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How To Upgrade Old Version of WordPress

Filed Under: WordPress Setup

One thing I see in common with users who have a static WordPress website is that they don’t update and upgrade it on a regular base. Most of you don't know how to upgrade an old version of WordPress.

Note: Update means small changes like Security updates. Upgrade means that there are new functions and possibilities in the new version.

Now that you ended up with an older insecure version you need to upgrade before you can change it to a better and more mobile version. Most of the time that will also mean that your need to upgrade or change your WordPress Theme as well.

But before you can do the later, first let’s take care of the upgrades first.

So, how do you upgrade from an old version of WordPress? You cannot simply push the Update message if you are on a much older version!

That update function will only work between two consecutive versions like updating from version 3.9 to 4.1.x. It will not work if you need to upgrade from let’s say version 2.6 to version 4.1.1

The technical reason for this is that with each major WordPress version there are also changes made in the database structure. Skipping these upgrades will leave you with incompatible database fields.

That is why you need a step by step approach to make sure your database is also updated up to the latest version. That is not hard to do, but you need to follow the right sequence of updating.

If you skip one step your WordPress website won’t work anymore.

What Do You Need To Upgrade WordPress From an Older Version

There are a few things that you need to have in place before you start the upgrades.

Don’t worry! Upgrading from the previous version is not hard! It just takes a little time and effort.

  • Make sure you have a good back-up of you files and database, especially the wp-content folder! That folder contains your media, plugins and theme files.
  • All the major previous WordPress versions starting from the next version after your current version. So if your current version is WordPress 2.6 your first upgrade will be to WordPress 2.7.
    Older version of WordPress can be downloaded from https://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/
  • Access to your website via FTP or Cpanel file manager. You need to be able to upload files from previous WordPress versions
  • A program to unzip the files from the downloaded .zip or .tar files like WinZip or 7-zip.
    To upgrade from 2.6 to 4.1 you need to download all the major versions like 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, etc. You don’t need the minor updates, so you can skip versions like 3.0.5, 3.0.6 etc.

Once you downloaded those version you need carry out a series of smaller upgrade steps to upgrade – eg: 2.6 -> 2.7 -> 2.9 -> 3.0 -> 3.1 -> etc.

To find out your current version, log into you WordPress Dashboard and look for the version under “Right Now” or “At a Glance”.
Identify WordPress Version 2-6

Identify WordPress Version 4-1-1
If you identified your current version you can download the upgrade versions you need to get to the latest WordPress version.

How To Upgrade Old Version of WordPress to Latest Version

Once you have all the previous requirements in place, let’s do a step-by-step upgrade.

First unzip the next version you need to upgrade to, in this case 2.7, unzip the files from wordpress-2.7.zip into a separate folder.

After you unzipped the files open your FTP program (I use Filezilla) and browse to the local folder where you unzipped the files and open the other screen to point to your WordPress installation folder or the hosting (aff) server.

FTP Upgrade for WordPress
Click to Enlarge

Select all files in the Local PC Folder (Ctrl+A for Windows) and upload the files to the server folder. Use the overwrite files option during the upload.
If the upload is completed open your WordPress Dashboard again by logging in via /wp-admin or wp-login.php as you would normally do.

You should see a notification that your WordPress database needs to be upgraded.

WordPress Database › Update

Wait until you see the message that the update is completed and then click Continue.

WordPress › Updated

Your Dashboard should now show that you are on the next version.

Repeat all the steps above of the FTP file uploads for each new version. After each version you need to log in again into you WordPress site to run the automatic database update.

Take the upgrades step by step updating version by version 2.6 -> 2.7 -> 2.8 -> etc until you are completely up-to-date.

Now that your WordPress version is up-to-date you can update all the plugins and themes (aff) via the automatic update function.

Want to prevent that you forget to upgrade next time? Install the plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-updates-notifier/

Set it to Daily, notification for Plugin and Themes (aff) updates and make sure to use the save and send a test email to check if that works with your hosting (aff) provider.

How To Downgrade WordPress to an Older Version

Why would you ever want to downgrade your WordPress version?

