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Making “Sharable” Content a Priority


Spring Cleaning month continues this week with “Plan & Optimize Content Creation.” Think of it this week’s tasks this way: It’s out with the old and in with the new. 

With the advent of a new marketing paradigm, the importance of content creation for your business or organization should be clear. Take this opportunity to review your current content strategy and make sure you have a clear strategy in place for creating, publishing and sharing content.

In the next few days, we’ll be sharing tips and ideas for content creation, but let’s begin with a solid foundation for your content strategy.

Remember this sentence:

Content should be sharable (and worth sharing).

Content offers an incredible opportunity to spread awareness of your brand. What did the words “like,” “tweet,” or “pin” mean a few years ago? Now these powerful phrases are apart of our everyday vocabulary.

While the purpose of your website may just be to provide contact information or showcase your product or services, anyone can create content that that connects with potential clients or customers.

Not sure what to share?

Here’s a few ideas for the types of content anyone can share:

  • Tutorials and how-to’s  - Everyone knows how to do something. And some people might even be paying you to do it for them. Consider a short tutorial with photos or screenshots explaining how to do something people want to learn. People will be interested in your expertise and you’ll probably even get a few new friends.
  • Recent work - What have you been up to? Keep your customers posted on the awesome job you just finished. Share photos, sketches, even problems you solved while working on a project. You’ll keep customers involved in your work.
  • Interviews or testimonials - It may seem strange, but don’t be afraid to brag on yourself by letting others do it for you. It can even be subtle: How has your product or service helped someone else accomplish their own success? For a good example, check out Mailchimp’s great Customer Love series of blog posts.
  • Photos or behind-the-scenes stories - One of the greatest advantages of the “content era” is an incredible opportunity to connect with customers on a personal level. Show that your company, while possibly online, is full of real people. Document everyday things around the office, stuff that goes on outside of work, even lessons you’ve learned in business. Just be real and authentic.
  • Announcements and news - Remember to keep customers and clients up-to-date with announcements and news. Hosting an event? Released a new product? Have a sales or promotion? Don’t forget to share it.

For more great ideas on creating content, read Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. Stay tuned to the blog this week for more ideas on planning and optimizing your content creation and get caught up on all of this month’s Spring Cleaning tasks so far.

This Week at WebDesign.com

We’ve got a lot of great stuff happening at WebDesign.com this week, including a couple free webinars. The second installment of No-nonsense Guide to Managing Your Personal Finances with Michael Cady is Wednesday of this week.

Also free this week is the Facebook Marketing 101. John Haydon, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, will join Benjamin to discuss how best to use Facebook as a marketing tool for you and your clients.

Don’t forget, it’s Spring Cleaning month here at WebDesign.com.  Keep watching the blog for more information on how to clean up your WordPress site.

iThemes.TV – Getting Started with BackupBuddy
May 15, 2012 – Tuesday – 11am (CDT)
Overview: Have you ever wondered how to get started using the BackupBuddy Plugin? If so, this class is for you! Join us as we show just how easy it is to get up and running with this awesome plugin that allows you to backup, restore, and migrate your WordPress site with ease!
Instructor: Bes Zain
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Beginner
Requirements: Desire to use BackupBuddy
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/782501458

BluePrint Advanced – BuddyPress and Builder
May 15, 2012 – Tuesday – 5pm (CDT)
Overview: Build your own social network with the recently released Builder Yukon theme which is customized and ready to use with the BuddyPress WordPress plugin.
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour +
Skill Level: Intermediate
Requirements: Knowledge of Builder theme
Registration Link: Visible to WebDesign.com members after log-in

No-nonsense Guide to Managing Your Personal Finances – Session Two
May 16, 2012 – Wednesday – Noon (CDT)
Overview: As part of our Make Waves campaign for 2012, “We Believe in Investing in People.” In this two-part series Michael Cady, Chief Financial Officer of Digimedia and former professor of accounting and finances, explains what it really means to budget and that a penny saved is NOT a penny earned. Join us as Michael changes lives, one penny at a time.
Instructor: Michael Cady
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Everyone
Requirements: No requirement
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/516562298

