the list of comments. And the selected or activated comment will be highlighted in blue color.
Navigate to Comment Above K (also known as the Comment Up key)
Navigate to Comment Below J (also known as the Comment Down key)
Comment Moderation Action Keyboard Shortcuts
After selecting the comments that you want to moderate, you can use the below shortcuts:
Approve comment – A
Unapproved comment, and put it back into moderation – U
Mark comment as spam – S
Reply to the comment – R (Hit Esc to cancel the reply)
Restore comment – Z
Quick Activate Edit for inline editing of the comment – Q
Delete comment – D
Bulk Comment Moderation Shortcuts
Following are the bulk comment moderation shortcuts. With the use of it, you can save a lot of time:
Approve Selected Comments – Shift + A
Move Comments to Trash – Shift + T
Mark Comments as Spam – Shift + S
Delete the Selected Comments – Shift + D
Reject the Selected Comments – Shift + U
Restore Comments from Trash – Shift + Z
Conclusion
With the help of all these amazing keyboard shortcuts, you can easily format the content on your WP website and can make changes quickly. These are some of the important shortcuts that can enhance your site’s productivity in a short time span.
