Category: General Blogging

I’ll be honest with you, multi language websites are expensive.  In this post I want to take you through a cost benefits analysis of a multi language websites to make sure it is cost effective before you start adding additional languages to your site.

What Is A Cost Benefits Analysis Of A Multi Language Website?

Just in case you haven’t come across this term before a quick definition is probably in order.  A cost benefits analysis, is where you look at the costs of a project and weigh them up against the outcome or benefits you will receive in exchange.

This may be monetary such as gaining foreign language sales, or it may be a softer benefit such as clients understanding and spreading your message more easily.

Here is a more detailed explanation, but in plain non MBA speak, it the cost of making it multi language really worth while.

Here Are The Costs

So here are the costs you need to consider when building a multi language site.

Development Costs

How much it will cost to hire a developer to make your site multi language?

They will need to code up your site to accept multiple copies of your copy, make menus translatable, make sidebars translatable. the list goes on.

Each site is different so I cannot give you a ballpark figure, but contact me and I’ll review you site and give you a quote ;), but you can expect a figure starting at $1k.

Infrastructure Costs

If you are hosting your site on bargain basement hosting, you may need to consider an upgrade.

Multi language comes at an overhead in memory, database space and disk space.Added to the fact that a multi language site will hopefully increase your traffic and that will need more powerful hosting.

Translation Costs

This will be a large cost of your multi language project.  As a rule of thumb you can say 10 cents per word for professional translation services.  More obscure languages will cost more as translators can command higher rates, but 10 cents is a good starting point.

When I’m giving clients a very rough idea of costs I like to use this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-word-count/ which counts the site wide words in posts and pages.  This then allows me to give rough costs.

An example;  say I have 10k words across my site and want translations into French, German and Spanish, a rough costing would be (10,000 * 0.10) * 3 = $3,000.

And no you cannot use Google translate cheap skate 🙂

It’s Not Just Copy To Translate

Don’t forget to factor in design costs for new images or videos.  It’s not just text that needs to be translated but image copy and spoken word in video and audio files.

Ongoing Maintenance And Translation

Websites are never static, there is new copy and new functionality all the time, factor in another chunk of cash to keep your pages translated and brining back your developer for maintenance updates when you add a new widget that is not multi language compatible.

Managing Multi Language Requests

There are some off-line aspects you need to consider, are you going to have to field custom support requests in new languages too, can you fulfil orders for people that don’t speak you local language?

Perhaps you need to invest in multi lingual staff to make your multi language expansion work.

An option to overcome this is to provide copy in language X but tell potential customers all live communication will be in language Y.

And The Benefits

Sorry to throw all the costs at you first, but I just wanted to be up front with you.

Increased Sales

Will the sales you get from country X justify the cost and ongoing maintenance of your site?

Just because you get $x in sales from English does not mean X multiplied by two sales when you add French or German, be realistic about your new territory income.  Will it pay for the development costs?

Equally don’t forget to factor in that the bulk of the development costs are one off and can be recovered over time when you start getting more and more sales from you new language territories.

Happier Site Visitors

Then there are the soft benefits to your site visitors which cannot be calculated in cold hard cash.

• Better understanding of your offering
• The ability to spread your message in their local language social media accounts
• A warm glow because you care enough to translate
• An understanding of local sensitivities if you combine cultural design in your multi language site
• explanation of often complex concepts in their local language

These benefits are soft benefits and it is hard to estimate the offset of costs they will make but if these type of benefits out-weigh the costs, then go for a multi langue site.

Wrap Up

Getting a rough idea of you expected benefits be they hard benefits like breaking into a new territory or $X increase on your bottom line by selling into country Y make it much easer to justify the cost of a multi langauge site.

If you can calculate the benefits I would be more than happy to tell you the costs of your build

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This is a guest post by Melissa Burke, see Melissa’s full details at the base of the post

Regular WordPress bloggers can find it cumbersome to post updates on a daily basis, primarily because it involves more than writing a content piece and hitting the publish button; images need to be uploaded, titles have to be created and the posts need to be shared over social media.

Thankfully, the up-keep of the CMS is possible, courtesy of iPhone apps.

Many WordPress blog owners give a wide berth to the fact that applications offer an opportunity to carry out blogging related tasks and keep the site updated on the go. Some modern offerings even provide insights to audience engagement, social media analytics, latest stock images, news updates and more.

