Tips and Best Practices

Purpose

A short list of habits that prevent the most common problems we see across clubs.

Always use draft, then publish. Make changes as a draft, preview them, then switch the Status to Published. Don't edit a published page directly without checking it on the front-end first.
Image filenames matter. Use cathkin-clubhouse.jpg, not IMG_4711.jpg. The filename ends up in image alt text and the URL.
Resize before upload. Hero images should be ~2000px wide and under 500 KB. Larger files slow the page and waste storage.
Write meta descriptions. Every page and post has a SEO tab. Fill in the description for at least your top 20 pages. This is what Google shows on the results page.
Use Categories sparingly. Two or three blog categories beats fifteen — search engines prefer focused taxonomies.
Headings tell the story. Use H2/H3 to break up content. Don't use H1 inside the body — the page title is already H1.
Keep slugs short and stable. Once a page is live, don't change its slug — that breaks every existing link. If you must rename, add a redirect (ask support).
Preview before sharing. Always click Preview before you send a link to anyone.
Save often. Payload doesn't autosave the layout. Click Save Draft every five to ten minutes.

Friday newsletter prep: have your blog post ready Wednesday, schedule the campaign Thursday.
Event ingestion: if you use Golf Genius, sync runs nightly; you don't need to re-add competitions by hand.
Photos in folders: drop all photos from one event into a single folder. Then any block that points to that folder picks them up automatically.

Don't use <form> inside dialogs (Payload's form will swallow submit events). Use a regular div with a click handler.
Don't paste from Word — it brings invisible formatting. Paste as plain text, then re-apply styles.
Don't rely on browser autocomplete for passwords on shared club computers.