WordPress

WordPress has infinite possibilities. This is my definitive guide to starting, owning, running and maintaining a WordPress website

Contents

1. What is WordPress?
2. I already have WordPress but it needs updating?
3. What are Themes, Plug-ins & Widgets?
4. Do I need dedicated WordPress hosting?
5. Does WordPress need on-going maintenance?
6. My WordPress website is hacked, what can I do?
7. Do I need a WordPress consultant?

1. What is WordPress?

New to WordPress? You've decided that your business or venture needs a website and you have chosen WordPress to run it.

WordPress is a popular choice for building a website, whether it's a simple 'brochureware' type site, to a fully blown e-commerce store or perhaps something a bit more bespoke.

WordPress website checklist

Here is my list of actions that need to be carried out when setting up a new WordPress website. If you are going it alone, you'll need to carry out most of them, if you decide to use my services then most of them I will handle for you. If you are new to WordPress this checklist will help you get up and running as quick as possible.

1. Get a password manager

Whichever route you choose this has to be the most important tip. A password manager is a program that you install onto your computer and it allows you to store passwords in a secure manner.

You'll need a password manager because you are going to end up with lots of passwords to remember. Taking a look at the average website you'll have numerous logins:

• Domain name login (123-reg, GoDaddy etc)
• Web hosting login
• Email login(s)
• WordPress Login
• Social Network logins (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc)
• Google Analytics

Already we've got 7 or more passwords to remember. Please don't use the same password for everything. Whilst convenient it opens up all your logins if someone finds out just one password.

KeePass is a decent and free password manager and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (KeePassX).

2. Take some decent photos

Quite often when building websites for clients I get supplied small sized images that have bad lighting or look blurry. You may have opted to hire a professional photographer to take shots of your products/services which is great as they'll produce decent images that can be used for printed literature and websites. Use a service like WeTransfer to send these large images to me.

Most modern smart phones have quite capable cameras built into them that output images of sufficient resolution for use on websites. Just remember to keep your thumb off the camera lens when taking the photos and take them in daylight. You'll be wanting images that are at least 2,000 pixels wide.

3. Get your content written

Writing content for websites can take time to do but if you are passionate about your new venture, this shouldn't present much of a problem for you. Ensure that your content has ideally between 1,000 to 2,000 words per page and use your site structure to hep you write. It makes sense to write your content using Word so you can spell check or even Notepad - having it electronically makes importing the content into WordPress easier.

Google likes long content and you'll achieve higher search engine rankings if you have pages that show you as a credible source of information. Ignore your proposed home page content for the moment as generally speaking home pages on websites are basically a summary of the rest of the website and this summary can be built dynamically.

4. Think of a website structure

Most websites that are used to provide information to potential customers about your particular product or services have a structure that allows a visitor to navigate around the site easily. A common navigation structure could be:

• Home page
• Products
  • Product 1
  • Product 2
  • Product 3
  • Product 4
• Services
  • Service 1
  • Service 2
  • Service 3
• About
• Contact

Use this as a starting point for your website and it will differ depending on what your venture is. Your initial WordPress website structure will help you in writing your content. Remember a website isn't like a printed brochure - It's not set in stone and it can always be changed later on.

5. Register a domain name

Most of my clients come to me having already registered a website domain name, whether it's a .com or .co.uk. We'll need the login for where you registered the domain name to update what's called name servers. This will allow us to 'point' the domain name to whatever web hosting you have or proposed to use.

There are plenty of places to purchase domain names and prices are pretty much the same across the board. Some examples of domain name 'registrars' are 123-reg, GoDaddy and Heart Internet.

Make sure that the information you use when registering the domain name, or if you already have a name, is up-to-date and accurate. I quite often come across scenarios where people already have a domain name but the registration information is usually the person that built their website initially or the information is out-of-date.

Consider extending the period of your domain name registration to the maximum 10 years. Names are relatively cheap and this will cost between £70 and £120. There is an SEO benefit to doing this and whilst the evidence of this benefit is small, Google changes it's search algorithm about 800 times a year, so it may become a ranking factor in the future.

6. Decide on Self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com

These are the two different versions of WordPress to choose from and in almost all circumstances you will want to self-host WordPress for maximum flexibility and to do this you'll need some web hosting. This will mean however that responsibility for routine management tasks like backups and updates will fall down to you (or your chosen web developer).

