Posts tagged wp

My Top WordPress Tips and Tricks

Gotta say this one took a while to start up, i think its been like 4 years in the drafts, not that i didn’t have anything to say hahaha, more that i was changing my mind, i kinda always want to make interesting posts and not just another copy paste nonsense, if i say something, it means i tried it and it works!

WordPress has been an important part of my web stack, i would say half of my sites run wordpress, as a cms or even as a simple app, wordpress has grown a lot and it has changed a lot, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, also im keeping this more general, i’ll make more posts about each point, especially if you guys ask for it! ;D

Some hehehe of my Best Tips and Tricks for WordPress

Get yourself some good hosting! No you don’t need AWS iron clad professional hosting or “professional wordpress host”, but you need something that works good from a reputable company, i’ll post some recommendations below, but if you want your wordpress site to run smoothly it all starts with a good host.

WordPress.com is a good alternative! On the segway from hosting, you can instead of self host, always try wordpress.com in my opinion its expensive, but you absolutely get what you pay, so if you are 100% newbie or you want to run a super high end wordpress site, just pay for wordpress.com.

Backup Backup and Backup some More! My backup strategy is multilayer and maybe a good idea for a future post, but make sure your host makes backups and you make backups as well, in my opinion the best is if you can make them automatic, so you don’t need to worry, the more important the wordpress site, the more backups you should have, it’s good your host makes backups but never rely on those, i’ve learned that the hard way!

Create Layers of Security! I see a lot of people recommending security plugins for wordpress and “firewalls”, not saying that they aren’t good, things like Jetpack Protect are pretty good, but don’t let your security be based on just one plugin and one setting, your host should already provide some security, i also like to lock down most things in the wordpress settings, especially if its stuff i don’t need, like file editing and finally i use Cloudflare to keep the site fast but the also to lockdown and secure the backend, also you can separate the backend from the main site (ill post about this some other time) to create a static wordpress site! The point is security works best if it has several layers to go through.

Keep Everything Updated! I don’t mean just wordpress, plugins and themes, i mean your host needs to update things or if you are running the web server, you need to keep the updates, you can’t rely just in strong security, that’s just one like of protection, keeping everything updates means most of the time better performance and better security.

Setup WordPress Correctly on First Install! If you setup wordpress correctly that avoids a lot of the issues of wordpress, things like not having an admin user or the database be called wp_ , there are a bunch of sites online that explain this step by step, and i know wordpress taunts that its super easy to install, but trust me, take 15 minutes to install and setup and you will have a more secure and performant wordpress.

Use a Cache Plugin! I hate this, i think wordpress should have a caching system and a SEO system built in, but it doesnt and it makes a huge diference, if you have a litespeed server, you can use the plugin Litespeed Cache, but i also like WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache, but any of the top plugins will do just fine.

Try and Avoid Overusing Plugins! WordPress plugins are great, they open up the platform, like i said above im going to install a cache plugin and a seo plugin, but think extra hard about installing any plugin, the less you have the more performance and secure your install will be, so only install the absolute essential plugins.

And that’s it, why oh why did it take this long to publish this… oh well better late than never, have a good one!

Oh and the hosting recommendations, well check BuyShared from BuyVM (its where this site is hosted), also check MyW and Knownhost! ;D

Bye Blogger Hello WP!

This isn’t so much why am i using WordPress, because by now im a power user, about half of my sites use WordPress in one way or another its still a great platform.

No… this is more about Blogger, the Google owned blogging platform was always one of my favourites, its simple and super fast, especially for a plain site/placeholder and or blog it has served me well and its has slowly been updated.

However its getting worst and worst with time, it keeps restricting or worst removing old posts, because a silly image is considered adult, because i link to a site that Google doesn’t approve, because of something i said, why?

And its not on one go, its like every couple of months it scans the site and deems what is approved and what isn’t and for EACH post i have to make a claim that its ok and they are brought back, if Google does this to its own blogging service, what else are they doing to search, but i don’t care, if Google wants to fuck around, go for it, they can even remove my site from their index, i…. don’t…. care.

So moving what little i still had from Blogger to WP, I was considering Tumblr but that also seems like its gone down the drain, so self host is best, at least you don’t have your overlord landlord overbearing and deciding what they deem right or wrong… and that can only make me happy! ;D