The following iOS apps will lighten your burden when it comes to posting regular updates on your WordPress blog, and also assist in making time for other commitments. Best of all, they won’t cost a penny to use.

Useful Apps For WordPress Bloggers

1. WordPress for iOS

It can be a daunting task to update WordPress from a mobile browser, but Automattic’s official WordPress iOS app provides a perfect solution to write and edit posts as well as moderate comments. You can add a self-hosted WordPress blog on installation, with your regular username, password and the domain name.

The app has a sidebar which lets you access stats, comments, pages, posts and other features inside the regular Dashboard. Selecting posts from the list will let you access all the published posts, while a new post can be created with the ‘+’. Simply put, the mobile version of the Dashboard is quite similar to the web version.

It’s compatible with media uploading, and there is an option to use limited bandwidth by choosing a small or a medium size of an image. As for the comments, you can swipe over any of them to approve, delete or mark as spam. The app was also recently updated for iOS 7, and now includes a theme selector and visual editor overhaul.

Download WordPress for iOS  https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/wordpress/id335703880

2. Circa

Keeping up with the latest happenings is important when it comes to generating new blog post ideas, especially when your blog mostly covers news in a particular niche. Circa presents news from reputable sources in a narrative that keeps the flow of the story on the small screen.

You can follow specific stories and configure the app to notify you when those stories are updated. The stories contain all the information as in traditional news pages, but they’re broken down into sections that make it easy for users to read.

The Circa editors present the whole scoop rather than just the summary, and they also leave sources to the original sources in case you want to visit the website directly. This app was also updated for iOS 7 and the new version i.e. 2.0 integrates full screen images and maps and a revamped design.

Download Circa 2.0 for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circa-news/id517114354

3. HootSuite

The HootSuite app will let you stay connected with all social media accounts and share the published WordPress post links over different platforms from a single interface. The HootSuite Wizard gets you started upon installation, quickly organizing all the accounts for verification and importing of feeds.

For writing any post, you can tap the pen icon at the top right corner of the main interface, which includes icons to different social networks. Tapping on any of those icons checkmarks them and validates that the post would be shared over the highlighted networks.

Other options are for adding images and for scheduling a post for a specific time. Hootsuite was recently updated to iOS 7 and now features a new design for Apple’s latest OS.

Download Hootsuite for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/hootsuite-for-twitter/id341249709?mt=8

4. iStock Photo

Stock images have grown in importance in recent times, especially after the recent lawsuit cases against bloggers over using copyrighted images (http://bloglawblog.com/blog/?p=4292). Enter iStockPhoto; an app that can be used to browse a library of stock images, save and create new images on the go.

Existing users of the app based service can also check download stats and sales of uploaded images. All the files are accompanied by the number of views and downloads it has received, so it’s a great way to discover royalty-free images that can be possibly used on your blog.

And compared to ShutteStock, which has a fee to download royalty-free images, iStockPhoto from Getty Images is completely free to use.

Download iStockPhoto for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/istockphoto/id377716883?mt=8

These apps will significantly enhance productivity and keep your WordPress blog up and running when you’re away from the desktop.

Which apps do you use for WordPress related tasks? Feel free to leave comments.

Photo Credit: Tyler Silva Photography via Compfight cc

I’m a big believer in the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) which says that 20% of your effort brings you 80% of your results.  Learn why i think WordPress Is Classic 80/20

I think using WordPress is a classic case of this principle when developing a website.

If you spend 20% of your website design and development effort on selecting WordPress and using the community that surrounds it, you will get 80% of what is needed to build a website with minimum effort.

Web Design

You don;t need go be a graphical design guru to have an amazing looking WordPress site.

You don’t need to hire the same person described above and their expensive price tag.

All you need is a few tens of dollars investment in a great looking premium theme.  Install it and configure it and hey presto a cool looking site.  20% of effort goes on finding a theme rather than developing and designing it.

Web Development

If you have a functional need for your website, 9 times out of 10 there is a plugin to fix your problem.

Why code up a solution yourself when the WordPress community has already done it for you.  If you spend a little bit of effort researching and testing plugins it takes away the need to custom code for most website problems you will encounter.