WordPress.com takes care of the hosting for you for a monthly fee but there is less flexibility in the customisations that can be made to a WordPress.com website. Consider what your technical needs and features are for your website as this will determine how much customisation you'll need to do to your WordPress website.

7. Get some web hosting

If you are self-hosting WordPress then you need some web hosting. Web hosting is a physical machine (called a server) that you install WordPress on so that visitors can find your website. Web hosting varies greatly in price, with cheap hosting providing a broad set of features and support, to more expensive hosting catering for specific requirements.

If you are just starting out with your new WordPress website and you don't expect to receive more than 5,000 visitors / month, then cheap shared hosting will be suitable. You'll want hosting that is Linux based, not Windows based. Whilst WordPress can be installed on Windows, it has been designed to run on Linux servers.

Shared hosting means your website 'shares' the same server with lots of other websites allowing for lower prices. Shared hosting prices start from as little as £5/month but there are some points to consider when choosing a hosting provider:

1. Is support included in the price?
2. What are the support channels? Phone, email etc
3. How crowded are their servers? Are there 1,000s of other websites sharing the same servers?*
4. Where are the servers physically located? America, Europe or in the UK?
5. Are email accounts included?

* This is probably the most important point to consider. If a shared hosting account has lots of other websites hosted that you have no control over, then if one of those other websites gets infected by malware or hackers it can damage your SEO efforts and/or your email deliverability. Websites on shared hosting occupy the same IP address. IP addresses can become blacklisted if malware is found and this will have a negative impact on your SEO and could potentially disrupt your business email communications. This is called a 'bad neighbourhood'

You'll want to also get what's called an SSL certificate. This have a proven SEO benefit so will increase your rankings for little effort. They'll also make your website secure by encrypting the information people send to you via your contact forms.

8. WordPress templates & themes

There are literally thousands of pre-built templates (or themes) available for WordPress making it easy to instantly change the look and feel of a WordPress website. This is the easiest and quickest way to get up and running with WordPress.

However, many of my clients require a bit more customisation from a theme, either they already have a layout provided by a graphic designer they would like converting, they would like their current website template converted into WordPress or they have found an existing HTML template they would like converting.
How to buy a WordPress theme
Most theme marketplaces offer themes for around $60 to $100 so they are a relatively easy way to get started. There are pro's and con's of using a pre-made theme so do some research into any theme that you are proposing to use, below is a list of some points to consider:

1. When was it last updated?
2. Is it mobile friendly?
3. How many other people have bought this theme?
4. How many ratings has the theme got?
5. What aesthetic are you aiming for?
6. Is it compatible with the latest version of WordPress?
7. Are there any premium plug-ins included with the theme?
8. Does the theme support any specialist plug-ins you are planning to use?
9. Does the theme fulfil your requirements in terms of functionality?
10. Does the theme author provide after sales support?
11. What web browsers do you need to support (or, is the theme compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc)

9. WordPress plug-ins

WordPress plug-ins extend the basic functionality of WordPress expanding it's capabilities far past a simple website and blog. There are literally thousands of plug-ins that can change WordPress into things like listings directories, event management, e-commerce. Some plug-ins are free but offer limited to no support, whilst others cost but do provide support.

Look at what sort of functionality you want to provide to your website visitors to determine the plug-ins you'll need, and whether a plug-in can fulfil all your technical requirements or if it will need a combination of plug-ins to get the required level of functionality.

Use the list of points to consider when choosing a theme above to help you in determining if a plug-in is suitable, most importantly though with plug-ins is when it was last updated. An out-of-date plug-in can open up your website to vulnerabilities potentially allowing hackers access.

Below is a list of some of the common plug-ins I install:

• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
• Anti-spam - stop comment spam
• Contact Form 7 - for your contact page forms
• Contact Form 7 Honeypot - stop contact form spam
• W3 Total Cache - performance enhancements
• WP Smush - compresses images to speed up your website
• Yoast SEO - for managing the WordPress SEO aspects of your site

10. What to do immediately after your website is launched

After your website is launched the work doesn't stop. Here is a run down of some of the tasks you should do immediately after website launch

1. Install Google Analytics
2. Set-up Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap
3. If you have an email list of subscribers, tell them about your new WordPress website
4. Promote your website on your social network accounts, Twitter, Facebook & Linkedin
5. If you are using the blog features in WordPress, then your first post will be your launch post

Most importantly though, if when installing WordPress you checked the option to discourage search engines whilst you were building your site make sure you un-check this option as Google won't index your new website.

