Professional Tips to Improve Your WordPress Website

Our team solves many small WordPress issues for our clients each week, so we want to pass on some professional tips for those entrepreneurs who operate their own WordPress site. We will cover these tips over the next 2 articles.

Keep Your WordPress Site Secure

WordPress offers some of the tightest security available, but hacking does happen. Once a hacker has gained access to your site, they can mess it up quickly causing you headaches to fix it.
Here are some ways to make sure that you’ve secured your site.

• Make sure you have an automatic backup of your site happening. You can use a plugin like Backup Buddy or your host can look after it. This won’t help security, but it will certainly help to have a restore point if you are hacked.
• Choose a strong password… by the way, ‘password’ and ‘123456’ are not secure passwords.
• Don’t use the ‘admin’ user for creating content. Or better still, create a new admin user and remove the default one.
• Remove any old installations of WordPress on your hosting account. Old WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacking.
• There are more things you can do but this is a good start. Keeping WordPress clean and using high quality services will help you improve the security of your site.

Keep It Clean and Streamlined

As a WordPress user, you should always try to keep your dashboard clean. This means you should:

• Keep your WordPress core up to date manually or using the auto-update feature.
• Publish or delete your comments and trackbacks.
• Uninstall old or unused themes.
• Update your theme when an update is available.
• Uninstall old or unused plugins.
• Update your plugins when an update is available.

If you have a custom theme or custom plugins, let your developer know in advance. They can create new plugins and build child themes, instead of changing the code of the original extension. It’s a little technical, but it’s worth it over the long term.

Speed is the Objective

A 1 second delay in site load time will result in a 7% decrease in conversions. This means that the faster your site is, the more money it will make you.

Here are a few ways to keep speed a focus of your attention:

• A great host will result in a faster site.
• The Pingdom site speed tool will help you check your site speed. As a rule of thumb, under 2 seconds is excellent, 5-7 seconds is acceptable and over 7 seconds means you should take action.
• Large images will kill site speed. Make sure you optimize images before you upload them to the web. The Pingdom tool will pick up any issues on specific pages. WP Smush It will squish your existing bulky images.
• A caching plugin like WP Total Cache will help if your host doesn’t have caching.

There’s always more that you can do, but this is a great start.

Invest In Your WordPress Website For The Long Run

WordPress is your most cost effective option, which makes it great for a tight budget. However, you should still consider investing in things that really matter. Here are some key investments to make:

• A great looking theme from WooThemes, Elegant Themes, Genesis, or Thesis.
• High quality plugins from reputable developers – remember to always check the review in the plugin directory and the reputation of the developer.

The saying “You get what you pay for” really applies to your WordPress site.

Free hosting, themes and plugins will get your site off the ground. But if you’re serious about your business, you need to invest in your site or you’ll look like an amateur. You might leave yourself open to security issues as well.