Author: Neil Matthews

It’s that time of year again, waist bands are a little too tight and we are feeling the results of holiday over indulgence. Many people turn to a body detox in January, but can I also suggest a detox of your website.

Why Detox Your Website?

Just like a body, a website can accumulate waste that it does not need, this waste takes up disk space, database space and can impact the performance of your site.

Here are four areas of website detox and some health checks you can do to start 2016 with a sprightly clean website.

Remove Unwanted Plugins And Themes

Look through your installed plugin and theme list, and delete any that are unused. Even if they are not in use they are taking up disk space and harbouring potentially harmful code if not updated regularly.

Look at your list of active plugins and ask your self “Do I really need this functionality”?

If not disable and delete the plugin in question.  Every plugin enabled is taking a small slice of your available memory.

Delete Old Content

I’m currently in the middle of removing old content that does not serve my business any more.  I’m removing things such as:

• Old sales offers.
• Offers for services I’m no longer doing (custom plugin development anyone).
• Reviews of plugins that are no longer available.
• Anything from my old archive (pre 2010) that is not evergreen.

Optimize Your Database

Your poor old database goes through a hard time, and is very often neglected. I recommend at least on a quarterly basis you optimize your database.

I wrote a detailed article on optimizing your database so I’ll not cover ground I’ve already walked.

Check For Broken Links

The interwebs are a fluid place, and links out from your site to other articles can sometimes break.

We also change links internally on our site (for example when deleting post for detox purposes)

Links break so it is good practise to check your links on a regular basis.  The good news is that there is a plugin called Broken Link Checker which will trawl through all your pages and create a list of broken links for you to fix. Here is a video to show you how.

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Three Site Health Checks

Once you have done your tidy, here are three health checks to ensure your site is in top top condition.

Google mobile check – run your site through this checker to make sure it is mobile compliant and works effectively on phones

Google page speed insights – is your site loading fast enough in the eyes of Google

Google malware checker – has your site been hacked or is your site free of malware?

Wrap Up

Start 2016 with a fit and healthy website to power your business through this coming year. Why not detox your website.

Photo Credit: Robert Gourley via Compfight cc

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, or so the song tells us.  The majority of us decorate our homes this time of year, why not spruce up your website with some festive cheer.

Deck The Website With Plugins Of Holly

The team at WPDude have been working tirelessly all year, and this does not stop at Christmas, we have scoured the interwebs to bring cheer to your website this Yuletide.

In this post I’ll show you some plugins to add some Christmas bling to your site.

Tinsel Time

Fancy adding a decorative touch to the header of your site, you can with Christmas Ball On Branch.

This plugin adds a tiny splash of festive cheer in the top corner of your site (here is where the kids go Ooooooh! when they see your site).

https://wordpress.org/plugins/christmas-ball-on-branch/screenshots/

Snow Balloons And More

It’s does exactly what is says on the tin, is pours festive fun all down your site, want Santas? Got that, want Christmas trees? Check.  The “and more” feels like a special present waiting to be opened.

Sing-A-Long-A-Website

Even the most hardened Grinch cannot resist a sing-a-long, why not start the singing off from your website.

Christmas Music plugin plays some jaunty Christmas tunes as people browser your site

https://wordpress.org/plugins/christmas-music/

Christmas Lights

My own personal favourite and the one I perk up wpdude.com with is  Xmas lights.  It adds a simple string of gaudy Christmas lights at the top of your site, no untangling, no annoying bulb checks just lashings of Christmas fun.

I’m deliberately going for a cheap fun look, I like to think if it had audio it would be going Fzzzz as if the bulbs are about to pop:)

https://wordpress.org/plugins/xmas-lights/

Bringing It all Together

And on three ! Two ! One click the video (if only you could hear the music better).

Need More!!!

These are my favourite plugins, but believe me there are more, for a full cast list check out:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/christmas

Wrap Up

Not very professional I know, but jollying up your website shows to the outside world you can have some fun and injects a little personality into your business, add the screen shots of your decorated website to the comments, the tackiest will get a free website job in 2016.