11. Long term tasks

After a few months of being live and the dust has settled a bit you'll want to monitor your new WordPress website to make sure it's all running smoothly.

1. Keep WordPress and any plug-ins or themes updated - I can't tell you the number of times I have had to deal with out-dated WordPress sites
2. Check your website rankings in Google. There are programs that can automate this for you.
3. Check your blog comments queue, if there are any respond to them
4. Keep your blog updated with new and interesting posts
5. Make sure the information on pages is up-to-date and accurate

2. I already have WordPress but it needs updating?

Already have a WordPress website and looking for a new theme or for someone to take over the maintenance?

As one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world today, WordPress has found it's way into many businesses. Just like any other piece of software WordPress needs constant maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

WordPress is out-of-date

I frequently inherit existing WordPress installs and see recurring problems with them. Predominantly WordPress and plug-in versions are out-of-date which is a risk in terms of security, increasing the chances of an installation becoming hacked. Other issues with existing WordPress websites are that the template used is quite often not responsive and therefore not mobile friendly.

A compromised website not only loses you trust from your potential clients but you'll also get penalised by Google in the search engine results with a warning "This site may be hacked". Severely out-of-date plug-ins make the update process much harder, with many requiring a special manual upgrade rather than the more convenient one-click update process.

Many website owners don't realise the importance of keeping up-to-date with WordPress and plug-ins and the process of updating frequently gets lost over more important business tasks.

How to tell if WordPress is out-of-date?

The quickest way of telling if your version of WordPress is out-of-date is visually. Log into the WordPress dashboard and if your version looks like the image on the left below, then it is most definitely an old version. If however your version looks like the image on the right, you need to check the version number shown on the dashboard. If that isn't evident then in your browser selecting "View Source" will show you the HTML source code of the WordPress, look for a meta tag near the top which should state your version number.

How to tell if plug-ins are out-of-date?

Simply navigate to plug-ins in the WordPress dashboard and it will show you a list of installed plug-ins and if each one has an update available.

How do you update WordPress?

My process for updating a WordPress install is as follows:

• Add my WordPress backup plug-in to your install. this will allow me to take a copy of the WordPress database and files.
• Download this backup and install on a local (running on my computer) web server. As I am now running WordPress locally, I am not hindered by things like slow network connections or limited server resources.
• Check plug-ins for any advanced or manual upgrade steps.
• Update WordPress core to the latest version, then update each plug-in to their respective versions.
• Check everything runs ok
• Upload the new version to your web hosting and import the new database.
• Check everything runs ok

3. What are Themes, Plug-ins & Widgets?

WordPress can provide infinite possibilities through it's use of themes, plug-ins and widgets

Themes

I can install a pre-built theme for you that you might have purchased from one of the many Theme marketplaces that have become popular ov er the last few years, such as ThemeForest. However using a pre-built theme made by someone else, especially if it's a complex one, does limit the amount of customisation I can put into the website as it quite often requires me to reverse engineer the theme. Many pre-built themes come bundled with additional plug-ins and whilst this may seem like good value at the outset, quite often all these additions do is add 'bloat' to your website.

For maximum customisation I prefer to convert HTML templates into WordPress where I can then control the build process, adding in features as needed and avoiding 'plug-in bloat' making your website as fast as possible and as usable as possible. There are plenty of HTML templates available from ThemeForest, they're often half the price of WordPress themes and quite often the HTML template version of a WordPress theme is available.

Plug-ins

Customising WordPress has been made easier through the use of plug-ins. They can add all sorts of functionality to WordPress. Here are a few plug-ins I have worked with with live example sites where appropriate showing the plug-in in action.

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

I refer to this as the Swiss Army Knife of plug-ins as it can allow for some very advanced configurations in the WordPress dashboard. I use this on all but the very basic of websites to customise not only the editing experience in the WordPress dashboard, but also the display of content on the front-end of the website.

Slider Revolution

Quite simply this is one of the most advanced slider plug-ins around allowing for some very advanced animations as well as embedding videos in sliders.

Easy Social Share Buttons (ESSB)

Employing ESSB on your blog can greatly increase the amount of social shares your blog posts receive. It automatically sets up the correct share URL for each button and includes buttons for all the major social networks. It's also mobile friendly.

Yoast SEO

I have recently converted to using Yoast SEO from another plug-in, All in One SEO Pack. I found that Yoast was more comprehensive in it's treatment of meta data tags, especially Twitter Cards and OpenGraph Data. If using Yoast SEO you might need to filter it's output if also using the ESSB plug-in above.

