WordPress is a highly beloved Content Management System, given its ease of configuration and amazing add-ons. Powering almost 30 percent of all websites online, WordPress is an answer to people who don’t like getting into the nitty-gritty detailing of software techniques. To further complement these powerful features, WordPress offers automated upkeep and maintenance so you can concentrate on your business.
In this blog post, we will be talking about the top WordPress automation tasks that will help you manage your online entity in a more efficient manner.
Managing speed optimisation
Experts have been laying emphasis on a fast loading website more than ever. Only when your website’s loading time is between 2-3 seconds, your WordPress website will appeal to your online audience. This applies to all websites regardless of type such as GoDaddy vs Wix etc.
To automate your WordPress site’s speed, you can add Caching. This helps by lowering your website’s load time when a user visits your website more than once. When Caching is in place, the requesting visitor’s browser on the server stores the website’s elements such as the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML and when the access request is repeated, it simply provides the user with a cached copy of the website.
To get started with Caching, you can use a plugin like W3 Total Cache.
Another way to automate improving your site’s speed is to incorporate image compression. Plugins such as Smush Image Compression and Optimisation can resize, optimise, and compress all of your site’s images, without reducing the quality.
Security monitoring
One of the most important tasks when managing your WordPress website is to monitor your sites security. However, it’s not possible to monitor a website’s security 24/7 through manual attendance.
Through the use of a security plugin or a website monitoring service, you can make sure that you are prompted for any malicious actions being carried out on your WordPress website.
To automate the Security monitoring aspect of your WordPress website, you can use one of the following plugins:
- Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
- Sucuri Security – Malware Scan, Auditing and Security Hardening
- All In One WP Security & Firewall
These plugins can protect your WordPress website from brute force attacks, hack attempts, database penetration and more. Their additional features such as blacklist monitoring, security hardening, live security notifications, remedial actions and firewall protection can help offer a comprehensive security shield for your website. Once you have installed and configured them, you can mostly tuck away your site’s security woes.
Database Optimisation
Optimising your WordPress website’s database has great benefits. The process can removes clutter and speed up your website by removing unnecessary data.
To automate the optimisation of your website’s database you can use plugins like WP-DBManager, which can optimise, backup, repair, and restore the database. It can even run selected queries, drop/empty tables.
Updating WordPress themes, plugins, and core
Apart from the option of enabling auto-updates for several components on a site, you can take care of the all critical website elements through the use of some update automation tools/plugins.
- For auto updating plugins check out Easy Update Manager plugin
- To learn about Configuring Automatic Background Updates check out the codex.
- You can manually One-click update your WordPress core, plugins and themes across many sites with the help of tools such as InfiniteWP.
- Fully managed hosting providers are a great way of dealing with these frequent updates because they check updates in a test environment before they go live.
Automatic Backups
Backing up your site is the most important task at hand for a website owner. It saves your site in case the files go missing due to a hack attempt or just an update mishap.
Incorporating automatic backups for your WordPress site(s) with the help of amazing plugins such as the BackWPup among others can help you simplify your site’s backups and restoration. These plugins offer the convenience of automatic backup scheduling, cloud storage, single-click restoration, multiple schedules, great customer support and more.
Editorial/Blog scheduling
If you are starting as a blogger, you must make a point to provide regular engaging content to your visitors in order to build a loyal audience. However, taking care of everything as a new website owner/blogger can be overwhelming.
In order to maintain consistency, you can use an Editorial Calendar plugin to plan your blog or website updates. You can use the plugin’s drag and drop feature to move posts and edit posts right in the calendar. Other features include easily seeing the status of drafts and completely automating your posting schedule.
Social media scheduling
As important as all these efforts are for your website, propagating your latest posts and other content on social media needs to be taken care of.
To automate social media sharing, you can schedule re-posts, announcements, Facebook Posts, Auto-share, Tweet-share, etc through some amazing plugins such as Jetpack.
You can use Jetpack’s Publicize feature to connect all of your social media accounts to your WordPress site and auto-share the latest postings when published. Revive Old Posts is yet another famous plugin meant for the same purpose.
These auto-posts on all your different social media platforms provide exposure to the content you publish and are indeed a great example of how automation can take away the pain of technical stuff.
Spam control
Last but not the least, controlling the outsiders’ activity on your WordPress site remains a challenge for each and every website owner. Known as Spam, this activity impacts your site’s online reputation, confuses your audience, and clutters your site’s contact form submissions.
To automate Spam control, the best WordPress plugin in the market is Akismet Anti-Spam. With it running in the background, you can remain assured that all kinds of spam are being intelligently filtered. The site admin can manually administer the flagged spam activity, which is in the form of comments.
Conclusion
Automating these WordPress tasks is a time saving way to move ahead with your site’s journey. When these plugins and tools are taking care of your site’s important tasks, you can better focus on growing your blog or website, streamlining your site’s marketing strategies, monetizing it well and earning a good reputation in the process.