CSS Dojo – Session Two
May 17, 2012 – Thursday – 10am (CDT)
Overview: Learn the foundations of CSS.
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Beginner
Requirements: Desire to learn CSS
Registration Link: Visible to WebDesign.com members after log-in

Facebook Marketing 101
May 18, 2012 – Friday – 1pm (CDT)
Overview: Join John Haydon, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, for an webinar to learn the skills to succeed in using Facebook as a marketing tool for you and your clients.
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Everyone
Requirements: You will need to have a Facebook account
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/143120986

Cleaning Up Your WordPress Media Library

 

Ah, the WordPress Media Library. It’s your site’s “closet” of images, videos and files. And just like any closet, it occasionally needs to be cleaned out.

What needs to go?  Most media library culprits are unused or “unassigned” files, as well as multiple versions of the same file. These files are basically just taking up unnecessary space and can be removed.

To get started: From the WordPress dashboard, visit Media > Library.

From this panel, you’ll see your media library files. These files are sorted into columns containing file information with a thumbnail, “file name (and file type)”, “author,” “attached to,” and date uploaded.

Sort files by Unattached.

You’ll see your files sorted now by their “unattached” status. Sorting files in this way offers an easy way to scan for multiple files or files that aren’t currently being used on your site.

Scan for duplicate and unnecessary files.

From here, look for duplicate or multiple versions of the same file. Check for files that can be removed because they weren’t used in any post, page or gallery–and delete.

A few tips for a “tidier” WordPress Media Library:

Always optimize your images for the web. Don’t slow your page load time by using ridiculously large images. In Photoshop, use the “save for web” function. Generally, medium quality is still good enough for the web without significant quality loss and can reduce the file size by over 60%. Mac users: check out ImageOptim for easy/speedy optimization.

Use the WordPress Image Editor to resize images. To avoid uploading multiple versions of the same image because of different sizing specifications, use the built-in image editor. From the dashboard, visit the media library and click the file name. Click “Edit” and then “Edit Image.” From here, you can scale, crop, rotate, or flip the image. Click “Update  Media” and the new file version will be saved. If you need to revert back to the original version, edit again and click “Restore Original Image.”

Delete unnecessary or duplicate files you’ve uploaded before publishing a post or page. Getting into this habit before you publish will help lighten your spring cleaning load next year. Add this to your “publishing checklist” (we’ll cover more about this next week!), to make sure each post or page didn’t add unnecessary files to your media library.

Whew, another task down! Stay tuned to the blog for a few more tips this week on cleaning up your existing site content. To view all of this month’s Spring Cleaning tasks, visit the WebDesign.com Spring Cleaning Page.

Should You Upgrade WordPress?

There are many “experts” out there who say you must never update software until you make sure other people who update their versions figure out whether there are any issues or problems with the software update. While I’m not going to say this is a good or bad thing, I will point out that most of these “experts” are talking about enterprise-level software applications… and even operating systems.

When it comes to WordPress, this mindset of “waiting to see what happens” is just flat wrong and a very bad practice. I’ve run into so many site owners who are having a problem with their site only to find out they haven’t updated WordPress, a theme, or plugins in almost two years… because they were “waiting to see if something was bad with an update”. Let’s take a look at why waiting to update is a very bad practice.

We probably need to start by asking the question, why are there updates? The most common answer to this question is that most updates are released (for themes, plugins, and core WordPress) because a fix to a bug or a security issue needs to be patched. So by not updating, you are leaving your sites buggy and open to being hacked. It is extremely easy to do a little Google search to find a site that has not been updated and therefore ripe for the hacking. This goes especially true for plugins. Plugins seem to be a greater source of security holes than WordPress itself… so if you are only updating WordPress but not wanting to update your plugins, you are moving yourself to the front of the line for hackers looking to cause trouble.

Now you might be saying what does it matter if I get hacked… I’ll just fix/restore my site.. While it might be true you can “restore” your site, you might not realize the damage done to your site. Not only does the hacker know your site is vulnerable because of an outdated plugin, but now Google knows about your issues. A hacked site can lose position on search engine rankings. Google will even de-list and de-index your site because it finds malicious code that the outdated plugin let outsiders leave on your site. And now you have to ask yourself, what good is a website if no one can find it on the internet (through search).