 Training & Support

First up WordPress is pretty intuitive even to a none technical person.  If you can use a word processor you can add new content to a WordPress site.

There is a huge community out there supporting and supplying training ans support on WordPress, much of it completely free.

A quick google and you can find a training video on youtube or a support request which will solve your problem.

Because WordPress is so widely used, there is a good chance somone has created a documented soluttion to your problem.

Compatibility

This used to be a huge issue on the early days of the web, but since about 17% of the web is made of WordPress, everyone is clamouring to make their services and products compatible with WordPress not the other way around.

Future Proof

Ill not stick my neck out tooooo far, but I can say with a certain level of confidence that WordPress will be around for some time.

The investment you make in building a website on WordPress is not one that will disappear over night, it will return that time and money investment for years to come.

 What About The 80%

Ah, that’s where we come in, the 80% is where you need technical skills, know how to code in php or understand mysql.

Rather than tackling the 80% of effort that goes into build a wordpress site why not outsource it to us to do it for you and you have the best of both worlds.

We have a great range of WordPress maintenance packages or we can provide a quote for a one off project.

Wrap up – WordPress Is Classic 80/20

Checkout out our WordPress technical support page now for the tricky 80%.

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In this post I want to list the 9 things you should consider when developing your multi language

Why Are You Going Multilanguage?

Sometimes it’s a no brainer, you are forced to host multiple languages by local legislation, I know French Canadian provinces are forced to be bilingual, UK based government sites are obliged to host English and Welsh.

You may want to break into a new territory and need to support their local language, great but are people coming to your site from those countries already, are they consuming your content in the current languages?

I always suggest you dig into your analytics and see where people are coming from before you invest in multiple languages. I;ve written a post in this called Which Languages Do You Need.

It is not cheap to build and maintain a multi language site, do you really need multiple languages or will one do? Which leads me to …

Costs

You need to take into consideration the additional costs involved with multi language.

You will need translators to make your contents available (this is ongoing of course) specialist multi language web development {and potentially more powerful and costly hosting to deal with the bigger website.

These all costs more than a single language site.

Database

Will you current database config support multiple languages, in particular double character languages such as Chinese.  These are known to cause database problems if not configured correctly from the start.

I’ve worked on a number of projects where these characters don’t display and come up as a string of ?????????????? It is a real pain to reverse engineer a database setup,  do this at the outset,  before there is content.

Here’s a quick test, go to Google translate and select all languages you intend to support enter “hello world” in your current language and cut and paste all the translations into your current site.  Do they display, yes, then you are okay, if not you need to look at your database collation setup.

Performance

As you add the complexity of multiple languages you need to be sure your current website hosting has enough “oomph!”  to support multiple languages and all the coding required to switch between and maintain that content.

As you add a language, your site doubles I size overnight and most people go for multiple languages which means triples or quadruples your hosting requirement.

Design

This is a huge consideration most people never think about, they assume their current website design will work in foreign languages. I’m here to tell you that is not correct. Here are just some areas you need to consider:

• Design for expansive languages I’m thinking German in particular, your neat navigation design may not fit when you populate it in German
• Left to right / right to left languages, will your design work with Arabic or Hebrew when people read right to left, are your call to action buttons positioned optimally?
• Cultural differences, will you colour selection work in another country, are you using symbology that won’t work; Red Cross versus Red Crescent for Islamic countries.
• Have you designed a widget to allow site visitors to select their desired languages and is it obvious, there is no point creating a link that says Japanese when all they can read is 日本人.

Multi language design is a huge topic and I will be writing much more in future posts, but here are some great resources to get you started

• http://www.smartinsights.com/online-brand-strategy/international-marketing/web-design-for-cultural-differences/
• http://www.jatit.org/volumes/research-papers/Vol9No2/5Vol9No2.pdf ( a little dry and academic but great anyway)
• http://blog.usabilla.com/designing-for-a-cross-cultural-user-experience-part1/

Can you deal with multi language leads

You shiny new site starts generating leads from customers who don’t speak your native language can you fulfil their needs?

Do you have multi lingual customer support agents, are your products translated, can you handle emails in French?

If not it is very important to set customer expectations, personally I conduct all business in English even though I have translations and I spell that out to potential clients.

Ads And Banners And Downloads Oh My!