GravityForms (GF)

Using GravityForms is quite a special use case. If you need advanced form functionality within WordPress then you'll need GF. It has a WYSIWYG for builder that allows for some highly complex forms to be produced.

GravityPDF

GravityPDF adds the ability to convert the results of a GF into a PDF. PDF's are useful for producing non-editable documents.

WooCommerce

The original e-commerce plug-in for WordPress

Regenerate Thumbnails

Quite often when building a custom theme I have very specific dimensions for WordPress to use for images that are uploaded via the WordPress Media Library. Sometimes these dimensions alter over time and this plug-in will re-generate all image sizes for all the images in the media library.

4. Do I need dedicated WordPress hosting?

WordPress is a fantastic tool for managing websites but it can be resource intensive on some hosting environments

Depending on the needs of your website WordPress can quickly become slow and unresponsive even under quite moderate traffic. I employ various add-ons to WordPress that are designed to increase its performance on regular shared hosting environments.

I have worked on WordPress websites that have advanced plug-ins such as GravityForms or WPML create between 60 and 100 database queries per page load. Within a shared hosting environment this quickly overloads the maximum number of MySQL connections allowed, resulting in a rather plain error page when someone tries to access the website.

Fortunately my hosting partners are very flexible and can modify configuration files for me but for true performance I am able to offer optimised WordPress hosting on my Cloud Hosting packages. These packages employ a series of modifications to the cloud server to speed up WordPress which include serving cached pages to visitors from RAM, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and some other performance modifications to WordPress itself.

5. Does WordPress need on-going maintenance?

The WordPress Maintenance Service is designed to keep a website up-to-date and backed up.

You have invested a lot of time and money in your website and it needs to be kept updated in-line with changes in technology over time. The web never stands still and is a constantly evolving ecosystem.

Think of it as owning a car. You have to put petrol in a car to drive it, it needs insurance, TAX and an annual MOT check alongside regular servicing. Fail to do any of these and the value of the car decreases and you lose money on your investment.

Why is a WordPress Update Service needed?

Websites get hacked regardless how big you are. Yahoo, Linkedin, Sony and Tesco have all been hacked. WordPress powers around 30% of all the websites on the internet, so it makes an easy target. The majority of WordPress websites have third party plugins to extend the functionality of the content management system.

This is not unusual but the more functionality added, the more opportunity that hackers can get in. In addition many WordPress websites are hosted on commodity hosting suppliers that have differing standards of setup. Even WordPres itself has vulnerabilities that hackers take advantage of.

Case Study #1 - Jan 2017:

A firm of solicitors had their website compromised. Hackers altered files on WordPress installing backdoor programs, so they can access the hosting account at will. They also altered template files to include spamvertising links promoting 'essay writing services'. They also have their company email hosted on the same hosting account.

They relied on backups being available from their webhost (Domain Monster). Four days later I still didn't have a backup of their website, which was still down. They are reliant on the hosting provider supplying the backup. The client wants to keep the website as it was, so this involved a clean up operation removing infected files and re-installing on clean hosting. Additionally their domain name became blacklisted, meaning they experienced email deliveribility issues.

Case Study #2 Sept 2016:

An ecommerce website is using OpenCart, a popular ecommerce system. Misconfiguration and outdated versions of the software resulted in store getting compromised and the same situation above occured - backdoors etc. The site was converted to WordPress and took two weeks carry out.

Case Study #3 Feb 2017:

Charity WordPress website on misconfigured webhosting, WordPress/plugins were up-to-date. Site got hacked with backdoors and spam links in content possibly due to a previous historical attempt. Clean up and migration took two days. The discovered hack was a defacement due to an out-of-date WordPress version.

Cast Study #4 August 2016:

WordPress/Woocommerce website (payment functionality disabled) built cheaply by a developer in Thailand on GoDaddy hosting. Site was hacked. Had more than 28 plugins installed. Job is on-going.

Why is a WordPress Maintenance Service important?

If a site gets hacked the following things might occur:

• If you search for your website/company name on Google, it will appear number one but will be flagged as hacked.
• Email deliverability & blacklists. I would consider email more important than a website as it's an essential business tool, a bit like a telephone or fax machine. If your domain name (e.g. your website) gets on a blacklist, this will effect a recipient receiving an email from your company. The servers of a recipient you send an email to might be employing a blacklist therefore bouncing your email.
• Google Webmaster Tools actively monitors the WordPress version running on a website and will send the webmaster an email if it is out-of-date.
• Brand damage, defacements etc etc.