Most people who don’t update their themes and plugins probably fall into the category of being afraid you’ll break your site. While this is a valid concern, it should NEVER stop you from updating a plugin or theme or WordPress… Why? Because there are so many easy ways to backup your site so that if something happens during the upgrade process you can easily roll-back the update and restore your site and do a little more focused work on making sure the upgrade takes place. Using BackupBuddy can be your security blanket to give you the courage to update as soon as you see an update is available. Here’s a quick 1-2-3 to help you update your plugins, themes, and core WordPress.

  1. As soon as you see an update is available, press the one-click button to perform a backup of your site using BackupBuddy.
  2. Go to WordPress’ update screen and update everything that needs to be updated.
  3. If everything went well… you’re done. If anything didn’t work out, just use BackupBuddy’s restore capability to roll your site back to before the update.

There’s another reason to make sure you are updating your plugins and themes that has nothing to do with security. (This is a real example.) WordPress recently changed the way the media uploader handled the uploading and management of images in the admin area of WordPress. If you had a plugin or theme that uploaded images as part of a feature… guess what happens if you choose NOT to update your plugin… Your plugin now fails to work because WordPress changed the way images are uploaded.

The great thing about being involved in an open-source project (WordPress.org is an open-source project) is that thousands of developers are banging on the code and constantly moving the project forward. This means things will change over time. And to take advantage of the expanded capabilities, you MUST keep all your code up-to-date.

If this post was too long and you really didn’t want to read it (TL:DR), here is the summary. Always update your plugins, themes, and core WordPress otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot!

Clean up your Posts, Categories and Tags

 

 

Last week’s Spring Cleaning tasks covered cleaning up your WordPress install. We covered the benefits of installing WordPress manually, how to clean up after a quick-install, the importance of upgrading WordPress, and how to customize WordPress for a client by cleaning out unnecessary blog functions.

This week’s tasks are focused on organizing existing site content. Today’s post deals with digging into your Posts, Categories and Tags. They’re not fun tasks (probably why they go undone, right?), but they’re easy and setting aside the time to finally tackle these things will be worth it. These tasks are especially helpful if your site is blog-oriented or you depend heavily on creating content.

Why? Future publishing will benefit from these organizational tasks by streamlining category and tag organization. Plus, revisiting old or forgotten content can mean a chance to update old information or an opportunity to get ideas for additional content based on the popularity or feedback of a post.

 

1.  Delete old or unpublished drafts.

 

Why? Really, they’re just unnecessary clutter.

Get started by visiting the Posts section from the WordPress dashboard. This birds-eye-view offers a super-quick way to scan a few important “clean-up” areas. From here, posts can be sorted into All | Published | Drafts.

Sort by Drafts to show all of the pending, unfinished or unpublished drafts. Consider whether any of these can be published and then clean these out.

2. Organize post categories and assign all posts a category.

 

Why? To optimize the archive and category view options of posts.

Again from the WordPress dashboard, visit Posts > Categories. Categories evolve over time and the life of your site, so taking time to evaluate your categories can help optimize the way posts are organized into archive views.

First, take a look at current categories. Note that this view offers the number of posts assigned to each. Which ones aren’t being used or have no posts assigned? Delete them. Next, think about which categories could be combined or need to be separated for the best usage.

Once you’ve organized your Categories, return again to Posts. Note the Categories column assigned to each post. Which ones were never categorized? Which ones could be better categorized? Make sure none of your posts are uncategorized.

3. Organize tags and assign tags to posts.

Why? Taking time to assign tags can increase site traffic.

From the WordPress dashboard, visit Posts > Tags.  From here, you’ll see an overview of your tag usage. (What’s your tag strategy? Visit this oldie-but-goodie What Are WordPress Tags? post for a few tips).

Remember that tags are intended to be words or very short phrases that accurately represent the post or page. Note how many tags have posts assigned to them and make sure all posts have them.