It’s not just your website copy you need to think about.  Have you translated the following:

• Are images containing text translated
• Are your downloadable PDFs translated
• Have you setup multiple languge ad banners and pay per click campaigns? Why spend money on a multi language site when you are not driving people there with ads in their own languages.

Ecommerce Multilingual Languages And Currency

If you are courteous enough to translate your site into multiple languages are you also going the final fews yards / metres to also offer your products in multiple currencies?

If you are making people feel confident in your products and services why not remove the final barrier to entry of exchange rates.

Last But By No Means Least Translations

Tell me you are not relying on Google translate!

Unless you have good in house language skills you are going to need a good translator.

Let me reiterate a good translator, having a couple of years of French at high school does not give you the skills to write business copy that converts. This is an investment you should look into.

Another thing to note is that subject matter skill are also crucial. If you have technical content can an everyday translator handle complex technical translation? As an example as a computer “techie” I might talk about object orientation, but would the translator think I’m talking about landscape versus portrait which is something completely different.

I sub contract all translation work to I CanLocalize, they have a large team of freelance translators, check them out.

Wrap Up

This was a very quick list post to highlight the issues you should be aware of before you start a multi language build.

I was thinking about running a free live webinar to go into more depth about these issues, if that is of interest let me know by leaving a comment if I get enough feedback I’ll run the live event.
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How To Stop Spam Registrations On WordPress

I’ve been contacted by clients a couple of times over the past month about spam user registrations on their sites.  This post will show  you how to stop spam registrations on WordPress in two seconds flat.

They are getting hundreds of spam user registrations on their site, and are seeing increasing amounts of spam comments. They then have to delete these users and the spam, it’s a time suck and pain for the site owner.  They are concerned this is some type of hack attack.

Here is a 2 second fix to stop spammers registering users on your site.

What They Do

The spammer will use scripts to search for sites that have open user registrations. Then using more scripts they add new users to your site.

You can check if  you site is open to user registrations by going to this URL

http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=register

If registrations are open you will see:

If they are closed you will see:

Why Do They Do This

Some sites set their comments to auto approve from registered users, this means that spam links can be added to comments and made live without moderation.  This then increases people search engine rankings.

If you think this is an automated process you can see how thousands of links can be generated and rankings increased for suspect sites.

It’s not a malicious attack against your site, rather it is spammers trying ot game google and increase ranking for their shoddy wares.  It’s also a pain in the a!se to clean up spam registrations.

How To Close it Down

This is very, very technical, go to settings -> general and un-check this box

Unless you have a site that required registration for memberships or email plugins there is no real need to keep this open, please check with your plugin documentation to see if you need this to be enabled.

We are of course available to hire for this complex procedure

Please Tell Me It’s Not Set To Admin

I have seen certain WordPress sites that have registrations enabled and the default user setting are administrators.  This leaves your site wide open to hackers using the same techniques, and I have seen sites hacked because they have not closed this simple loophole.

Wrap Up

Unless you have a very real need to keep user registrations open I always recommend closing this function down to keep the spammers at bay.

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I get called in a lot to fixed hacked sites.  Here is An Open Letter To Hosting Companies Of Hacked Site Owners

I loath something almost as much as the hackers that perpetrated the crime and that is the way hosting companies treat people with hacked sites.

Here’s an open letter to all stroppy hosting companies out there from the point of view of a normal site owner who has been hacked.

Dear Hosting Company

Thank you for suspending my account after I was hacked,that is really helpful way to make me feel special. You are taking my site down, I’m losing business and you are making me feel like I’m the bad person.

I of course did not ask the hackers to attack my site so thank you for the threatening email saying you are going to kick me out if I don’t fix it immediately.

Thanks for making me jump through technical hoops so many times that I had to hire a techie to make things work again.

Thanks for the interrogation by your representative via Live Chat to make sure everything was fixed.  Perhaps you could have helped me to do this.  I have no idea what a .htpasswd file it or how to add basic authentication to my webroot.

I was a victim of a hack attack.,

It sucks.

I feel vulnerable

Some unknown fuckwit in cyber space came after me for whatever reason and defiled my site.

Thanks for making me feel even shittier with your emails and accusations.

Oh BTW it was probably due to your poor  security that the hacker gained access in the first place. Can I review the access logs, what do you mean no they are private.  Can you review the access logs and tell me how the hacker got in …… hello anyone there?

