Productivity

Still copying content into WordPress? You’re doing it wrong. Here’s why.

April 13, 2022

Wordable saves marketers anywhere between 30-60 min. each time you export, format, and optimize a piece of content. That can reduce publishing costs by as much as 90%.

Sound crazy?

It shouldn’t.

Not if you were ACTUALLY doing all the mind-numbingly-tedious, soul-sucking tasks you should be performing each time you hit Publish.

You know, the ones already being done by your SERP-topping competition, like:

❌ Cleaning HTML, removing <span> tags, line breaks, etc.,

❌ Creating anchor ID links and Table of Contents for all headers by hand

❌ Resizing & compressing images one-by-one before uploading back into your content,

❌ Optimizing images with descriptive file names & alt text attributes

❌ Manually pasting target=“_blank” and/or “nofollow” attributes to every single link

Ugh. Just typing these out gives me hives.

This process sucks. There’s no way around it.

But it’s also a necessary evil.

Here’s why.

Reason #1. Slow sites are poor sites. Literally and figuratively.

Uploading ‘YUGE images to a website will slow it down over time.

Don’t think that’s a big deal? Slow websites are proven to:

  • Provide a bad user experience,
  • Rank worse in search engines, and
  • Even sabotage your conversions!

Don’t take our word for it.

  • Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). Portent
  • By compressing images and text, 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB (which contributes to page load times)

Most people don’t compress images because, well, it’s often a pain in the ass. This can be very difficult to do without IT support or the right software. 

You have to manually crop and resize images. Then, run them through special software one-by-one. And finally save them as a smaller image file type (like .jpg vs. .png).

Well, you’re in luck!

Wordable will compress images and resize them, automatically, based on your document settings — all while still retaining image quality.

Go into the Export Settings and look under the Transformations options for “Compress Images.”

Cleanshot+2022-03-11+at+16.21.21%402x

No, I can’t read that, either. Getting old sucks.

Here’s what it looks like zoomed in, where you can now view the “lossy” vs. “lossless” options (along with “resizing to dimensions” if you want to retain the original size you set inside a document).

Cleanshot+2022-03-13+at+16.42.35%402x
  • Compress Images: Enable this option to resize images.
  • Resize: Click this to automatically resize the image to match your image dimensions in the original document file.
  • Lossless: We’ll find a happy medium, compressing images but not too much so that they lose noticeable quality. This is best for photography and other high-quality image assets.
  • Lossy: You might lose a little quality here (which might not be a big deal if you’re just displaying charts, graphs, screenshots, etc.), but you’ll also save the most space.

Our friends at Kinsta have an excellent guide on Lossless vs. Lossy if you want to nerd out on this in more detail.

Then, you can then view the individual Document Details to see the resized dimensions of each image, along with how much space has been saved.

Cleanshot+2022-03-11+at+16.18.47%402x

Once again, for the over-30 crowd:

Cleanshot+2022-03-13+at+16.44.57%402x

Reason #2. Copying & pasting WRECKS your content’s look, feel, and performance.

Copying and pasting content from Google Docs into WordPress causes all sorts of issues.

The “Classic” editor is the absolute worst. Be prepared for everything from formatting errors, to missing images, underlying unnecessary code, and more.

For starters, you’ll notice tons of extra spaces and line breaks added randomly throughout the content. So after pasting, you’ll need to go through and manually remove all of these spaces and line breaks, in addition to cleaning the underlying messy code that’s been added.

318zxug8bdgk3prygg1b2orq02wjps3vk4dw3fn5tr7xa6u jt8kkf3tupy62pfiutjcmpjndzmvgk9n4drvt-fvnkcjshey c11h-ggrj5pmxtsjccmpzduozrw9ulzgsvrqng0

Also, extra <span> tags + font stylings (essentially unnecessary HTML) from Google Docs are injected throughout your content

4b4ewejcma42aee8bx2ywcnndyemp-vssldgizqoteugd2ihs-z1-hvglpgvhcbrkzvat8aw6hmxqbzp1glpqop5gwo3l9csuly-urpepxrmo4woeutzbxzwnnf4liorrhhanpkv

Pasting into Gutenberg and blocks is slightly better, but still not perfect. For example, there are still some issues like random spaces being created that you’ll manually need to correct before publishing:

Bllbzdahidwzzjrqksuhzityg0cwdblkbze8ug2gnndmgc7-i5kchgx1m8x5s  zs2hjwaq779v2reygv17fajx4rl5bxqolykisfle840rche5d6leocamnpfwn2fejdfyytmfy

Incredibly, this isn’t even the worst part.

Your images are.

Images are NOT brought over at all when you copy and paste content into WordPress, so you’re left with a ton of open spaces and still need to manually export them from Google Docs before inserting them back one-by-one (and in the right areas!) into WordPress.

Qqymf5lvfnlsqpxp-ynw32f0tuwtcgcpqdx1jqurswzfu mcqetbhohanl9bno1szqaieztt7p8dvvq4q5dcterd60rsqtpmirss1ipuvzixamdigzs cex6mmismh75l2jpemd-

This means the likelihood of these breaking on your site in the future is pretty high (when that document changes, if that person leaves the org and email/account removed, etc. etc.).

Plus, images still need compression, resizing, alignment, file names, alt text, and more. And you’ll need to do all of this one-by-one in painstaking detail.