Whew, we made it! Stay tuned to the blog for a few more tips this week on cleaning up your existing site content. To view all of this month’s Spring Cleaning tasks, visit the WebDesign.com Spring Cleaning Page.

 

 

 

 

This Week at WebDesign.com

We’ve got a lot of great stuff in store for you this week at WebDesign.com.  We have courses for everybody from beginners to advanced developers.

Be sure to check out the free No-nonsense Guide to Managing Your Personal Finances – Session 1 webinar on Wednesday.  This webinar, lead by Michael Cady, Chief Financial Officer of Digimedia and former professor of accounting and finances, will teach you what you need to know to get your finances in order.

Also free this week is the Advanced Gravity Forms webinar in which you’ll learn how to take Gravity Forms to the next level.

And be sure to watch the blog this week for more Spring Cleaning tips!

Designing with Hype
May 08, 2012 – Tuesday – 3pm (CDT)
Overview: Tumult Hype’s keyframe-based animation system brings your content to life. Click “Record” and Tumult Hype watches your every move, automatically creating keyframes as needed. Or, if you’d prefer to be more hands-on, manually add, remove and re-arrange keyframes to fine-tune your content.
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Requirements: Mac required for Hype
Registration Link: Visible to WebDesign.com members after log-in

iThemes.TV – WordPress 101
May 08, 2012 – Tuesday – 11am (CDT)
Overview: If you’re new to WordPress or simply thinking about making the switch from another CMS, this class is for you! Join us for our WordPress 101 series of webinars which will walk you step-by-step through the basics of WordPress. You’ll learn everything from installing the software to creating your first post. Sign up today!
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Beginner
Requirements: Desire to use WordPress
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/973293658

No-nonsense Guide to Managing Your Personal Finances – Session 1
May 09, 2012 – Wednesday – Noon (CDT)
Overview: As part of our Make Waves campaign for 2012, “We Believe in Investing in People.” In this two-part series Michael Cady, Chief Financial Officer of Digimedia and former professor of accounting and finances, explains what it really means to budget and that a penny saved is NOT a penny earned. Join us as Michael changes lives, one penny at a time.
Instructor: Michael Cady
Length: 1 hour
Skill Level: Everyone
Requirements: No requirement
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/926123450

BluePrint Basics – Building an Upcoming Schedule Website
May 10, 2012 – Thursday – 2pm (CDT)
Overview: Build a Builder-powered website using the new Events block to create an interactive upcoming events/schedule
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour +
Skill Level: Beginner
Requirements: Knowledge of the Builder theme
Registration Link: Visible to WebDesign.com members after log-in

Advanced Gravity Forms
May 11, 2012 – Friday – 1pm (CDT)
Overview: Take Gravity Forms to the next level to create interactive forms, pass submitted data on to other fields, interact with 3rd party APIs, and much more.
Instructor: Benjamin Bradley
Length: 1 hour +
Skill Level: Intermediate
Requirements: Knowledge of Gravity Forms
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/559420106

Free Advanced Gravity Forms Training

On Friday, May 11th, at 1pm (CDT) WebDesign.com will be hosting a free Advanced Gravity Forms Training event.

Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/559420106

Gravity Forms is an absolute must-install plugin for every WordPress-powered site. Gravity Forms is so much more than just an easy to use form creator. Whether you want to create interactive multi-tiered forms, or sell Grandma’s latest crock-pot recipes, or enhance the user-registration experience, or require clients to sign-off (literally) on project milestones, or even revolutionize the way user’s generate and post content on your site… Gravity Forms has got you covered.

This free advanced training event is not a getting started class. This class is for people who want to take Gravity Forms to the next level. Do you want to harness the built-in conditional logic so that Gravity Forms does the heavy lifting for you? Do you want to learn how to pass submitted data on to other fields in the form? Do you want to learn how to work with external API’s to make Gravity Forms do even more? This this class is for you. This Friday, May 11th, at 1pm(CDT). Register your space here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/559420106.

Cleaning Up the WordPress Dashboard for Clients

Okay…so this doesn’t so much have to do with cleaning up your site per say! But it is still a good thing to know how to clean up the admin area of WordPress to better suit the needs of your client.