The majority of your customers are none technical.  They have a website to market their business or send news to their club.  They are not trained in the dark arts of cyber security.  They came to you to host their site with the understanding it would be secure.

Thanks again for making a bad situation of teh hack even worse.

Love and Hugs

Your Customer – remember the person that pays to keep the lights on

P.S. Can I have my transfer code so I can go somewhere my business will be appreciated.

An Open Letter To Hosting Companies Of Hacked Site Owners

Need help with your WordPress site get a no obligation quote.

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I work on-line 100% of the time. I never go on-site to fix client issues ( well there was that one time but I doubt I’ll get asked back, they didn’t like my penguin pjs). I’m very comfortable working like this and as a result I often lose site that other people are not as comfortable with this as I am.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking how I can bridge that e- gap and help people to feel comfortable working with me online without ever meeting me in person.

It’s A Balancing Act

I don’t have time to “jump on Skype” for a quick call with everyone who requests it, I’ve got clients to service and a team to manage. How can I create an environment of trust and still get my stuff done.

How To Create On-line Comfort

Here are some of the techniques I use to put people at their ease when working with me.

Testimonials

I’ve got a long list of real testimonials from my clients. I’ve added their contact details not just their names so people can reach out and contact my previous clients if they want.

I also use a testimonials plugins that allows me to add head shots linking real people to real client’s faces.

Check out this post “The Power Of the Testimonals” for more thinking about testimonials.

Case studies

I talked  a lot about case studies in my previous posts “The Power Of Case Studies” (wow must get less dramatic with my post naming convention) so I’ll not go into too much detail but having lots of case studies in your site proves you work with clients and that you are legitimate.

Guarantees

Provide guarantees in your sales pages, let people know you will do what you say or give people their money back. Here’s my
Guarantee

“If we cannot solve your problem, we also offer a no fix no fee guarantee and all money will be refunded”

And yes I have had to invoke the guarantee a couple of times, not every problem can be solved.

Don’t ask for too much too soon

Asking people to pull out  their credit card and pay up front for an expensive service to a complete stranger is going to be a hard sell. If someone comes to you cold and they see a credit card form that puts a barrier to entry up.

You won’t be asked for any money from me unless we have had a couple of email exchanges.

All I ask from my first exchange with a potential client are details of their problem and their contact details.

It’s like asking for a phone number of someone cute as opposed to asking for … well you know where I’m going with this.

Use A Payment Provider People Trust

Using some random provider over http does not inspire confidence like a provider such as Paypal.

People trust paypal and know they can lodge a complaint and get their money back.

Share The Risk

When I started this caper I used to bill upon completion, this was excellent and my clients loved the feeling of trust, that was until I was stiffed by a couple of scummy people and other clients would delay payments.

Nowadays I share the risk by asking for a deposit and then taking the final payment upon completion to satisfaction, this way we are sharing the financial risk.

Sometimes You gotta Skype

This is the real reason for this post.

Recently I was doing my normal thing raising quotes telling people about my no fix no fee guarantee, this potential ( now current) client commented that it was all too mechanical.

I’d not thought about it in that way this has been tried and tested process for nearly five years.

A five minute call created the feelings of trust and the project was green lighted, sometimes we need to create a physical connection.

I know I said at the top of the article that I don’t have time to jump on Skype with everyone but now I’m encouraging a quick pre-project Skype call with new clients to make sure they are happy working with me and that I’m a real legit business.

I’m doing this with people who are past the tyre kicking stage so I’m giving my time to real potential clients, again it’s a balancing act.

Other Things I Have Done Which Work

A couple of other things I’ve done in the past which work but I’m not doing now for various reasons are:

Talking Head Video

Talking into a video so people can hear your voice and see your face is a great way to make an online connection.  People like to look at faces and read body language.

I’ve disabled my talking head video while I split test some other items but I found it increased conversions a lot.

Have A Live Chat Box

Add a live chat box so people can ping you and speak to you real time.  This one didn’t really work for me due to time zones, too often people were pinging me from the US when I was offline inthe UK, but if you service local clients this is a great

Wrap Up

The take away point for this post is that you should be bending over backwards to put people at their ease.

Have I missed any tricks, what do you do to increase a feeling of confidence in your potential clients?