What the WordPress Maintenance Service involves

There are two issues this solves:

1. Making sure the software that runs the website is up-to-date
2. In the event a compromise occurs, there are sufficient backups avaiable to restore the site

Updating WordPress

Software means WordPress Core, as made available for download at wordpress.org and any plugins used on the site, whether free or premium.

I generally, when a notification of an update is available, leave it for a few days especially immediately after a WordPress core update. I usually find that plugins are reactive - they update after a wordpress core has updated. Sometimes a plugin will update twice in as many days after a core update. It makes sense to wait for the developers of the plugin to correct their code before updating. It reduces the amount of work I have to do. Updates are timely but not slack.

WordPress Backups

The high performance hosting has 15 backups taken daily built-in, so at most you'll have 15 days in the past of backups to restore from. Restoring from one of these backups takes about 20 minutes. Additionally I take a files and database backup of a website every week, for 5 weeks, to remote Google Drive storage as a compressed zip file. After the 5th week, backups then start overwriting. So at any one time you will have 5 backups of a website for the last 5 weeks stored on remote storage. The frequency of these additional remote backups can be defined by you. So you may want a backup a month for 6 months.

Can't we do it ourselves?

Yes you can. You'll need to remember to take a files and database backup every so often and login to WordPress to make sure each plugin and wordpress are up-to-date. In reality though this never happens when business owners are in charge and things will quickly be pushed aside alongside more important business tasks.

How do you know this is happening? Isn't it just a scare tactic to make me part with more money?

The image below is from logging software on my site. It logs multiple events on a WordPress website. You can see that in the last four hours i've had at least 7 attempts of someone trying to login to my WordPress website

Our webhost backups our website, can't we rely on them?

If you want, but I wouldn't recommend it for the following reasons:

1. Different webhosts have differing policies on backups, check their small print to understand how, when and where backups are taken.
2. They may not backup all of WordPress' files, especially the wp-content folder, which is traditionally populated by the owner of the website (you)
3. How do you get access to a backup and how long will it take to get the backup files? See Cast Study #1 above.
4. Where are the backups stored? On the same account your WordPress website is stored? Not ideal.
5. What if your webhost gets compromised? How do you get to your backup? What if they have a structural failure, like a corrupted hard drive on their server or a power outage, is your backup safe?

Is this an insurance/guarantee we won't get hacked?

Absolutely not. I tell my SEO clients that want to get up on Google that I have techniques that have shown good results in the past, but I can't guarantee it still works. I don't know Google's algorithm, if I did surely others would also know it and not everyone can be number one.

Hacking is the same. I don't control the hackers and therefore I don't know what they are up to. All I can do is employ mechanisms that reduce the opportunity to get hacked and afford a better result if hacked of restoring the site to normal operation.

Note that I don't offer this service to websites that are hosted on third party servers. You need to be using my hosting in order to take this service out.

6. My WordPress website is hacked, what can I do?

Often we see hacked WordPress websites that have been compromised for a few months prior to the site owner finding out anything is wrong.

Any website can be infected with malware. There are hackers constantly scanning websites for vulnerabilities to see if they can find an entry point into a web hosting account. WordPress is the most popular content management system in use today and powers around 30% of all the websites on the internet.

The popularity of WordPress makes it a prime target for hackers as there are large amounts of misconfigured WordPress websites and hosting accounts. Hackers use automated tools to probe and find backdoors, which can be as simple as incorrect file permissions, to a known vulnerability in a plugin or theme.

How do I know if my WordPress has been hacked?

Usually the first sign that a website has been hacked is the appearance of small, nearly invisible links in the footer of a website, these are usually injected into WordPress theme files. A slow wp-admin dashboard can also be a sign that something isn't quite right.

Other signs that your WordPress website has been hacked include a warning on Google results pages with a visual warning - this is a bad sign as potential customers will also see this warning when searching for your companies website, not good for your companies reputation. Even worse, if you get on an anti-virus blacklist your website could potentially be flagged up as malicious or hacked when your customers try to visit your website.

Your compromised WordPress website may have had a spam program or script placed on it by the hackers, their intention is to send out lots of spam emails from your web hosting account. This can have dire consequences as in many cases your domain name, the same which you use for your corporate business email accounts, will end up on email blacklists, disrupting your ability to send business emails to customers.