If you haven’t worked with a client yet who wants you to remove all that “blog stuff” from their site, chances are you eventually will. There are a number of things you can do, from the simple to the more advanced, that will turn your site into a content management system rather than a blogging platform.

Set the home to page to a static home page

By default WordPress sets the home page as where your posts display. If the client isn’t going to be creating posts, this is a pretty obvious and necessary change.

To change this, you’ll go to Settings > Reading and “Front page displays” from “Your latest posts” to “A static page.” You’ll then select the page you want to use as the home page from the drop down menu.  If you won’t have posts page, you can leave the drop down menu on “Select.”

Static Home Page

Turn off comments

Comments are typically associated with blog posts, so removing this feature for a non-blogging site is a good idea. You’ll change your comment settings under Settings > Discussion.

Comment Settings

You’ll also want to go into each page and uncheck the “Allow comments” and “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page.” You may need to open “Screen Options” and select Discussion to uncheck those options.

Page Discussion Settings

This is the point at which things become more advanced. So please continue with caution and within your skill level.

Get rid of all widgets that have to do with blogging

If your user were to go into the widget area, they will see all the available widgets, including ones that are related to blogging such as the “Recent Posts” widget. Seeing this may confuse them and make them think you’ve built them a blog.

To get rid of the blogging widgets, you’ll add the following code to functions.php

function unregister_default_wp_widgets() {
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Calendar');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Archives');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Categories');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Posts');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Comments');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_RSS');
unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Tag_Cloud');
}
add_action('widgets_init', 'unregister_default_wp_widgets', 1);

Remove blogging related dashboard items

There are a number of things that appear in your dashboard by default that are blogging related, such as the QuickPress section. You can remove these from your dashboard by, again, adding code to your functions.php file.

function remove_dashboard_widgets() {
global $wp_meta_boxes;
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_quick_press']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_drafts']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_recent_drafts']);
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'remove_dashboard_widgets' );

Remove “Posts” from menu and “+ New” from admin bar

If your client is not going to be keeping a blog, the “Posts” menu is obviously useless to them. Plus some clients will assume you’ve built them a blog site when they didn’t want one if they see this option available. The following code, when added to functions.php, will remove the Posts, Dashboard, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Tools and Settings menu items from the menu on the left of the dashboard. It will also remove the WordPress logo, Updates and Comment links from the admin toolbar.

function remove_menus() {
global $menu;
$restricted = array(
__('Posts'),
__('Dashboard'),
__('Comments'),
__('Appearance'),
__('Plugins'),
__('Tools'),
__('Settings')
);
end ($menu);
while (prev($menu)){
$value = explode(' ',$menu[key($menu)][0]);
if(in_array($value[0] != NULL? $value[0]:"", $restricted)) {
unset($menu[key($menu)]);
}
}
}
add_action('admin_menu','remove_menus');
function remove_admin_toolbar_links() {
global $wp_admin_bar;
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('wp-logo');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('updates');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('comments');
}
add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'remove_admin_toolbar_links');

All of these suggestions are an excellent start to de-blogging WordPress.  To see what else you can do and to learn about specific plugins that will help you manage your content (i.e. files and images), be sure to check out the WordPress as a CMS webinar.

If you’re not a member of WebDesign.com yet, be sure to check out our membership options.

Cleaning Up a Quick Install of WordPress

Getting onto the web with WordPress is quick and easy, especially if you use quick-install program like Fantastico. However, using a quick-install program can make it easy for hackers to attack your site.

There are a few things you can do to help clean up a quick install though.

Create Salts and Keys

Go to https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt to generate your salts and keys. Just copy and past the new salts and keys and place them in your wp-config.php file.

Keys & Salts

Create a New Admin User

With certain quick install programs, it creates an admin user for you with the username of “admin.” Hackers know this and it makes it really easy for them to break into your site.

Begin by logging into your site as the “admin” user. Create a new user and give them administrative rights. Logout of the site and log back in as the new user you created. Now delete the user with “admin” for the username.