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I love writing case study style blog posts for my business. They are a great way to provide great value to people through helpful content whilst at the same time marketing your business with some great under the radar techniques that don’t come across as pushy sales tactics.  let me tell you about The Power Of The  Case Study

How I Do Case Studies

I will highlight a particular problem a client has had and write a detailed study on how I fixed it.

My aim is to provide information about my services and a fix to people searching for solutions to their own problems.

Sounds simple but the elegance of the marketing underneath it is often missed.

The Marketing Begins

This is where content meets marketing and stealth selling begins. Not in a sleazy yellow highlighter stylie but in a useful way that can help people to solve their problems.

It Proves I Can Do X

I have performed service X for a client, then I write up a detailed report on how to implement X.

This is definite proof that I have the technical skills to do X and possibly the related task Y that may be in a clients mind.

Social Proof

By writing a case study I am providing social proof about my services.  It lets people know:

• People have hired me.
• People trust me
• People consider me an expert at performing that service.
• They can see how I work and that I won’t be a nightmare contractor

Assume The Role of Authority

Authority is too often bandied about in my opinion, but the ability to write a decent post about a subject, highlighting how you accomplished a solution will setup you up as an authority or content area specialists in the minds of your reader.

If you can confidently supply a solution in a blog post it means you can definitely supply that solution to a client.

Don’t Be A Douche

It’s very easy to write up a false case study based on the premise of “This is how I would do it if I had any clients” people will see through it.

Write from experience and real client interactions.

Doesn’t This Prevent People Hiring You?

The argument goes, if I open the Kimono won’t everyone then have the solution and not hire me.  In short no.  People will hire me because

a) They don’t like the look of the effort required to implement the solution from the case study. Perhaps it is too technical or they don’t have the confidence to do it themselves.

b) Are too busy to implement the solution.

c) It’s not something they can do themselves, if an acupuncturist provides a case study on healing migraine by sticking needles in points a -z, you are not rushing to your sewing kit.

Either way people see that I can provide solution X for them and hire me to do it.

Wrap Up – Power Of The Case Study

Get some case studies of the work you have done for your clients and see it turn into business.  It’s great none pushy and helpful marketing.

I’m always interested in writing posts about blogging, not just posts about WordPress technical stuff.  If you want more content like this leave me a comment and I’ll publish more about marketing with your blog.

Need help with your WordPress site get a no obligation quote.

My keyword density is down so the power of the case study

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In the third part of my series about the regular maintenance tasks you need to perform on your WordPress site,  I’m going to talk about optimising your WordPress site (in the UK we optimise never optimize 🙂 ).

See the base of this posts for the other articles in this series.

What Is Optimisation?

Optimisation is my fancy way of saying spring cleaning your WordPress site.  During an optimisation process you would clean up your database,  any unwanted files, any unwanted comments and remove any unused plugins or themes.

Here are the things I recommend you do every 3-6 months on your WordPress site.

Clear Plugin Tables

If you are anything like me, you are constantly testing new plugins on your site.  This is fine, but there is a downside to this, and that is the orphaned database tables that are left over.

Very few plugins are written to remove their data once they are deactivated.  As a result lots of tables can be left over creating an overhead on your database.

I recommend you run a plugin garbage collection every few months using this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/plugins-garbage-collector/

WARNING: this is a complex process please read this post before doing this https://dev.neilmatthews.com/year-blog-tidy-up-version.

Optimise Your Database Tables

Your WordPress database is also creating overhead for itself during it’s day to day work.  It add entries to it’s index and creates a working file which can grow in size if not truncated regularly.

If this file grows too big it can have an adverse affect on your site performance.  To fix this, I recommend the following plugin, but please remember as with all major database changes,take a backup first and know how to recover that backup.

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/

Install and configure this plugin as you would any other plugin and scroll down to the wp-optimize menu.

Select optimize tables (there spelling not mine) and click on process

I’m going to use this plugin for a number of other optimisation jobs so they can all be batched into one session.

Remove Revision History

WordPress create a revision copy of all posts, pages and custom post types every time you go into edit them.  This is great if you want to roll back to a previous version, but not great for database performance.  It is holding multiple version of each bit of content on your site.

It’s a good idea to purge post history every few months as it clogs up your database.