One of the reasons could be that you run into problems with the latest version of WordPress and some Plugins or Themes that are not upgraded yet and are incompatible with that latest version.

But it could also be needed if you skipped a version and updated from, as an example, version 2.9 to 4.1 and now you site is not functioning anymore.

Downgrading is just as easy as upgrading. First, you get the latest version you used the have from the release archive.

Then upload the old files via FTP like you did to upgrade, overwriting the newer files. Now log in again into your dashboard and confirm the Update WordPress Database option.

Click continue and check if you site is back on the previous version and working again. Once it’s up and running again you can upgrade using the correct steps.

Or wait until your incompatible plugins / themes are upgraded to the new version.

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Which Sidebar Widgets to Use in Your WordPress Site

Filed Under: WordPress Setup

One of the main ways for your visitor to navigate through your website is the Sidebar.

In the sidebar of your WordPress layout, you can place a lot of widgets.

However, what you really need in there are the things that will help your visitor to get a clear image about the topic your website is about.

Besides that it should show them how they can find what they are  looking for.

Basic Sidebar Widgets for WordPress

For me, there are some basic widgets that you should always use.

Registration option for Updates

In order to allow your visitor to keep informed about new postings is your first widget.
Whether you have a mailing list via MailChimp, Aweber or Feedburner that you want to build, you do have to get this option to give your visitor an easy working signup form.

A signup widget in your sidebar is the fastest and ever-present possibility.

Site Topics Selection

A custom menu widget containing the main categories of your website is also a must.

Such a menu gives your visitors the ability to see what your site is about and gives them instant access to your most important articles on a particular topic.

Latest Articles or Recent Posts

I almost always use this to show that there are regular updates. If you build a static website, then replace this recent article widget with a custom menu widget linking to your main pages.

Another option that could replace the Recent Posts widget is a Widget with your most Popular Posts. There is a special plugin that gives you that ability http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/

Above widgets are the basics for about 95% of every WordPress site I do, perhaps you can take advantage of it.

Make sure in any case that you don't show the following widgets in your sidebar, they just use space you need for better things.

  • Meta widget – You know yourself how you can log in.
  • Date based archives with month selection: This list can get very long if you have been blogging for a longer period of time. People are not looking at the article date but for a certain topic.

Social Media Widget

Not everyone has an extensive online social life, so it depends on your own situation if you want it. It will get increasingly important to get high rankings in search engines.

A good social media widget can provide you with many new followers on Twitter, get Facebook likes, Google+ connections and more.

Site Dependent Sidebar Widgets

Other sidebar widgets you can think of, depending on the purpose of your site, are special text widgets like an About the Writer (Biography) widget.

In such a text widget, you can use HTML code to show an image or link to a special about or action page.

You can place an Ad widget to earn some money with your website.  You can use a plugin to help out like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ad-squares-widget/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ad-codez-widget/. Both will give you an opportunity to rotate banner codes.

A special call to action widget that is specifically crafted towards the main goal of your site. Like the direct link widget on my Dutch website www.wphandleiding.nl with an image to guide visitors directly to the download page.

A Call to Action Sidebar Widgets

Tag Cloud Widget usage depends on the fact how well you have created tags on your site; you do have the main navigation categories. Tags can provide good extra navigation options.

Last but not least you should consider a search widget. It depends on your theme lay-out if you need one in your Sidebar. Most of your visitors will be used to look for a search option in the upper-right corner of your site.

This is a selection of sidebar widgets and reasons why I use them. And what about you, what widgets do you always show in your sidebar and why?

How To Set Up and Use WordPress Menus

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup

The recent versions of WordPress offer you the new Custom WordPress Menus function to set up a navigation menu. The Menus can be created with pages and categories, and include hyperlinks. You can also sort them any way you want.

These new WordPress menus are very flexible and are especially useful if you want to create a static website. You can have different custom menus to show different navigational elements.

For example, you can create a menu to all the main pages and a separate one for pages like Contact, Privacy Policy, Legal Pages etc.

How To Create WordPress Menus

To create such a menu go to Appearance -> Menu and first put in the name of the menu you want to create. Then push Save! this is important because you cannot place any links until you save the menu first.

