Like your automobile, your WordPress blog requires periodic and ongoing maintenance. It is a tool for your business and if you don’t perform routine maintenance, then it won’t perform optimally. Here are five specific routine maintenance items you should perform on your blog to keep it safe from hackers, to ensure it performs optimally, and to keep your content working hard for you and through the search engines.
- Regular back ups - You should back up your WordPress at least monthly. You can manually do this, but there are plug-ins now that will do it for you automatically. Some of the best back up plug-ins will schedule a back up for you daily, weekly, or monthly and send it to you by e-mail or save it on your server.
- Keep your WordPress software up to date – WordPress is continually in development. New versions arrive several times throughout the year. You don’t have to adopt every new update immediately, but you shouldn’t allow yourself to fall too far behind. If you are more than two versions behind the latest, you should update your WordPress software.
- Update your themes – Like the WordPress software, themes need updating too. If you operate on an off-the-shelf free theme, then it isn’t as necessary. But if you have purchased a premium theme for your WordPress blog, then updating regularly is a necessity.
- Update your plug-ins – Plug-ins are another WordPress tool that I’d recommend staying current on. Almost all plug-in developers update their plug-ins periodically to keep them working optimally with the latest versions of WordPress. You should update your plug-ins as soon as the developer makes them available.
- Site diagnostics – Finally, run periodic diagnostic checks to ensure that your WordPress blog is free of malware or unnecessary hacker code, and spam. Google Webmaster Tools will do that for you for free.
If you keep your WordPress blog maintained properly, it will give you years of good and useful service.
WordPress once was thought of as nothing more than a blogging platform. It was considered – and still is – the premiere blogging platform on the Web. There’s good reason for thinking of it that way. No other blogging platform offers the same level of design flexibility with search engine optimization benefits and maximum functionality.
Today, however, WordPress is thought of as more than a blogging platform. It is a blogging platform PLUS. And that plus is a big deal.
It is being billed today as a content management system. That means you can use WordPress to upload all of your website’s content and you can build a full-fledged website using it to manage your content from beginning to end. However, there are some pitfalls.
As an example, if you use WordPress’s media upload features and you decide to move your website to a new server or host, then you’ll have to migrate those photos and images and if you aren’t careful you could lose them. It’s much easier to make a website transfer with a traditional HTML website. You simply drag and drop your folder to the new server and you’re done. It’s not that easy with WordPress.
That’s just one example. Designing WordPress also comes with its own set of headaches. For instance, are you going to use an off-the-shelf template? Be careful because a lot of them are not optimized correctly for the search engines.
You could use a premium framework, but those cost money. You could end up spending as much money to design with a WordPress site as you would to pay for a custom HTML design, and have fewer headaches.
While I wouldn’t say don’t use WordPress for your next web design as an absolute imperative, it’s important to know the dangers and pitfalls before you make that decision.
When it comes to web design, not many people can do their own. It requires special skills such as knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and maybe even other Web languages. But many small business owners and community service organizations are beginning to design their own websites now with WordPress as a CMS. Is that a good idea?
Actually, it’s a great idea, but don’t think that using WordPress is going to absolve you from having to know any programming languages. You can build your own website using WordPress, but there are some functions for which you might need professional help.
For instance, if you want to include your Twitter stream in your blog, where’s the best place to put it so that it doesn’t get in the way of your reader’s enjoyment but still provides the content benefits that you are looking for? Do you know how to map an image inside of your header? A lot of people don’t.
Special knowledge aside, there are plenty of benefits to using WordPress as your web design CMS:
- It’s flexible
- It’s free
- You can tweak it and customize it to fit your needs
- Built in search engine optimization
- Cuts down on time when designing a website
While the benefits are there for using WordPress as a CMS, you can still get more out of it if you let a professional web designer build your site then teach you how to upload your own pages. You won’t have to pay for ongoing design and management, but you can get a good looking website right from the beginning. Then, when you want to add to it, all you have to do is log in and write your pages.
WordPress has come a long way since its first introduction. Over the years the blogging software has earned a solid reputation for being an easy-to-use platform with better than average SEO benefits for users. One of the cool things about WordPress is its world class support and the never ending list of plugins available. But I’d say that in the last year WordPress has stepped out as one of the top content management systems on the market and one of the things that makes it so useful is the ability to design a great web site using only the tools available in the package.
In the old days web designers would borrow an off-the-shelf WordPress theme and that served a useful purpose. But in the last couple of years a few savvy web designers have developed premium themes that anyone can purchase and those themes offer benefits that are not available with off-the-shelf themes. One benefit is the ability to actually design a custom website with strong SEO benefits. WordPress can actually be used to build a website without a blogging feature, which makes it a robust content management system deserving of the best respect.
When it comes to web design today, you don’t even need to know HTML. You can use a CMS like WordPress with a snazzy premium theme and design your site like a pro. I think that’s awesome.
These days, it seems like everyone has a blog. While the vast number of blogs on the Internet might seem to lessen the chances that your’s will be the victum of hacking or spamming, the greater quantity of blogs out there only encourages more of these annoying pests to attack.
In the Internet marketing world, spamming has unfortunately become a popular way to get free links, referals, etc. While legitimate Internet marketing firms such as Reciprocal Consulting look down on these sorts of black hat practices, the most annoying thing about these spammers is that some people actually click on these links, hence giving them a reason to continue to do it. If everyone knew how to spot spam and no one ever clicked a spam link, they would probably die out, but unfortunately this is not the case.
So, as long as there will be spammers and hackers, there will also be those who wish to put an end to it, and a lot of these programs are not only free, but coded specifically for your needs. The best example is a self-hosted WordPress blog. Due to ever growing popularity, the WordPress blog has become a prime target for spammers, both human and robot controlled, but by the same token, so has the number of anti-spam WordPress plug-ins increased. There are also a few other ways to protect your self hosted WordPress blog.
- Choose your password wisely- it may seem like elementary knowledge but believe it or not, many people don’t know what makes a password good. The first step is to choose something that is easy to remember, or something that you can write somewhere you will always be able to look it up if you forget what it is. Worst case scenario, you can always have the password sent to your email address, but that should only be the last resort. I personally have a password that includes numbers and letters, both lower and upper-case. The further your password is from a coherent English word or phrase, the better, which is why the combination of numbers and letter is best.
- Check your settings- The WordPress self hosted blog has a lot of built in features to help protect your blog, many of which can be found in the settings. Many times, an effort to allow more user interaction via comments on a blog will result in more spam, so what I have found to be the best settings for comments is allowing anyone to post, but first requiring myself or another admin to approve the comment. Once a comment is approved for a user, then comments from that user no longer require approval. This way, anyone who’s posted before can feel more welcome posting, which could increase visitor loyalty. There are also a number of great plug-ins available on the WordPress.com site which can help you deal with spam and security. These are conveniently organized by category, so performing a search for “anti-spam” or “security” should get you a plug-in that works the way you want it to.
- Watch Those Links- WordPress blogs have a handy feature on the dashboard that tells you who is linking to you. This is a great way to network, but also a good way to see when people are linking to you, even if you don’t want them to. Should you encounter a website that is saying bad things aboout you, or one with a large readership that might send unwanted traffic your way, you can easily see this and send a kind email over to ask the administrator at the other site to remove the link.
There are plenty of more advanced tactics to protecting your blog, but these are the most basic, and believe it or not, the ones most often overlooked.
