WordPress Expert
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com. (in their own words). Essentially, its a plugin which brings lots of the little features that WP.com has to self hosted WordPress installations.
That includes a really simple, awesome contact form setup (shown below).
Contact forms are an important part of engaging with your audience – and now Jetpack makes it even easier to setup your own.
This is my first go at posts to read this week – I hope you find them interesting / useful.
1. How To Create a Featured Post Layout in WordPress – Fewer and fewer free themes have featured posts layouts built in – but for some blogs they make a huge difference.
2. The 10 Things You Need to Know to Secure Your WordPress Site - Lots of customers this year have come to me after having hacking problems – with these you can make a pre-emptive strike and save yourself some time (and money!).
3. WordPress File Permissions - Another security post, with the same reasoning.
4. View All WordPress Posts on One Page - Not for everyone, but interesting – and potentially useful for an archives page.
The WordPress App for iOS (iPhone, iPad) has just received a major update – completely overhauling the UI with a pretty new sliding interface and a bunch of bug fixes.
I just downloaded it, and have had a quick play – and as a fairly regular user it is faster, easier to use and prettier. WordPress.com stats (a free plugin for all self hosted installations) are now available from the device too and my primary use for the app – photo posts, have been improved and simplified. All in all, a pretty cool upgrade.
New Features Include:
(Both pictures are from ios.wordpress.org).
As traffic increases to a WordPress website, so too does the load placed on the server. For websites on shared hosting, this can mean costly upgrades, fees or just trouble from your host. The fastest way to improve performance and reduce load in this situation is caching.
Every time you (or someone else) visits your website / blog, WordPress goes through a fairly lengthy process to generate a page to show you. It’ll call your database, run thousands of lines of PHP and finally output something for you to see – and doing this hundreds of times a second will slow your website down – something WordPress has been criticised for in the past.
However, using caching plugins, the process above only has to happen when the first user visits your website. The caching plugin will save everything generated when the first visitor loads a page and serve that to subsequent visitors – speeding everything up tremendously.
There are a number of different kinds of caching plugin, from simple disk cache plugins (which work on pretty much anything) to advanced memory cache software (which requires dedicated or semi-dedicated hardware, and so I won’t bother covering those), with all sorts in between. They have one thing in common – they will help you serve your website to more users without needing dedicated hardware. Below are some of the plugins I think are most effective, user friendly – and compatible.
W3 Total Cache – This is my favourite cache plugin – it supports disk caching (which I think is the most effective means of reducing load), as well as a number of other really cool features – including serving static files from a content delivery network, or CDN. Not only does this take some of the load off your server, but it will help your page load faster.
WP Super Cache – This is a reboot of the popular WP Cache plugin, adding additional functionality and increasing compatibility with shared hosting systems. It works well with most server setups (although notably not Windows servers) and is fairly easy to setup (the basic mode is just an on / off switch, although you can dig into some more complicated setup if you want to. With super caching enabled, it is a little faster than W3 Total Cache (I have found) and I use it for my higher traffic websites.
Quick Cache -This is a much simpler version of the above two plugins, and I haven’t used it but it is well reviewed. It is a super simple, work-out-of-the-box setup that’ll work on pretty much everything.
Caching won’t make up for a crappy host – but with the right combination of caching and hosting, you can handle a great deal of traffic without too many performance consequences.
Disclaimer: This review is not sponsored by HostGator, nor will you joining them benefit me financially in any way. There are no affiliate links on this post (apart from the advertisements on the sidebar) and this is a true, unbiased review.
Direct link to HostGator (no affiliate links).
Way back when I started making websites, I used a British web host called Compila. For the princely sum of £5 a month, they gave me 250mb of webspace, and 2gb of bandwidth. And that was great. I created my first WordPress website. Before too long, though, I outgrew my Compila account, and had to look for a new one. This was in .. 2009?
After some searching, messing around with cheap reseller hosts and eBay “Unlimited Master Reseller Plans” I found HostGator. It offered a simple service – ‘more or less’ unlimited hosting for about $10 a month. There were lots of negative reviews, lots of people trashing them for not being truly unlimited, but for a cent for the first month (coupon code 404PAGE by the way) I figured I’d give it a go.
