Important but Ignored Resource Roundup
This is a Resource Round up sublist. A list of all the Resource Roundups is kept at:
If you haven't read that yet, then these Resource Roundup sublists are my curated collections of training on WA centered around specific topics.
Mel, Onmyownterms , recently did an article on viewing your website in multiple browsers on multiple platforms. I made the comment that this fell into the category of “important things people don't think about” and that maybe we should make a custom tag for such topics so people could find them easily. I suggested ITPDTA, but that went over like a lead balloon. I thought about it some more and came up with "Important but Ignored", and since I didn't ask anyone's opinion this time, I'm going to call it a winner and go with it. :) So that's what this is going to be tagged with, but I hope it will catch on with anyone making a similar post.
The first post listed below is Mel's post that inspired this whole thing. The rest of the topics are the ones that I came up with off the top of my head based on years of working with clients that have run into problems in these areas. Unfortunately, by the nature of the topic, there's not a lot of training on WA for them yet, so to a certain extent these are just placeholders until I'm able to start posting training for them. If you want to know when it's updated just leave a comment and I'll comment with updates when I post them. Of course if you want to beat me to the punch and do some training, I'll be more than happy to include yours here intstead.
Make sure you view your website in multiple browsers on multiple platforms, because it won't look the same everywhere.
Wordpress security is HUGE!! You probably know that WP is the number one CMS platform being used by something like +25% of all websites. The corollary is that it makes a great target for hackers because if they find a good exploit, they have a ton of people to use it on. The tutorial in the link above recommends a product I haven't used, so I can't vouch for it myself. But it's what I could find for now.
Also beyond just Wordpress itself, there are a lot of plugins and themes with security vulnerabilities. https://wpvulndb.com/ maintains a list of vulnerabilities that they have found so make sure you check the plugins and themes you use against the list.
Related to security, any good developer will fix a vulnerability when notified about it and push and update of their theme, plugin, or Wordpress Core itself. This does you no good if you don't use the update. The article above is by Carson regarding doing updates.
Browser Security
This is something people probably don't think about when it comes to there web hosting. If you save your passwords in your browser and your computer gets hacked they'll get the passwords to your site as well. I've had this happen to two different clients. I only use Firefox to save passwords because they used to be the only browser that would let you set a master password to encrypt all your other passwords so hackers couldn't use them. Chrome and the other browsers may have changed since then, but I haven't looked into it.
Credit goes to Gila for reminding me of the other one I missed. In the event that your site gets hacked or any catastrophe strikes, having regular backups will save a lot of headache and possibly all your hard work. The link above lists four ways to back up your site. I used to us a plugin called Wordpress Database Backup because it emails you your entire database on a regular basis, so you don't have to remember to do it. I still recommend that plugin, but I'm moving to a paid plugin that I haven't fully tested so I can't say anything about it.
Also, you these options only cover your data. You still need to back up your media library separately, because when you recover your site the files need to be in the right place or WP won't be able to find them. I use FTP to do this, so I don't have good answer on this for the average user yet. When I do I'll come back and update it.
The site backup portion reminded me of something else. Every time you edit a page/post or WP autosaves it, WP saves a new copy of it in your database. After a while all these saved copies add up and can slow your site down. Clearing them can solve this problem. The link above goes straight to the revisions clearing portion of an 8 part training that covers several of the things found here as well.
That link is to a question that was asked about pinging in Wordpress. If you scroll down my answer explains pinging what it means for your site. And this is a tutorial by Jay regarding the services he uses. Not sure if it's the one recommend in the other comment, but we'll go with it.
Pagespeed optimization
This is just a placeholder for a future Resource Roundup. There's so much to cover here, that it deserves it's own post.
I almost forgot this one and originally posted this without it, so this is a quick edit to add it. I haven't actually watched this video yet, but come on it's Jay. It's got to be good.
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Thanks. I appreciate it, but really the credit goes to him. I'm mostly just feeding off him. He mentions something that reminds me of something that I've picked up over the here's and this is the end result. And even then I need people like Gila below to come by and remind me of what I missed. :)
Gila for the win!!!! I ideas for this list started popping in my head as soon as I read Mel's post, but I didn't get a chance to write it until later. I knew I was missing something, but couldn't think it for the life of me. You hit it right on the head, and then the backups section reminded me of deleting revisions. So you got two for one. Thanks for the reminder.
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thanks, mate, great to know these tools, I heard of them but needed a refresher.
Happy to help.