Sooner or later every WordPress blog or website owner wants to know how to speed up their WordPress website. A well performing website is good for users and for  search engine rankings. So lets look at what you can do about it.

The more you post on your WordPress website the bigger your database grows and the more plugins you install and uninstall Your database then gets bloated with uncleared settings. What can you do about that and what other measures can you take to get that initial install speed back into the site?

Initial Actions to Take

First of all you need to take three actions on your files and database:

• backup,
• backup,
• and BACKUP

Why this emphasis on creating a backup of your website and especially the database? Because you are going to work on that database.  Don’t worry you don’t need to learn MySql statements and queries (although some basic knowledge can help). You can do most of the work with plugins.

So, did you create a good backup and test it or at least check that it is done? You can create a backup via your providers CPanel or request it via a ticket if you don’t know how to do it yourself.

After your backup verification check your baseline by running a page check on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. Your goal should be to reach a score of at least 90/100.

Two Easy Plugins to Start

With the latest versions of WordPress you are filling your WordPress database with many revisions of your posts and pages if you go back into them and edit the content. These revisions  are rarely used and you can clean them out and prevent them from being created in the future and thereby reduce the number of revisions stored.

Revision Control is the first plugin you can install and you can change the settings to suit your needs.

Now that you have revisions under control you need to clean out the old revisions and with the next plugin you can do several things in one click.

WP-Optimize gives you the options to clean:

• all post revisions
• all auto draft posts
• marked spam comments
• unapproved comments
• and optimize your database tables

Just select your choices and click PROCESS to clean and optimize. In the configuration screen you will have a large overview of the tables in your database and it shows you if they need optimization or not.

Getting Closer to Your Turbo Options

There is a great plugin called Clean Options that can help you to find and eliminate old entries left by plugins you no longer use. This looks pretty easy but you must have some knowledge of which plugins you used before and which plugins you removed.

If you follow the instructions of this plugins documentation you will see a large list of fields that might be no longer in use, but please be careful and if you are unsure about one or more of them, don’t clean them out.

What you can look for are descriptions that are clearly related to old plugins. In my case these were entries like wp_insert and whydowork_.You might recognize others from plugins you stopped using.

Cleaning your images and reducing their size with Smush It.

Smush It is a plugin that reduces image file sizes and improves performance. It is simple to use and is easy to configure. .

Do I use it myself? Sometimes I do, especially if I am working on websites other than my own. I prepare all my images before hand by optimizing and, if necessary, resizing them via Irfanview.

Using a WordPress Cache Plugin

I have tried several caching plugins on my WordPress websites and the one that out performs the others for me is W3 Total Cache, but it requires the right configuration.

For your understanding, a cache plugin takes the result of a post request and stores it on a disc as static HTML. If the next visitor to your website requests the same page this cached version is shown. W3 Total Cache uses a mechanism for the temporary storage of your web document to increase performance. The cache itself is cleared after some time (you can set that time in the configuration).

Installing W3 Cache is easy. Just install it like any other plugin by searching a plugin from the back end.

The next steps are to configure it. If you get any warnings on these settings start by checking if your .htaccess file is writable during this configuration session.

The first action is to disable the preview option.

Next is to enable the settings for:

• Page Cache
• Database Cache
• Browser Cache
• Under Miscellaneous only check “Verify rewrite rules” and save all settings.

Click on the menu option titled Browser Cache and activate the options as shown below. This is not the standard setting and has a great effect on your site’s speed.

Save everything, exit out of this screen and then go back into it.

You will see some error messages in the top part of the screen.

Click the option auto-install and you will be fine.

Ready? Now go and check again on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to see if your scores have improved. Note: Run the test twice because your cache may need to kick in.

If this has no effect, you either already had a good score or you need to look at your theme and plugins, but you will see that on the Pingdom tools page. The final option if nothing else helps is to look for a new hosting provider.

Below is the ultimate score of 100/100, but you should take that with a big grain of salt as this is a new installation with nothing posted yet, but with all the plugins active I mentioned above.

So what about your site, did you get better scores or do you have extra options and information that you can share that will speed up your website?

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

In my book review WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers I told you that I missed one piece of content, which was security, and that I would give you some tips on how to secure your WordPress website.

WordPress is a very popular Content Management System and as such is always under attack by hackers and crackers.

Most of the hack attempts are not focused on WordPress core security holes but rather plugin or theme security weaknesses.

Basic WordPress Security

WordPress security starts with the installation of your website and these steps can help:

• choose a good web host
• create a cryptic database and database username for your MySql database
• create a highly secure password
• don’t use the standard wp_ prefix for ou tables
• don’t use the standard Admin user name but create a more difficult username and matching secure password

After installation use the permalinks option to create a .htaccess file in the root of your website.