What malware do hackers put into WordPress?

We frequently see what's called remote shells, small programs that are hidden as regular WordPress files but they give the hackers the ability to connect to your website remotely and upload any other files to your web hosting account.

Some of them come with a GUI, below is an example of one from a site I cleaned. It allows hackers to effectively upload any file they want to your WordPress website.

Once they have installed a file manager and can upload any file they want, the first signs we often see of a hacked WordPress website is spamvertising links/pages.

Below is an image of such an hack, where the hackers gained access to a site, probably via an outdated plugin. They generated randomly named directories each with a single file in. The probable outcome of their actions was to extend their network of compromised WordPress websites for a likely spam network - directing recipients of spam email to their malicious content. You can see in the image there is a mix of languages, both written and computational.

How do you remove WordPress Malware?

Removing malware from WordPress is a multi-pronged process. It involves various tools to track down the files that hackers have placed on a site. It's also a process of auditing - working out what plugins and themes are installed, how old those plugins or themes are and if there are any updates to them or known vulnerabilities. In short it can be a time consuming exercise when done properly.

Below is a list of programs, plugins and tools used to scan for malicious content and files that shouldn't be in WordPress. Some use strict search patterns or file comparison, others use a form of heuristics to determine if a file should belong in the average WordPress website.

grep

find

Meld

PMF

Wordfence

The key to using these programs effectively is to ignore some directories in WordPress, mainly the root folder (where wp-config.php resides) and the wp-admin and wp-includes directories. The logic behind this is that there should be no user files uploaded into these directories, in essence they should be the same as if you had installed a fresh copy of WordPress. So your scanning scope is strictly targeted at the wp-content directory. There are two stages to this analysis. Part one is to find files that shouldn't belong where they are, the second is to make sure that any existing files haven't been tapered with.

How do I search for hacked WordPress website files?

Grep and find are two commands found in linux. they search for things on file systems. We#re going to use them to find files that shouldn't be in the uploads folder. Whenever you upload an image via the WordPress dashboard it ends up in the /wp-content/uploads folder. You can upload other file formats as well, such as PDF, XLSX and DOCX. We're going to specifically look for files that aren't images. To do this we'll run the following find command:

find /home/Work/homedir/public_html/wp-content/uploads/ -type f -not -name "*.jpg" -not -name "*.png" -not -name "*.gif" -not -name "*.jpeg" > uploads-non-binary.log

This will find files that don't have jpg, png, gif or jpeg as a file extension. Or if you want to do it the other way round, you can search for any php files:

find /home/Work/homedir/public_html/wp-content/uploads/ -type f -name "*.php" > uploads-shouldnt-be-here.log

7. Do I need a WordPress consultant?

Looking for an expert WordPress consultant in Hertfordshire? Tired of Googling for answers?

Have you just started out with your WordPress website? Perhaps you have purchased a WordPress theme and are having issues setting it all up? Not sure how to configure permalinks or what the difference is between a page and a post?

I can help you unravel some of the mysteries of WordPress and at the same time suggest improvements that can increase your search engine visibility of your new WordPress website. I offer a range of WordPress consulting services, based in Hertfordshire, that covers the whole range of WordPress issues, including but not limited to:

Basic WordPress Training

• What are the differences between posts & pages
• Best practice for creating posts or pages
• Creating galleries or embedding videos in your posts or pages
• Increase your post and page search engine rankings
• What are categories & tags used on posts

Advanced WordPress Training

• Maximising your WordPress website search engine rankings
• How to change themes and site design
• Testing how fast your website loads
• Useful third party software for getting the most from your website
• How to create, assign and modify WordPress menus
• Using FTP
• Setting up WordPress caching and minification
• Image compression and optimisation

WordPress Security Consultant

Alongside the essentials of WordPress, I can analyse your current setup and suggest ways in which you could reduce/minimise the chances of being hacked. I frequently come across hacked WordPress websites and they do nothing for your reputation and remidial work to address the causes of a hacked WordPress websites costs time and money.

Hertfordshire SEO Consultancy

Now that you have a WordPress website up and running it's time to submit your sitemaps and install Google Analytics. But do you know if your content is optimised correctly for your focus keywords? What effect does page speed have on SEO? Do you need an SSL certificate? What keywords do you rank for already?

Hertfordshire WordPress Consultancy

My WordPress consultancy and training sessions are tailored to your specific business needs in order to achieve maximum ROI from your WordPress website. Contact me today to find out more.