WordPress Tips: It's Time to Spring Clean Your Blog!

Get ready to dig in and clean under the hood of your blog! It's important you take the time to periodically clean up the following parts of your WordPress site.

Between all the plugin's, passwords, domains, drafts and more, there is a lot going on under the hood of your blog. WordPress tips like the following I'll share today will help prevent you from those malicious peeps out there trying to hack their way in to YOUR blog. Of course nothing is ever guaranteed but the more you stay on top of things, the better results you'll have.

Here are 5 simple WordPress tips to keep your site in tip top shape:

1) Plugin's – Do you really need all those plugin's? Nope, you don't. Have an objective before just adding WordPress plugin's willy nilly. If you're not sure whether you'll use a plugin, don't install it. Even disabled/deactivated plugins can pose a security risk to your site. Plus having a million plugin's installed certainly has the potential to slow down your site.

See WordPress: Managing Plugins

2) Passwords – We all have them, those easy to remember passwords that we shouldn't be using. I highly recommend that you start making the transition to LastPass and taking the time to switch over all those easy passwords like yourname123 to ones that are much more secure. Doing this will make it much harder for those pesky hackers to break in and get logged in to your most valuable assets. Plus it's time to STOP saving your passwords to your browser.

3) Make a list of all your WordPress blogs – This may not sound like an important Spring cleaning task but trust me it is. For those of us that have numerous blogs/sites, we should all be keeping up with them frequently to make sure they are updated when it comes to plugins, overall blog updates or delete them if you no longer plan to keep them. It might even save you some money in the long run if you're still paying for a domain that you have no intention of keeping. And it can also save your hide should a hacker try to break in. If you keep your site updated, you make it just that much harder for them to be compromised.

If you don't want to have to bother with keeping track of all the updates, let us do that for you here at WPSL. The Pro, Super and Premium packages all include scheduled backups, monthly maintenance and more.

4) Blog Post Drafts – I am guilty of this one and have many, many blog posts in draft in my WordPress blogs. How would you feel if your WordPress blog missed a backup, crashes and you lose all of those awesome ideas for blog posts? I know I would feel horrible. It's time to start putting your blog post drafts into something like Evernote just to be safe.

I have heard that the Google robots can still crawl drafts and in fact index them. You can see what's indexed in google by typing in “site:www.yoursitename.com” (without the quotes). I'm afraid to look myself.

5) Comments/Comment Spam – Did you know that comment spam on your blog can tarnish your reputation with Google? Yep in fact it can. Google crawls blogs and if they find a spammy link they will pass right over it and not give it a second thought of helping you out in the search engine. Another thing about comment spam is that those bad links have the potential to infect your WordPress blog. You definitely don't want your readers to click on something just to get a virus and especially if it could have been prevented by the simple task of monitoring your blog comments.

Your WordPress comment settings should be set to the following:

* You want the comment author to fill out name and e-mail
* Before a comment appears, comment author must have a previously approved comment.

The above means if they are first timers to your blog, they will automatically be put in moderation. If you think they are someone you want commenting on your blog, approve them and you'll never have to do it again. The other settings are personal preference.

What other tips for a WordPress Spring Cleanup would you recommend? Please leave a comment below.

For help implementing any of the recommendations above, please click here.