Once the installation is done you can remove the following files:

• wp-config-sample.php
• readme.html (contains information on what version of WordPress you are running)
• wp-admin/install.php
• wp-admin/install-helper.php

Secure your files by changing the permissions on:

.htaccess to 404 (or 604)

wp-header.php tot 400 (or 600)

if possible move your wp-config.php file one folder up and set the security to 400 or 600 if your hosting company won’t allow 400.

WordPress Security Plugins

There are four plugins I always install on my WordPress websites:

WordPress Firewall 2 monitors web request to your website and blocks obvious attacks.

File Monitor Plus this plugin will send you an email if a file has changed on your website and which file(s) are changed.

WP Security Scan will let you know if you already are under attack and will give you extra tips and aids to block some standard attacks.

Login Lockdown looks at login attempts that fail from a certain IP address and shuts down login functionality for a certain amount of time for that address preventing further brute force attacks.

All of the above measures have helped me to secure my WordPress websites from attacks on several occasions.

WordPress 3 Cookbook

I also got a chance to read WordPress 3 Cookbook, a fun concept that gives you “recipes” that you can use on your own WordPress website.

Here is a short overview of the chapters in this fine book:

Chapter 1: The WordPress Cook’s Tools
Chapter 2: Installing and Customizing Themes
Chapter 3: Working with Plugins and Widgets
Chapter 4: Customizing Content Display
Chapter 5: Building Interactivity and Community
Chapter 6: Implementing Online Sales and Advertising
Chapter 7: Making an SEO Friendly Site
Chapter 8: Enhancing Usability and Accessibility
Chapter 9: Managing Maintenance and Improving Security

And yes this one has a chapter on security :-) but the rest of the book is also a very good read and gives you over 100 short practical articles that you can use.

I really enjoyed reading and implementing several of the recipes on my own WordPress websites and I really suggest you take a look at the WordPress 3 Cookbook
as it has some nice pearls in it … but that said you need to be aware that you should have a code editor and FTP program. I recommend PSpad and FileZilla

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

Packt Publishers is very good when it comes to identifying great topics for their business and finding people who can write in a clear and simple way. In this new book WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers by Paul Thewlis bring you the knowledge to start the process of blogging for any purpose, not just business.

Here is a short overview of the chapters so you can see what is covered in this book.

Chapter 1: A Blog Less Ordinary—What Makes a Great Blog?
Chapter 2: Introducing our Case Study—WPBizGuru
Chapter 3: Designing your Blog
Chapter 4: Images and Videos
Chapter 5: Content is King
Chapter 6: Search Engine Optimization
Chapter 7: Supercharged Promotion
Chapter 8: Connecting with the Blogosphere
Chapter 9: Analyzing your Blog Stats
Chapter 10: Monetizing your Blog
Chapter 11: Managing Growth

WPBizGuru a Case Study

After the first introduction of some great WordPress blogs and how blogs can be used Paul goes into a case study showcasing a new site on http://blog.wpbizguru.com/

In the following chapters he takes you from the basics of the design and changes to match you own ideas (don’t get scared by the coding!, it is not that hard..) up until how to write your content and using images and video in your posts.

What I really like in these first chapters is the way he helps you with ideas on how to create a blogging plan and how to implement is focusing on the real purpose of you blog / website.

The following chapters are about how to get traffic to your blog, how to measure that traffic and what to do with it.

The monetizing chapter is a bit limited on how to get the most of your blog traffic, but is surely a start in the right direction. Managing growth is not only about keeping the performance of your site but also about keeping up with comments and reducing spam in your blog.

WordPress Plugins

Paul mentions several plugins in his book that I think are very good, however there are three plugins he uses that I don’t use anymore for several reasons:

• Akismet = replaced by Growmap Anti Spam Plugin (I use the premium version which comes with Commentluv) because it works better and the free version is well.. free (Akismet is not free in many cases https://akismet.com/signup/)
• Super Cache = replaced by Hyper Cache if you want it simple or W3 Total Cache for the more techies among us.
• All-in-One-SEO = replaced WordPress SEO by Yoast, no not because he is Dutch like me, but the plugin just works better and is also free (AIOSEO has a premium version)

Conclusion

WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers is not just for Business bloggers, it is a great starting point for any WordPress blog or website you want to setup. Like I mentioned before I really liked the Blogging plan layout and the focus on the purpose of your blog / website.

One thing I missed was how to secure your blog against hackers, so I will write a blog post on that next because you really need to secure your site. The Backup and restore section of the book are mandatory for making sure you can get your blog back fast.

All in all, a great starting point for any new WordPress website owner that wants his or her website to succeed.

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

This is a question I get on a regular base: How can I convert my Static HTML website into a WordPress website?

