1. Backing Up WordPress
So your blog hosting companies servers go down and your blog vanishes into thin air. How do you retrieve all the posts you’ve spent hours writing and all the comments your readers have left over the years?
Don’t think this is a 1 in a million chance, it actually happens more than you might imagine. But luckily, you need no server end knowledge, and the solution is not only simple, you can put it on autopilot. WP-DB-Backup is a wordpress plugin that backs up the entire wordpress MySQL database of tables that make up your blog. It also has the added feature of allowing you to schedule daily or weekly backups to be emailed to you. So if something does go wrong, you can simply restore it with minimum damage.
2. Page Load Time
It’s essential to keep your page load times as low as possible to ensure your visitors stay on your site. Not only that, it’s important for Search Engine Optimization as it’s a ranking signal to Google. WordPress can be quite slow, the answer – WP Super Cache. This is a caching plugin, it serves visitors static versions of frequently accessed pages, which decreases loading time as it no longer has to query the database thus enhancing user experience.
3. Redirecting Old URLS to new Ones
Perhaps you have a dated post, that is now obsolete, and you’ve written a much fresher one. You want to direct any traffic landing on that page to the newer version, and you’re not a dab hand with 301 redirecting using the .htaccess file. Luckily, the Redirection Plugin has the answer. It’s simple to use and makes monitoring 404 errors very easy.
4. Keeping Your Visitors On Your Site and Visiting Other Pages
A common problem is getting visitors to navigate through your site and read more of your content. The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) helps solve this. It automatically selects related posts that may be of interest to readers and displays them at the bottom of individual posts. Increasing the chance of further engagement with your site.
5. Letting Your Visitors Contact You
The easiest way to let your readers get in touch with you is obviously via email, or perhaps yet, via a contact form that can be displayed across your site, be it in the footer, the sidebar or on a standalone page. Contact Form 7 plugin allows this to be accomplished with ease
There are literally thousands of wordpress plugins available, these are just some of the most popular and useful ones to solve common problem.
Post written by Helen Clough from IT Support Company – Integral IT