Turning back to our good friend wp-optimize,  click on remove post revisions and process the queue.

If you have lots of unwanted draft posts you can also do that at the same time with the check box to remove unwanted drafts.

Remove Unused Plugins

During an optimisation it’s a good idea to review your plugin list and remove any unwanted plugins.

First review your list for plugin functionality that you do not use any more and disable those plugins.

Next up,  review your plugins for redundant functionality e.g. I see lots of people with SEO plugins install that provide google sitemaps, but they will also have a sitemap plugin installed.  Same goes for security plugins, choose one and go with that, it’s not a good idea to install multiple security plugins thinking it will add additional layers of security, often it just causes conflicts.

Disabling plugins frees up memory for the rest of your site to use.

Then delete the plugins to free up disk space, and of course don’t forget to run plugin garbage collection to remove those database tables.

If you have plugins that are not used very often but you still need them, it’s good practise to disable them and only activate them as required, an example is the maintenance mode plugin, which you only need when your site is being worked on.

Remove Unused Theme Files

You can only really use one theme at a time, I recommend you delete any unused theme files to free up disk space.

Word of warning, if you have a child theme, you will also need to have a copy of the parent theme installed, don’t delete that.  A good example of this is Genesis, you will need the genesis files and your child theme files to make this work.

Unused Files Can Harbour Malware

Just a note on security (which we will be touching on in the next post). If you have a series of unused themes or plugins installed they could be harbouring out of date code which is vulnerable or infected with malware.  Deleting old code is also good security practise.

An example this would be the timthumb script, which  allows people to upload malware very easily unless patched.  I come across many many sites with old abandoned themes which include this script and can let hackers in.  Just because a theme is not active does not mean a theme script cannot be run.

Clear Spam Comments

Many site owners have anti-spam plugins in place, but often they do not clear out the spam.

Just because the comment is spammed, does not mean it has been removed from the database, I can think of four sites that have crashed or have had major performance issues due to huge spam comment backlogs.

A quick spam comment optimise with wp-optimize can save you a few hundred dollars in maintenance charges from a company like mine..

If you have a huge number of spam comments (tens of thousands) sometimes clearing out spam takes a long time and scripts can timeout  with a 500 error, if this happens to you, don’t worry simply re-run the scripts and clear them out in batches.  Akismet commonly does this for large backlogs.

Check your anti spam plugin, often they will clear out spam automatically for you.

Wrap Up

Optimisation like this doesn’t need to be done as often as backups and standard updates but I do recommend you visit your site every 2-3 months with this in mind.

Anyone who has signed up for our regular WordPress maintenance service gets all of these things done as a matter of course.

If you would like us to look after your backups, updates to WordPress, theme and plugins, regular optimisation, security and uptime monitoring, crash recovery then please check out our WordPress maintenance page, we are offering new clients a 15 day free trial.

 See the other posts In This Series

• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Backups
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Updates
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Optimisation
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Security Monitoring (coming soon)
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Uptime Monitoring (coming soon)

Photo Credit: It’sGreg via Compfight cc

In the second part of my series about the regular maintenance tasks you need to perform on your WordPress site, I’m going to talk about applying updates to WordPress, plugins and themes.

See the base of this posts for the other posts in this series.

Why Does WordPress Have So Many Updates?

The quick answer is it doesn’t, the core WordPress files are only updated a few times a year on a regular release program, the only interim fixes that need to be applied are security updates.

The update problem is due to the brilliant eco system around WordPress that allows developers to extend WordPress with plugins and theme.  The majority of sites I work with have 10 or more plugins, this code needs to bd patched and fixed on a regular basis.

Why Do We Need Updates

WordPress and it’s related plugins and themes are in a constant state of development.  New features are being added, fixes to bug are being released and most importantly of all patches to security loop holes are discovered and

We need to keep up with updates to ensure your site is secure,  bug free and lastly to take advantage of new functionality that has been added.

My preferred Way To Apply Updates

This is the method I use before applying updates

• Full backup of site
• Disable all plugins
• Enable default theme
• Update core
• Update plugins where applicable
• Updates theme if applicable
• Re-activate plugins
• Re-active theme

Rather than get into too  much detail, here is a video to show you the process

[leadplayer_vid id=”5229A6F939930″]

Updates Do Cause Problems

Because the developers or plugins, themes and WordPress core cannot test every permutation of installs there are sometimes issues after an update, so there are some cases when you need to roll back to previous versions of code.  This is when your backup comes into play and your knowledge of how to recover from your archive.