Let me give you a warning in advance, a WordPress website needs to be kept updated!
A static HTML site can run for years without you ever touching it for things like security updates or new versions. Just to make you aware of the need for updates!

Another thing that needs really close attention is to make sure that your rankings in Google and other search engines stay intact.
That means you need to make sure your URLs of your old site will stay the same with your new WordPress based website.

Luckily this can be done and for those few links you want to change you can redirect them via your .htaccess file.

But first things first, the conversion of your website.

First, what do you need:

• good hosting that support php
• a mysql database: databasename, username for that database and the password for that useraccount
• the possibility to use a .htaccess file

If you are not sure about the above mentioned items, ask your website hosting provider!

Installing WordPress in a Subfolder

The first thing you will do is to install WordPress into a Subfolder like /cms .

After you finished the installation you have to set the Privacy setting so that Search Engines are not allowed to visit and index your site (Settings -> Privacy) so your new URLs are not getting into the search engine indexes until you are ready with your conversion.

Now you can start building your WordPress website next to your current site, that site will stay active while you build a new one.

Keeping Old URLs

Like a mentioned before, it is very important that you keep the URLs for the new site the same as the old one!

That is why you need to set the Permalinks to custom with the value /%postname%.html this will result in Posts links with the extension .html.

During the development of your new site the urls will be like /cms/page-url.html , but after the final steps this will become /page-url.html , that same as the old site.
Make sure that the “slugs” are the same as the old site, and there is a plugin that you will need which is “.html on pages” . I take it you will have some pages that use the extension .html

You can now start to convert your old pages to WordPress by copying the text or the HTML code of the content from the old website into the HTML code screen of WordPress.

Your page URL is created by the Title of your page, but you can change them by editing the Slug permalink.

There is a plugin that could help you convert old pages: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/import-html-pages/ Attention! For this plugin to work you really need  PHP5! Ask your hosting provider if you are not sure.

Website Layout

The conversion from your old site to a WordPress based site with the same layout is completely different exercise than what I am describing here, to do that your will have to get a complete custom Theme / Layout.

But why not take this opportunity and change the look of your site together with the conversion? Choose a nice premium or free theme  that will fit you company / website topic and customize it to your needs.

If you are happy with the look and feel and the content of your site you can follow these step to get it “live”:

1. delete or rename the index.html file in the root of your old site.
2. copy the index.php and .htaccess file from the /cms folder to the root of your site
3. change one rule in the index.php file into require(‘./cms/wp-blog-header.php’); (only with the index.php file in the root, not in the folder  /cms!!)
4. change only the Site address (URL) in the general setting (Setting -> General) into the domain name. (remove the /cms part)

Change Site Address Only!

5. remove or rename the old  .html files.
6. change the privacy settings so the Search Engines can access and index the site again.

If you handle the change over it this manner, than your old site is not reachable during the 5 minutes you need to rename the index.html so the index.php takes over and if you kept your URLs you are not loosing any visitors from the search engines like Google.

And of course you have taken a complete Back-Up of your old static website so you can restore your old side if you should encounter any unexpected error(s).

If you want new URLs for your pages than you can redirect the old URLs to the news ones in two ways:

• use a plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
• via the .htaccess file in which you have to write a rule per url you want to forward:  redirect 301 /olde-url.html http://www.example.com/new-url.html

However if you change your URLs, even with a 301 redirect you could loose some credit and backlinks that are pointing to your site.

Good luck and if you still have some questions, please use the contact form.

If you have other tips and additions that might help others, please write them in the comments section below.

One last question: Is there a need to have this information in an even more detailed form like a pdf manual with screen shots and tips? if so, please leave a comment.

Update: You asked for it and now it’s finally here… From Static HTML To WordPress version 1.0

You can share the PDF with friends, post it on you website but you cannot sell it or change anything in it! If you find any language or grammatical errors please let me know so I can correct them.

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

Once you have completed the basic setup of your WordPress website, it’s time to add more functions by installing plugins.

Here is a basic list of plugins that I integrate into every WordPress website I build.

Basic WordPress Plugins List

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
FD Feedburner Plugin
Flexi Pages Widget
Google XML Sitemaps
HeadSpace2
My Page Order
NextGEN Gallery
Related Posts
Robots Meta
Secure Files
SEO Slugs
Subscribe To Comments
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress Database Backup
WordPress File Monitor
WP-DBManager
WP-SpamFree
Fancybox
WP Security Scan
W3 Total Cache

Yes, you counted correctly, those are 20 different plugins… and if you have ever installed a plugin, you know how difficult a task it was to install these.

Search for the plugin on wordpress.org, click the install button, confirm that the installation was successful and activate the plugin.

Plugin nr 21 to the rescue, meet Plugin Central!