In the five years since then I’ve moved around, tried other hosts (I have some of my own servers now) but I always kept a HostGator account for my smaller sites and development – I’ve never had a problem. My websites have always been fast, very rarely been down – which is all I need. The websites I host with HostGator don’t get a tremendous amount of traffic (about 6gb a month) and I’m sure if they did, I’d start having issues. But that’s not what I think the account is meant for – if you’re getting 10,000s of hits a day then you need more dedicated resources (Like I have for my travel network), a shared host is cost cutting that will come back to bite you in the ass.
My biggest problem with HostGator in the past was that their live support quite frankly sucked. It was powered by LivePerson, and I’m not convinced anyone I talked to back then actually worked for HostGator. I got boring, canned responses that did nobody any good, and never solved my problem. Since then I’ve not wasted my time with HostGator’s support team, I figured they had to skimp somewhere. With that said, I recently used the live chat to enquire about a server function and not only have they ditched LivePerson (yay!) but they have their own in-house system which is actually pretty cool. And the guy I talked to was helpful – he actually solved my problem.
So far I’ve waxed on about how wonderful HostGator are – this is starting to sound very one sided. There are things that suck too – the biggest of which is their ‘unlimited’ hosting. Nothing is unlimited, I’m sure they cram a few hundred of us on each of their servers – and even if we assume the server has a terabyte of storage space, that still only leaves 10gb. Hardly unlimited. The same goes for their bandwidth :- even at 5c/gig cost for HostGator, that makes 200gb of bandwidth before they are making a loss. So unlimited it most certainly is not. Bummer.
I’ve also heard that once you cross a certain usage threshold they’ll force you onto semi-dedicated hosting – not great if you get a burst of traffic and then go quiet again. For WordPress websites, though, use of caching plugins can reduce the effect of traffic surges, and help to avoid problems with hosts. All of my websites use my recommended plugins, and I have never had any major load issues (fingers crossed). I think any shared host would force you off their servers for continued resource abuse, perhaps HostGator are a little trigger happy – I have yet to discover.
So, in conclusion, I like HostGator. I like them enough to have stuck with them for several years, and they haven’t failed me yet. I don’t think they are much good for high traffic websites, but with some care, and some caching, they can be good for websites that don’t get a million hits a day.
Starting this Friday, at 6pm, I will start a weekly series of posts to read this week – all about WordPress. I hope these will cover some of the more interesting things that WordPress has to offer, as well as some of the best tutorials that I find.
I read hundreds of WordPress stories a week, and I plan to find at least five things to share with my readers each week.
I hope you enjoy!
When you run more than one WordPress website, it can be a pain to manage them all – you have to log into all of their individual admin panels, remember logins for each site, log in frequently to check for updates – it’s a pain.
Enter InfiniteWP stage left. InfiniteWP is a free, open source application that lets you manage any number of WordPress websites from one central location. It handles updates, backups (although not yet automatic ones), and lets you easily login to each site from your central panel. I use it to manage my entire collection of websites from a single control panel (and I have 10+).
So how does it work? Well, you install a plugin in each of your WordPress sites (this is the most difficult part of the setup) and it provides you with a code. You copy that code into your installation of InfiniteWP, and it picks up your site and starts managing it. Then, whenever you login you can see at a glance which of your sites require updates, and perform them all from one central location. Simple!
I love InfiniteWP – it has made the management of my websites a million times easier since I got it setup. Hopefully it’ll help you too!
We’ve all been there, be it changing hosts or just selling the site – eventually everyone has to move their installation to another server. Unfortunately, unlike most of WordPress’ management, it isn’t the simplest of tasks. There are a number of premium solutions available, but for those who want to do it themselves, or just learn how, I’ve put together the tutorial below.
Step 1 – Preparation
The first and most important thing you can do is backup your website. You should have automatic backups already, but in case you don’t (you really should!) you can use a plugin like WP-Complete-Backup to create a copy of your website. This is important both to ensure nothing goes wrong, and for uploading the content to your new host.
Once you’ve downloaded a copy of your backup (should be in a zip file) duplicate it, and store one copy somewhere safe. We’ll be using the other one, and wouldn’t want to accidentally damage the data.