Delete "admin"

Another good idea would be to change the way your new admin username is displayed. If, for example, your new username is “Jon” and that displays on your post, hackers know that your username is probably “Jon.” If you set it to display your full name, “Jon Doe,” it makes it a little more difficult for them to figure out what your username may be.

Change Your Table Prefixes

Changing your table prefixes manually is relatively involved. However, it helps to improve the safety of your site as all quick installs of WordPress create tables with the prefix “wp_.”

wp_ Tables

We do NOT recommend you change your table prefixes manually unless you have advanced experience with databases!

To change the table prefixes manually, you’ll go into your wp-config.php file and change your table prefix to something new. You’ll then need to log into your server’s cPanel and into your MySQL database. You’ll have to change the name of every table associated with your site.

You’ll then need to run queries in the options table and the usermeta tables:

SELECT * FROM w3pp_options WHERE option_name LIKE ‘%wp%’

AND

SELECT * FROM w3pp_usermeta WHERE meta_key LIKE ‘%wp%’

Any data these queries return will need to be changed to the new prefix you’ve created.

Don’t have the advanced database skills to change your table prefixes manually?

Don’t panic! There is an easier solution!

You can also change your table prefixes using BackupBuddy.

You’ll start by creating and downloading a Database Only backup of your site along with downloading importbuddy.php. You’ll then want to create a new database for the site.  Creating a new database allows you to access your original database tables if you need to revert to the original if something goes wrong.

From there, you’ll use your database backup and importbuddy.php to recreate your site. One of the last steps (step 4 out of 6) in the BackupBuddy process will ask for your database information and will allow you to create a table prefix of your choosing.

Table Prefix

Again, there are a number of things you can do to clean up a quick install of WordPress, or even just an old install of WordPress.

The suggestions here are a good way to start, but be sure to check out the premium WebDesign.com webinar, Fixing WordPress Installations, for more ideas on how to clean up your site.

It’s Spring Cleaning Month at WebDesign.com


This totally beats scrubbing the kitchen floors: We’ve named May as “Spring Cleaning” month at WebDesign.com to share a few tips for tidying up your WordPress sites.

What’s the plan? Each week we’ll be focusing on a different topic and outlining a checklist for tasks and tools to enhance your site’s functionality and efficiency — from important maintenance and organization tasks to content publishing and security tips:

  • Week 1 – Clean up your WordPress install
  • Week 2 – Organize existing site content
  • Week 3 – Plan and optimize content creation
  • Week 4 – Update your SEO
  • Week 5 – Review your security and backup plans

Stay tuned to the blog each week for new “Spring Cleaning” posts from the team. We’ll be compiling the entire checklist on the webdesign.com/spring-cleaning page each week, so you’ll be able to see the whole month’s tips, tasks and resources there.

 

Week 1: Clean up your WordPress install (for both new and existing installs)

Spring Cleaning kicks off today with a free guide from iThemes:

How to Install WordPress Manually: Securing and De-bloating WordPress.

Learning to install WordPress manually is an important skill to create the foundation for a secure and efficient WordPress installation.

As you’ll see in this guide, doing a manual install of WordPress (rather than using any of the quick-install applications provided by some hosting providers) is relatively straightforward. While a manual install does take a little bit longer, it helps to correct the security issues associated with a quick-install of WordPress and does not add any additional files to the server.

 

So what are some of the security and “bloat” issues involved with a WordPress quick-install?

  • The installer creates your database for you, naming it wrdp1. If you create another, the database will be called wrdp2. This is common knowledge and makes your site easier to hack.
  • Quick-install applications (like Fantastico) add additional files to your server in order to help it “keep track” of itself. This adds additional, unnecessary bulk or “bloat” to your site.
  • Quick installs add a prefix of wp_ to your tables. Hackers know this and can use it to break your site.
  • At the time of this post, quick-install programs like Fantastico are not installing the latest version of WordPress. It’s always important to install the latest version of WordPress whenever possible as WordPress updates often include important security updates.

Download your copy:

How to Install WordPress Manually:
Securing and De-bloating WordPres
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