Plugin Central is a plugin created by Vladimir Prelovac, and it is a great time-saver.

This is always the first plugin I install using the standard process:

Plugins -> Add New -> Search -> Install -> Activate Process

Once you have done this, the magic begins. Go to the option “Plugin Central” under the Plugins menu.

The next screen gives you the option that you are going to use. Pay special attention to the field where you can paste the list shown above.
Of course, you can just type the names of other plugins you want to install.

Once you are satisfied with your list, click the “Install Plugins” button.

Depending on your host’s security settings, it might ask you for your FTP data such as FTP site, username and password. Or,  it will start to work directly.

The process of installing the plugins depends on your hosting environment, but with my Just Host based websites it takes under two minutes for all 20 plugins.

After the whole process has ran, you need to active all of the plugins, which takes about four clicks.

Go to the installed plugins page, click the top checkbox (Plugin), choose from the dropdown menu “Activate” and then push “Apply”.

Now all of your plugins are active. Some of them need some configuration (Google xml sitemaps, Wp Super cache and Askimet, etc) but most of them are running right off the bat.

Configuring the plugins will take some time, but you just saved a lot of time on the installation, so go ahead and set all the options that you want. I will be writing more about some of these plugins, but now it’s time for you to take action!

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

You want your new WordPress website to be easily found by search engines, right?

One thing that you need to think long and hard about is the title of your website. This title will show up on every search engine’s search results page, which shows the link to the homepage of your website.

The title should not only contain the keywords you want to target, but it should also invite searchers to click on that title.

The WordPress Title

Most themes will show the title as the title of your post or page, with or without the title of the site (which is set under Settings —> General).

For myself and the majority of my customer’s sites, I use a plugin called Headspace2 which gives you the ability to write different HTML titles. These are the titles that are shown in the title bar of your browser, and are also the titles used by search engines.

With Headspace, you can set different titles for your homepage along with several other pages (archive/category pages, etc.). It shows a separate field under your writing panel where you can put the title.

On this page, you see the title “Use the Right Title in Building a WordPress Website.” But if you look at the top of your browser, you see the title “The Importance of Using the Right Title when Building a WordPress Website.”

The WordPress Theme Header

There is a little catch for Headspace2 to work the right way…. you need to check the way your theme uses the Title function in your header file.

To check this, go to Appearance —> Editor,  select the file called Header (header.php) and look for this coding:

<title><?php if (function_exists(‘seo_title_tag’)) { seo_title_tag(); } else { wp_title(”); bloginfo(‘name’);} ?></title>

In the example above you can use a plugin called “SEO Title Tag” that will do the same as Headspace2, with the exception of a few limitations. You can also see that the name of the site is appended at the end of the title. You need to change that code for optimal use of Headspace2 and replace it with:

<title><?php wp_title (”); ?></title>

For branding purposes you could add something extra into the code, such as:

<title><?php wp_title (”); ?> | WpSiteBuilding.com</title>

The only problem with this is that the title will get too long for the search engine listings. Search engines will cut the title at this moment to about 60 positions.

Did you install the plugin and change the title function in the header of your theme? If so, it’s time to read up on how you can write those great visitor-attracting titles over at Copyblogger’s How to Write Magnetic Headlines.

P.S. The code “wp_title” is taken from your database table. If you have another table prefix, you have to change the prefix to match your installation (WordPress Installation).

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

This website is now on a full new WordPress 2.7 platform and all plugins are updated to the latest release.

I am now really happy with my new laptop an HP Mobile Workstation  which runs on Windows XP. I is really fast on for my kind of work a real workhorse!
But the main reason why I am so happy is this: It runs Adobe Flash 9 ! instead of 10.

On my old laptop I upgraded to Flash 10 ans since then all WordPress 2.7 based Blogs and Sites I wanted to administer ran horrible, and that was not because of some plugin that was at fault.
Also my Blogs on WordPress.com gave me the same administrative problems resulting in not being able to post or even update a post, aarrgh :-(

Where possible I downgraded my 2.7 based sites to 2.6
Which is easy, just follow the same process as upgrading to a new version, but instead of uploading the 2.7 files you upload the 2.6 version and login, upgrade and your done.

I even tried to downgrade to Adobe Flash 10, but no luck there. As soon as I went to a website with Flash the plugin update to 10 again…

On the new laptop I can hold off the Flash Upgrade so I can work with WordPress 2.7 which I must say look great from an administration view.
Coming form 2.6 you still need to get used to the new placements, but it is not that hard to getting used to.

So in short: Don’t upgrade to 2.7 yet if you have Flash 10 installed (Check your Flash version here) if you have version 9, then go ahead but make sure not to upgrade to Flash 10 until this issue is fixed.
For your information, this is NOT a WordPress problem, but a Adobe Flash security problem!

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.