WordPress Tips and Strategies

January 7th, 2007

This blog runs on WordPress, which I totally adore. Over several months, I’ve collected some technical WordPress tips. When I first started this blog I had little clue what I was doing, and found help from other people on the web - so I should share what little tidbits I’ve gathered.

For more general blogging tips and what plugins I’ve found useful, please check out these past posts:

Blogging Tips and Strategies
My Favorite WordPress Plugins

1. Akismet.

I’m super thankful for Akismet. I get spam comments daily and I estimate 99% never appear to readers because Akismet does an awesome job. When you click on “Manage” there is an Akismet Spam tab, and the number following indicates how many spam comments it has caught. You can review these suspect comments easily, but it’s most often spam. In order to activate the plug in and service you have to register for a free account at WordPress and get a WordPress.com API Key and  enter it into your WordPress configuration. But it’s well worth it.

2. Disable post preview.

If you have Google ads it’s a good idea to disable the post preview, so while writing, you aren’t displaying ads to yourself. I deleted some lines in my post.php file, but you can also get a plug in here.

3. Use the optional excerpt.

Here’s a tip I saw on digg a while back. When someone does a search, looks at a category, or views archives in your blog, the results appear in an abridged format of a headline and the first thirty or so words. Well, you can control what words appear, or even add images to these shortened versions. When you’re in “Write Post” view, there’s a field just above “Trackbacks” called “Optional Excertp” where you can paste in exactly what you want to appear - including HTML code for little images. This can definitely make these summary views more appealing.

4. Duplicate content.

One thing you want to avoid is duplicate versions of your content appearing in search engines. Ideally, you want the search engine results to link directly to your post page - not pages where a user has to click on a link to get to the post. There are some tactics to inform search engines what not to index, namely, the category and archive pages on your blog.

Here’s a run down of some strategies you can try. I’ve done the “noindex, follow” thing for my category pages on this blog. If you click on a category in the sidebar and do “view source” there is a meta tag instructing a search enging to not index this page, but follow the links so it finds the actual post pages and indexes them.

5. Editing template files.

The template files I most commonly find myself editing are sidebar.php, header.php, and footer.php. It’s a good idea to figure out where these live on your server and bookmark the folder in your FTP client so you can get to them easily. (wp-content/themes/(name of the theme you have active)/).

You may need to edit header.php and footer.php to add services like Google Analytics or MyBlogLog. With a template, you can do it once and the change will appear on all the pages of your blog. For all the funky sidebar widgets, you may need to edit sidebar.php. Most services will give you a code snippet which you have to paste into these template files.

6. Repair the tables in phpMyAdmin.

One day I visited my blog and it was riddled with strange text and errors. There was something seriously wrong with the database. I’m admittedly pretty clueless when it comes to the MySQL database running the whole show, but this tip fixed it. Basically, login into your server. Go through phpMyAdmin. Find your WordPress database, and click on its name. You’ll see a big table. The last column shows “overhead” which in an ideal world, is empty. In my case, I repaired the specific rows with “overhead” and my blog was back. There are lots of other good tips at the site in addition to this one.

7. WP-Cache.

I’ve found the WP-Cache plug in to be quite solid. It alleviates some of my worries regarding high traffic spikes. It basically stores a cached version of a WordPress page once it’s been viewed. This cached version expires after a period of time that you can adjust. The idea is that when a huge number of people try to view a particular page, the cached version kicks in and saves your server from having to reload every piece of that page on every page view.

I recommend using WP-Cache, because the nature of a site like digg means you may not realize one of your blog’s posts has been submitted, received diggs, and is sending hordes of visitors to your server until it’s too late. If your hosting provider charges you an overage fee, lack of preparation could be an expensive mistake.

8. Backup.

Lastly, there’s a way to get all the content of your blog off its server and onto your computer for safekeeping. Activate the Backup plug in (it comes with WordPress), and generate a backup. It’s essentially a MySQL dump.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed this list of tips. If you have any additional tips to share or corrections to what I’ve written above, please add!

[tags]WordPress, Blogging, Tips, SEO[/tags]

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