The “white screen of death” is a common problem after updates, WordPress crashes out and you cannot login until you deactivate your plugins or theme that is causing the problem.

A Word Of Caution

If you have made changes to your plugins or themes, when you apply updates those changes will be overwritten

Check out this post on stopping a plugin auto updating, or if you have customised your theme, you should consider moving those changes into a child theme

Next Up

In the next post in this series I will talk about the often overlooked maintenance task of  optimisation and clear outs of unused files and database content/

Need Help?

We are now offering an ongoing WordPress maintenance package.   As we go through this series of posts you will see that the maintenance tasks required to keep your site running smoothly do take up a lot of time, we can do that for you and free up that time to work on your website not in it updating and managing code.

 See the other posts In This Series

• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Backups
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Updates
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Optimisation
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Security Monitoring (coming soon)
• Regular WordPress Maintenance – Uptime Monitoring (coming soon)

Photo Credit: Kaptain Kobold via Compfight cc

This is a guest post by Kevin Gao from Comm100, see Kevin’s Bio at the bottom of this post

One of the first things many people do when starting up a new WordPress website is to begin building a communication channel with web visitors. This almost always involves putting a generic contact form on a “Contact Us” page. Indeed, contact form is an effective way of letting your web visitors keep in touch with you, but there are also other options available to WordPress powered websites such as live chat plugin.

What is Live Chat Plugin?

Live chat plugin, as the name suggests is a plugin that embeds live chat feature into your WordPress powered websites. By adding a live chat plugin, you can keep connected with web visitors and offer real time assistance to them. Whatever your WordPress powered website is, a commercial site or a personal blog, there is a good chance that your website can be enhanced by live chat plugin. Here I’ll take  Comm100 Live Chat WordPress Plugin as an example to explain how live chat plugin can benefit your blog or online business.

1. Reach Your Visitors in a Timely Manner With Comm100 Live Chat, your visitors can start a chat with you immediately and they don’t need to provide their emails or any other details as when filling in contact forms to connect with you. Even when you are offline, your visitors can leave messages and these messages can be directly delivered to your inbox. For a business website, this can help you improve you conversion and customer satisfaction. And for personal bloggers, the ability to make it easier for your readers to reach out can strengthen your relationships with them and enhance the personal aspect of your website.
2. Track Your Visitors in Real Time Along with providing live support to your web visitors, Comm100 Live Chat also keeps you updated about your web visitors’ footprints and activities. You can see where your web visitors come from, what they are viewing currently, how long they have stayed on your website, what keywords they use, how many times they have come and many more. This can give personal bloggers a bird’s-eye-view of the blog readers. As for online businesses, you can easily have an insight of what your web visitors are interested in and identify your potential customers, thus formulating your marketing campaigns and carving your offers in a better way to win more customers.
3. Invite Your Visitors Proactively Instead of re-actively waiting for web visitors to connect with you, proactive invitation allows personal bloggers to engage readers proactively to exchange thoughts and ideas, exploring ways of improving blogs. This feature is especially useful for
   online businesses as you can not only spot the best prospects, but also have the ability to actively reach out to them. For example, when you notice your web visitors have been on a certain page for a while without taking any action, chances are they
   are interested in your products on the page or need help with something. If you can get them into a live chat, you will have a great opportunity to turn them into your customers. To make things easier, the invitation can be done automatically
   based on rules you predefine. There are a lot of parameters such as visit times, referring page, search keywords etc. available for you to design your invitation program based on your own needs. By far, the most important practice of proactive invitation is to treat it like a science ¨C to test a wide variety of implementations, make changes, and continue measuring.

Wrap it up:

Live chat plugin can be an alternative to engage your web visitors beyond the traditional emails and contact forms. Whether you are a personal blogger looking to connect with your audience or a business owner using WordPress to build your website, live chat plugin should be able to help you.

Author Bio:

Kevin Gao is the founder and CEO of Comm100, a leading provider of live chat software for business. As a software developer as well as a small business expert, he’s always ambitious to revolutionize the way of online customer service and communication.