(Note: Your installation should be completely safe on your old hosting account, but it never hurts to be absolutely sure).
Now, extract the zip file (double click for most operating systems) and you will be provided with a folder containing a .sql file, and a bunch of other files and folders. Keep the .sql file, don’t worry about the rest (for now!).
Step 2 – Downloading
Now you’ll need to login to the FTP account of your old host, and download all your files. You need all the files shown in the screenshot below, although you may not have _vti_inf.html or readme.html.
All the files you need to download from your old host.
Downloading all these files might take a while, especially if you have lots of pictures. Don’t worry – this is completely normal.
Step 3 – Upload
Once all your files are downloaded, we are going to upload them again on the next server. Login to the new host FTP account, and upload all the files into the public_html or httpdocs directory (depending on setup). Again, this might take a while, completely normal.
Step 4 – Database
This can be done while you are waiting for steps 2 and 3 to complete. Do you remember the .sql file I mentioned earlier? Great! We need it now. Make sure you know where it is, and if you can’t find it, you can download the backup from the old host again – it’ll still be there.
On your new hosts control panel, you’ll need to create a SQL database and username for your blog. Make sure you note down these details, as we’re going to need them later. Most hosts use cPanel, which looks a bit like this:
Once that’s done, we’re going to need to open up PHPmyAdmin – an application that comes as standard with most hosts. Some have their own versions (like GoDaddy) but they all work in very much the same way.
Select the database you just created for your website, and then select “Import”.
You’ll be presented with an interface that allows you to upload a file – this is where you upload the .sql file we mentioned earlier. Click “Okay” or “Go” and your entire WordPress setup will be migrated into your new hosts server. Fantastic! You can close PHPmyAdmin now, we won’t need it again.
Step 5 – Final Setup
By this time, your files should all have uploaded to the new server – I hope you still have the FTP client open! Right click on the file called wp-config.php, and select edit. We need to tell it where to find the new database. (Side note: This can be done by renaming wp-config.php to wp-config-old.php and redoing the installation process, but until you change your nameservers you will not be able to see the new site to do the setup. This way is more reliable)
When the file opens, you will see something like the below.
Modify the information in the second set of quotes to match the database information you have provided,
DB_NAME is Database name. In this case mine is wpguy_wp.
DB_USER is Database user, again mine in this case is wpguy_wp.
DB_PASSWORD is the password for the user to access the database.
DB_HOST is localhost for most people but for everyone else it is the database host (some, like GoDaddy have their own setup for this).
That’s all you need to edit! Save your changes, and change your nameservers – your new blog should be working perfectly!
[ttinfo]
My team and I work on up to 20 WordPress websites a week – and it never ceases to amaze me how few of them have backups. Perhaps one in ten have something fully automated, one in five take their own occasional backups.
I try and stress this to every single customer I work with, but without backups its not a matter of ‘if’ your data will be lost, it’s when. Thousands of websites are hacked every single day – why take a chance on your security? You might have the best server in the world but eventually someone will find a weakness.
There are a number of cheap / free backup services on the market for WordPress bloggers – as well as some more expensive premium options, like VaultPress. My business also offers a fully managed daily backup solution for a little shy of $8 a month – more about that here.
For those who cannot justify the monthly fee, there is always S3 – Amazon’s Simple Storage System. It has a free tier for the first year which should be more than enough to store some daily backups – and there are some great plugins out there (search “S3 backup” on the plugin directory and you’ll see) to help you implement it. My favourite is made by Dan Coulter – seen here. The great thing about S3 is that even when you do have to start paying for it, it’ll likely be 30 or so cents per month – which is awesome.
Whatever you do, find a way to keep your data backed up. A lot of time and effort goes into the creation of a blog that you love, and waking up one day to find that it’s all gone is the worst thing in the world. You may never use them, but if you ever have to you’ll be glad you made them.
Welcome to WPguy – a website about WordPress.
I’m George Pearce, a WordPress designer and developer with more than seven years of experience. I run a WordPress business, and blog tips, tricks and news to help WordPress users.
This website is in the early alpha stages at the moment, but will reach full release sometime in August 2012. Stay tuned!
