Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Well, literally not figuratively . Or is it the other way around?

I was thinking about premium WordPress plugins.

What do you use?

If you don’t use them, why?

I have two.

One I lost. Yup, forgot what it was called and where I downloaded it. The other one is an RSS bomber, which I have yet to use. At least I know where that one is!

Out there in the big wide WordPress plugin world, there are many premium plugins that enhance your SEO, promise to fetch you traffic and even bake you a cake of you let them. Ok, I am making up the cake baking bit, but if there was one, I’d know about it.

So can your words be music to my ears? Can you tell me what you recommend as premium WordPress plugins, point me to any reviews that have caught your eye?

If you have created a WP premium plugin, come and tell us about it, as I said I am all ears today

Sarah

Now that Google has confirmed that a website’s speed – the time it takes for a page to load – is taken into account when considering your website’s position, it’s even more important to ensure your WordPress is working at its most efficient. This is not cause for panic  but it is something the anyone using WordPress should have a look at – having lots of shiny plugins and fancies can slow your website/blog – so we’ll look at just what can be done to speed things up a bit.

Take a look at Matt Cutts’ blog post on this subject, and at Google’s Let’s make the web faster page.  What we’ll do with you over the next few days is take you through a few things to look at to be sure that your WordPress is not holding you back – and not just because it makes a difference to Google. Your visitors may also decide to not bother if they have to wait for your page to load.

As well as the above links, take a look at Google’s official webmaster blog post for some useful links that can help you research your own site’s speed.

Then in the next Blogmistress post we will take you through a few aspects for consideration and which can speed things up a bit and ensure your WordPress blog or website loads in a timely manner?

As I was timely reminded yesterday, comments are important to some peoples’ blogs. So there needs to be a way of enabling your commenters to keep informed of the conversation. On a chatty blog, like Birds on the Blog it’s vital but on my transport blogs it’s not so important.

So what options are available for those that like reminders?

Disqus is used by a lot of probloggers and social media bloggers, it enables the conversation to take place in other web locations and be tracked back to your blog. If you are a big fan of stats and tracking, then this is the tool for you. If you click on the link it will take you to the WordPress page where it explains how to install. Easy, and easy to keep track of. It also allows people to comment using a login from another platform – like Twitter or Facebook as well as using OpenID or a Disqus account.

Tempus Fugit have created a fab plugin that has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times and that allows a commenter to subscribe to the conversation.

There is also Subscribe2 which allows html emails to be sent and is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress.

All this is lovely, and helps your community providing the plugin doesn’t conflict with your WordPress theme. If it does that, you are back to the drawing board!

Sarah

As you know I don’t speak fluent geek just yet (I need lots of practice), so I shall just come right out and say it… have you ever broken your blog? Babs aka Blogmistress must despair of me, as I am always breaking them.

The first time I did it, I resolved that one myself, I called the hosting company in California and asked them to reset my blog to it’s last back up point (it was backed up every 24 hours with this host), and everything was restored, phew! I just wish they were all that easy to fix!

The second time, I learned I needed to back up… and I lost all my content, all my comments etc, my blog still does look a shadow of it’s former self

There really is no excuse not to back up your blog, just have a quick look at how many plugins are available to keep your data safe…

Some will back up your blog and send you an email with the data, so you can give this to your blogmistress to get it restored if like me you can’t do it yourself. If you have a lot of content, think how you will replace that if the worst case scenario happens, you could land up losing the whole lot if you are not careful.

Breaking your blog isn’t limited to the things you can inflict upon it, oh no, there are ways to break it without even realising it!

Try upgrading your WordPress to the latest version without doing what the Blogmistress tells you and guess what, no blog – just the white wall of death (AKA as white wall of doom or as it’s popularly called in this house OMFG what have I done…).

Upgrading a plugin can also have a detrimental effect along with changing from one theme to another. Although you may like the fact that some plugins make your blog super fabulous and fast, the theme you love may conflict with it and one of them will have to go… you will only find out when your viewings go down or you do some cross browser testing, or your blog just plain stops working

The image for this blog is a cat sitting on a laptop, that was no accident. My laptop is at the dining table, I have had cats knock cans of Pepsi Max into the keyboard and whole blog posts erased when they have tried to cross the laptop when I am not looking. The cats walking across the keyboard I can semi cope with, using the Lazarus form recovery tool in Firefox. The cats have broke at least 3 of my blogs. Watch out for outside influences.

As I type this I notice that I called this the beginners guide to breaking your blog when actually I am quite an expert at it!

What have I missed – any that I have yet to try?

Sarah