5 Ways to Keep WordPress Running Smoothly – By Karen Jackie & Dana Rockel

Here are some easy steps you can take to ensure that your WordPress blog is running optimally.

1. Choose Your Host Wisely
While it’s tempting to go for a shared plan that’s under $5/month, you have to remember you get what you pay for. As your site gets popular, you may need to consider upgrading to a virtual private server, a dedicated server, or even a cloud solution. These plans can often guarantee better uptimes (especially when you land on the home page of Digg) and offer superior performance overall.

2. Fight Spam with Plugins
It’s no accident that Akismet is WordPress’s most popular plugin (and not just because it’s included with your install). It really stops most spam in its tracks. Want even more protection? You can supplement Akismet by installing Simple Trackback Validation (to thwart pesky trackback spam) and Bad Behavior. As spammers get more sophisticated, so do these tools. No blog should be launched without them.

3. Back It Up
Remember you can’t rely on your host alone to get your blog’s data back. As with any website, there are many, many points of failure, including lost files, corrupted databases, plugin breakages, and software upgrade errors. Install the WordPress Database Backup plugin for peace of mind. (Bonus Tip: create a special Gmail account and have your backup files sent there daily). When things go wrong, you can restore to your last good known configuration and be back running quickly.

4. Watch Those Upgrades
If you are running a newer version of WordPress (2.6 and above), you can be bombarded with prompts to update your out-of-date software. If you have a lot of plugins or a customized theme, you should think twice about blindly pressing any update buttons (see #3 and do a backup first!). Also, please delete any “automatic upgrade” plugins, which have been known to lock many an admin out of their dashboard due to incompatibilities. Learn how to create development server and test out your upgrades before applying them to your production site.

5. Why is My Blog Slow?
There can be many reasons why your blog is behaving up like a snail. Common causes can be traced to:

 Your host or your plan (see #1)
 Running too many potentially conflicting plugins (pare them down when possible)
 Using too many widgets (which may be poorly coded)
 Relying on external services (when you pull in files from Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube, for example, it means you have to wait on them to serve up images, tweets, and videos from their sites.)
 Using a free, off-the-shelf theme (they can be programmed poorly or even have rogue code within them)

Toolbox
 WordPress – http://www.wordpress.org
 Akismet – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet
 Simple Trackback Validation – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/
 Bad Behavior – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bad-behavior/
 WordPress Database Backup – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

Follow these 5 tips and you’ll find that your WordPress blog is more stable and easier to manage.

Karen Jackie, is the Principal and Chief Architect of Ideas and Execution of ContentRobot and Dana Rockel is the Principal and Chief Engineer of Design of ContentRobot.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue6.pdf
FeedFront issue 6 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/06

Tagged as: contentrobot.com, dana rockel, karen jackie, wordpress