Welcome to the inaugural post of Maintenance Monday, a collection of resources for WordPress website owners.
These resources will be targeted at small business owners and managers rather than WordPress developers (although as a small business owner, you might be the web developer too!). There are tons of online resources for developers, but this blog is devoted to the front end business and marketing side of WordPress website manintenance.
Specifically, these resources help small businesses understand the three key areas that Steady Sites targets in every WordPress maintenance plan: Security, Performance, and Education.
Why “Maintenance Monday”? These are both unexciting words on their own, but they are also very necessary parts of life. If you see them as “negative” words, just remember that two negatives make a positive. Or something like that.
Here are the highlights from this month’s collection of WordPress maintenance tips and resources. This is not exhaustive by any means; in fact, I prefer to keep it short so you don’t get exhausted!
If you have any questions or need help integrating any of these resources, please contact me.
Security
WordPress Maintenance Resources to help keep your website secure
I cannot wait for the day when someone comes up with an ingenious alternative to passwords. I have started experimenting with alternative solutions, like LastPass, but if you are not comfortable with a password manager or have only a few passwords, here’s a utility to test the strength of your password.
Security and Privacy Considerations for Website Owners and Developers – This article is more concerned with privacy and being careful what type of information you collect and post on your website. It is written from an American perspective, but Canadians need to be especially careful. When in doubt, contact your lawyer rather than your webmaster or developer.
The Beginner’s Guide to Akismet – If you blog often, you probably have noticed the occasional spammy comment under a blog post. Akismet is a fantastic plugin that helps fight comment spam. This guide will walk you through setting it up.
Performance
WordPress Maintenance Resources to help keep your website optimized
Simple Methods for Speeding Up WordPress – many of these are based on a proper setup of WordPress, but consider something like Total Cache or even a CDN service like CloudFlare.
If you are not sure what CloudFlare is, check out this excellent tutorial – Integrating CloudFlare With WordPress
Top 8 Project Management Plugins For WordPress – I recently did some research to find management tools that would help me manage my work time more efficiently. I actually settled on some iOS apps, but project management within your WordPress website is a great idea too. Like any app, however, you are dependent on the developers to keep them updated.
Education
WordPress Maintenance Resources to help you manage your website
Four Stupid Reasons People Don’t Blog – Chris Lema claims he’s not a writer, but I disagree. His writing is informative and fun. So if he says we can do it, we’d better listen up!
20 Helpful Google Chrome Extensions for WordPress Bloggers – Makes me want to switch to Chrome!
You probably know that you can integrate your WordPress website with your social media, like Twitter and Facebook. But do you know how many different ways they can be integrated? Check out Elegant Themes’ post on How To Integrate Twitter With WordPress (and also their link How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress)
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