Merry Christmas!

Photo Credit: donielle via Compfight cc

Something I recommend if you are experimenting with new themes or plugins is a staging site. In this post I’ll share how to build a WordPress staging site.

What Is A Staging Site?

A staging site is a clone of your live site, in a development area where you can experiment with changes without it impacting on your live site.

Staging sites are also know as sandboxes or development sites.

It will be an exact clone of your live site but will use  a separate database and set of files from your real site.

The point of a staging site is that you can throw in a new theme or a raft of new plugins without the worry that it will crash your live site.

Staging sites are very common in corporate IT environments, but have not trickled down to the owner of small business sites, which is a shame, having a staging site where you can test changes can save a lot of heartache from crashes.

Making A WordPress Staging Site

There are three main ways to create a staging site, they are

• Using a host with staging capabilities
• Staging Plugins
• Manually Creating One

Using A Host With Staging Capabilites

The new breed of WordPress managed hosting companies are increasingly offering staging solutions.

For example I use WPEngine and they have a one click staging feature.  I ask for a clone of my current live site to be made, and their automated processes go off and make an exact duplicate at http://neilm.wpengine.com/

This is probably the easiest (but not cheapest) way to create a staging site for your installation.

Costs – starting at $29 per month

Staging Plugins

If your hosting does not offer a staging solution, the next method to look at are the staging plugins out there.

One that I have encountered is WP Stage Coach.

This plugin clones your site onto their infrastructure so it is completely separate from yours, you then make your changes there and when fully tested you can push those chnages back to your live site.

Cost – from $4 per month

Manual Build

The cheapest but most labour intensive would be to build a manual staging area.

You can install the site into a subdirectory of your current site e.g. yoursite.com/staging or create a new sub domain staging.yoursite.com and install your cloned files there.

I wrote a step by step process in this post Building A Development Environment so I’ll not rehash those steps here.

In essence get a copy of the Duplicator plugin, clone your site and move it to the appropriate place. Run the installer that comes with Duplicator and a new site is built.

I recommend you create a new database in your hosting control panel to keep all data separate.

Cost – $0 just some of your time.

Making Your Staging Live

Hosting staging site and WP Stage coach pull your live site into staging area at the click of a button, and then push it back to live, with the new changes again at the click of a button.  This makes it incredibly easy to keep your development and live site aligned.

For the bootstrappers, using a manual build you will have to reverse the process, take your new duplicator files push then to your live environment and make your changes live, this is why methods 1 and 2 appeal to less technical site owners.

Wrap Up

If you site is mission critical, making changes in live is not a bad idea, consider build a WordPress staging site and make your mistakes there not in live.

Photo Credit: Brian Rinker via Compfight cc

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and migrated to a grown up hosting provider (WPEngine) after Bluehost shafted me one time too many.

I am migrating to WP Engine.

Why I Migrated To WPEngine

I was previously using Bluehost and there were three main reasons I moved over:

1. Site getting closed down with little warning for using too many database tables
2. Constant downtime, the Jetpack monitor would tell me of outages 2 -3 times per week
3. Snarky comments from the support team

I went to WP Engine for the excellent security and speed I had seen when moving clients over.

The Migration Process

I’m not going to bang on about the pros or cons of WP Engine, what I really want to highlight in this post is how simple it is to migrate all your content, migration is a real headache and WP Engine has done a great job of making this as easy as possible.

I’ve done a number of manual migrations for clients in the past and it has been a bit of a pain, but there new system is super simple.

Migration is one of the biggest barriers to entry to it makes sense for WP Engine to make the process as smooth as possible.

Install Plugin

The migration process is as simple as installing a plugin, download this from your wpengine account, install it on your existing account.

Populate the plugin with some migrate SFTP details to copy  over your

Sit Back And Migrate

It will take some time to do the migration, it was about an hour for WP Dude, but I did nothing in that time but watch a progress bar.

WP Engines Migration Video

Check out WP Engines migration video to see how simple this process is.