Pro tip: resizing an image file inside a Google Doc also doesn’t actually update the image file itself. So none of those settings are saved. And you’ll still need to mess with it before and after pasting it inside WordPress.

Reason #3. Working dumb, not smart, is well… dumb. (And expensive.)

Most sane people want to work smart, not just hard.

Well, you wouldn’t call most marketers sane then.

❌ Instead of consistently executing simple tasks, they cut corners and pray for miracles.

❌ Instead of documenting recurring procedures and delegating, they act like control freaks that need to do it all themselves.

❌ Instead of batching processes to increase efficiency at scale, they do everything one at a time ad hoc.

Again, might sound crazy. But it ain’t. Let’s look at just a few obvious examples.

If you’ve made it this far, we don’t need to discuss the importance of links. Trouble is, if you want to control how search engines and people use them, you’ll need to manually edit each one at a time.

That means pasting “nofollow” or target=”_blank” (open in a new tab) tags to each individual link inside WordPress after moving your content — whether that’s through the visual editor or editing HTML directly.

-fmhuwgk22e3z3fa94eksu-8acltkcttzwh8v5ak6ur2ywrer6v snrpi12xq1tbxwr-fi03lej1j2d7ksi6gcoovozqgjmd5z8uch2njfxfyguvtwaud3evkq1xk76pqa3ydmd5

That’s easy peasy compared to building out a Table of Contents with internal anchor ID links, though.

Creating internal document links (to bring people from one part of a document to another) inside Google Docs, then trying to copy and paste them often doesn’t work (unless you properly format all tags in HTML for the upcoming post you’re going to need).

For example, you create a Table of Contents to help link people to different headings on your document. Except, those won’t work inside WordPress — they’ll only reference the Google Doc IDs:

9zyaklxc9eobctex851hhcv4icnzhufumbs-tvkpgujlqiugnt8ts6n7ibfzp1qhpy0je6ur9gerwituxfgc4kcn2 58crboupw4zoukfsumymkefkyhokzxqw1o-l 7vusm5xar

Instead, Wordable can automatically create these for you, pulling in the headers on the page, and automatically formatting them properly in HTML so they work exactly like you want them to when published.

Cleanshot+2022-03-18+at+13.38.42%402x

You’ll also still need to manually set authors, categories, slugs or URL, etc. Doing this across one article might only take a few minutes.

However, add this to your seemingly-never-ending task list each time you export a piece of content and you can see how it all adds up. A few minutes here and there, times dozens (if not hundreds) of articles each month results in another wasted weekend.

Again, Wordable makes this type of work easy to batch so you (or better yet, someone less expensive on your team) can quickly edit these settings across all the content you want to upload at a time.

Fw00pdsgyl4nmnvyabngj61v ft6pt2jnfhumeadx53svh33yc8zvfuz44r9sy52m9dusxmxn5vu86vtwsc s8iydzqktjpvctiyre1h wvp3z8iyc twkc5l0izjb4htnddf2vb

That way, you don’t need to edit one document at a time. You can set aside a smaller block of time, once a week, to do all of this dirty work and then load up your export queue.

Our saved templates will automate these recurring settings for you, so all it takes is the simple click of a button.

Pbiyqoiwwzzh72ecih-rzuqly6su86urjxskzu9jiva-qpejk7au5cic9dalegftjtmhendpvghc i1gycvn 9yexgoqe2sobyum7ptsspobbaeh9ssppbut3j9nwlb3qh 71aa

Again, this comes back to efficiency at the end of the day.

It’s similar to batching the time you spend in email or other tedious tasks. It’s faster & takes less time (per post) to have all documents edited + pushed live at the same time each day (like all finished drafts uploaded Friday for Monday publish or similar).

That’s how we manage high-volume projects for very very very very very very large billion-dollar sites:

Pasted image 0

This simple yet powerful move is how you realize compounding cost savings through more streamlined operations. Lensa shares the critical role of IT. Let technology work for you.

Read: less wasted efforts + costs, while at the same time driving better results

Using a tool like Wordable has some “hidden” benefits that help compound the ROI you get. For example:

  • “Forced” consistency across multiple people (vs. each person uploading & formatting documents manually, inconsistently)
  • Faster onboarding training, SOPs in cases of turnover or new team members. (think: times of scale, new writers, new writing teams, new marketers, etc. etc).
  • You can also have less expensive internal people manage something like Wordable with a bunch of pre-built templates vs. relying on them to manually apply the same settings each and every time, or have to hire / force more expensive and senior people to do this kind of work.

And on and on!

Conclusion

Look. I get it.

Exporting, formatting, and optimizing content sucks.

That’s why most marketers cut corners. It’s easier. It’s less of a hassle.

That’s also why most markers get mediocre results, though, too. Because they’re lazy.

You, however, are not. The very fact that you’re still reading this means that you’re not a lazy SOB like the rest of them.

You’re not looking for the easy way out. You’re looking for that extra competitive edge that will help you out perform everyone else.

It’s really that simple at the end of the day.

The red or the blue pill. You decide. 🔴💊🔵

‘Cause what’s separating million and billion-dollar sites from yours aren’t shiny silver bullets. It ain’t faux influencer BS, either.

But doing things the right way, consistently, week after week, month after month.

It’s NOT fun to pay attention to every tiny publishing detail.

Fortunately, Wordable can do most of it for you. 👋

Brad Smith
Brad is the CEO of Wordable. His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.
Brad Smith
Brad is the CEO of Wordable. His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.