Best practice for Menu naming is to give it the name where you want to use it, or what content you want to put into it. I use Top Menu, Page Menu, and Category menus for example.

Create WordPress menus to improve navigation

After you saved your menu, you could get extra fields on the left-hand side of the screen. If your theme supports it, you will see Theme Location Menu options like Primary navigation. You can have that new menu replace the theme default menu if you use that option.

WordPress Menu Created

Now you can add you pages or categories to the menu, select them on the left side and choose Add to Menu option. Hint: Under pages select View All first so you can select Home as well.

 

Once you added the page to the menu, you can sort them by dragging them to the right place and even drag them to a child page position. Click save when you are done and your first menu is ready.

Now create another menu for your categories and add the topics you like to show.

WordPress Category Menu

Showing Your WordPress Menus

You need to get your WordPress menus into your layout and bring the navigation structure to the front of your website.

The menu's you just created are shown via Widgets, so go to the Widgets page first via Appearance -> Widgets. Look for the widget that is called Custom Menu and drag that to your primary sidebar (or the widgets position you want to use).

WordPress Custom Menu Widget

If you open that widget you can give it a title and select the menu you created from a drop-down menu.

You can use more than one Custom Menu widget on your site, just make sure you create a good navigation for your users.

If you want to make a WordPress website instead of a Blog, these custom menu's are the way to go!

Special Custom Menu Options

In the custom menu creation screen, you also saw another option called Custom Links. With custom links, you can have a link in your menu that points directly to another website. Just give it a name, put in the hyperlink you want it to point to and add it to the menu of you choice.

You can also use this option to create a NonLinked menu item. A possible use could be that you want a section divider in your menu. To do this you use the custom menu option. Label it by using the Name you want to use and for the hyperlink you use http://# add it to your menu in the position you want to show it. Save the menu.

Open that menu item and remove the URL option and save the menu again. Now you have a menu item that is not linked.

No Links Menu Item

Editing Custom Menu Links

Title Attributes and Custom Menu Fields

With any Menu item, you can edit some extra options, with the most prominent one being the Title Attribute. The Navigation label is the name that is shown in the menu, the title attribute is shown if you hover over that menu item.

If you create a page menu, you could have very long titles in you menu items. By reducing / renaming the Navigation Label you can improve the menu option and if you put the longer page title in the Title Attribute your have the best navigation for your visitors.

There are a few extra special options which are not shown by default. If you want to see and use them, use the Screen Options on the right-hand top corner and select the extra options you want to see.

Custom Menu Screen Options

This will show you the extra options.

Custom Menu Special Options

Most of us will not use these options, but its good to know they are there.

If you can think of other cool things you can do with Custom WordPress Menus that please share it in the comments below.

How To Speed Up WordPress on Your Website the Easy Way

Filed Under: WordPress SEO, WordPress Setup

Sooner or later every WordPress blog or website owner wants to know how to speed up WordPress. 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 gets bloated with uncleared settings from previous plugins. What can you do about that and what other measures can you take to get that initial install speed back into your site?

Initial Actions to Speed Up WordPress

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 you need to make sure you get a good baseline to measure improvements. First run a page check on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. Your final 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.

WordPress Revision Coltrol settings

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

wordpress optimize options

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.

Clean Options Table Results example

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 documents to increase performance and ultimately speed up WordPress. 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 for the W3 Cache 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.

Disable W3 Total Cache Preview

Next is to enable the settings for:

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

w3 total cache first settings to speed up WordPress

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.

W3 Total Cache Browser Page Cache Settings

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.

w3 total cache errors settings

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

Speed Up WordPress Final Check

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 (aff) 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.

Top Score for Newly installed website.

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 WordPress?

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How to Secure Your WordPress Website – The Basics

Filed Under: WordPress Setup

In my book review WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers I told you that I missed one piece of content, which was options to secure your WordPress website, 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.

Basics on how to Secure Your WordPress Website

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 (aff) company won't allow 400.

Secure Your WordPress Website Plugin Options

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.

Secure Your WordPress Website

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 (aff)
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

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