One Small Issue

I did notice one small issue, a number of internal links on my site were pointing to wpdude.wpegine.com the test URL of my site before I migrated my domain, I installed a plugin called Better Search And Replace and did a search and replace (surprisingly) to change then all back, I’ll record a video tutorial soon on better search and replace.

Wrap Up

If you were thinking about moving over to WP Engine, but were wary because of the effort to move over your database and files, don’t be it was super simple and required no technical skill.

WP Engine is  not cheap but it is super fast and secure and their on-boarding was exceptional.

I’ve created a new lead magnet for WP Dude, a five part e-course on the essentials of maintaining a WordPress site, you can get it hear.

Protect Your Content Marketing Efforts; Essential WordPress Maintenance Tasks

I’ve tried lots of different types of lead magnet over the year with mixed success, I thought you might be interested in learning what has worked and what has not worked for me.

What Is A Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a “thing” you use to entice people to hand over their email address when visiting your site.

The thing is usually something of value given away in return for that address, an ethical bribe to start an email conversation.

It can be a downloadable e-book, video course, audio, coupons or email courses.   I have even tried giving away my most valuable asset; time.

What Is It Meant To Do

Once the site visitor has handed over their email address you provide the “thing” and an ongoing conversation via email can being, you can send them updates from your site, make marketing offers the list goes on.

The point is the lead magnet breaks the ice and a relationship begins, they turn from anonymous site visitor to a person who begins to know, like and trust you and your business.

My Success Or Lack There Of With Lead Magnets

I’ve not had a great deal of success with my lead magnets over the years, perhaps my offer is just not interesting enough, perhaps

Here are the lead magnets I have tried over the years, and details of my success.

Video Training

I’ve got a suite of video training tutorials, I’ve had some success offering troubleshooting training, but not a huge amount, I don’t know if it’s the content or the way I presented it people e-shrugged their shoulders and said “Meh!” and moved past the pop up.

One thing I do get is lots of YouTube subscriptions, but they all come from YouTube not on site.

Membership Site

A number of years ago I started a paid membership site called the WP Owners Club, that ran it’s course and as a lead magnet I made this available as a freebie.

This was my resounding success, loads of people signed up for that for free protected content.

In then end this become untenable for me, the time needed to create new content took me away from doing billable client work, as my business became busier I just couldn’t keep it up.

Webinars

I love webinars they are an amazing way to offer value to a large number of people.

In exchange for their email for future marketing you can get people on-board and show them your value through a training session.

Trouble is, webinars are everywhere, people have become cynical, they know there will be a sale at the end.

Plus webinars force you to turn up at the appointed time, if you are time poor, it’s hard to run a weekly session to ensure emails keep coming in.

E-Books

I’ve written a number of downloadable e-books, and these have worked well for me.

In particular the one I wrote for the sister site of this one WebPolyglot.com,  “The 10 things you need to know before you build your multi language website”.

Packaging up your expertise in a free e-book is a great way to collect email addresses and show your expertise.

My Time

My most valuable none renewable resource.  I was offering people a chunk of my life force in exchange for their email address.

I’ve offered free site health checks, free security reviews, guess what I cannot give it away.

I had zero takers for any of my free consulting offers. It’s hard to hand over passwords to someone you don’t know yet.

E-Course

The current band wagon I’m jumping on is a multi part e-course. Do I sound cynical?  I’m a little jaded because I cannot find that nice balance of valuable resource for my potential clients and not taking up huge amounts of my time.

I love the way e-courses keep you front and centre in someone’s mind over a period of days.  I’ve joined e-courses myself and have bought products and services as a result.

Over a series of emails 5 in my part you get to introduce yourself to someone, show them your expertise and make an offering in a none sleazy manner.

Wrap Up

If you want to checkout my latest lead magnet, you can sign up from this link

On my 5 day e-course ” Protect Your Content Marketing Efforts; Essential Maintenance Tasks For Your WordPress Site” you will learn

• Why You Need to maintain your site
• How to backup
• How to Update
• How to secure
• How to optimize

What are you preferred lead magnets, lets extend this discussion to the comments below.

Photo Credit: Mario’s Planet via Compfight cc