We’ll look at some of the general settings in WordPress today, including permalink, export and backup tools.
Then I’d like to have a look at a few specific plugins and services to think about setting up.
We’ll start with SEO
The first plugin to check out is Yoast, which handles SEO pretty well. There’s a great user guide available at Moz here.
You’ll note there’s a link to another article about Google’s Search Console. This is a fabulous tool to help you see where your site is not doing well with the search engine. The Moz article about the basics of search console is also pretty good.
On a related note, you may want to check out the Google XML Sitemap generator. This is a plugin that will help you generate a sitemap for Google and the other search engines. (Remember, this is an indicator of quality for Google.)
If you’re hoping to produce really great snippets for SERP, then you may want to check out All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets. (They could use some branding help.) I haven’t had a chance to play with this one yet.
Website Performance
One of the things you can do to increase the speed of your webpages is to create a website cache. Essentially, a cache is a copy of your website saved as a static page, so the next time your audience member comes back to the page, they get the quick, static version.
W3 Total Cache can help you do this easily within the dashboard.
Wp-Optimize is a good option for cleaning up your database tables. As your site ages, you’ll have copies of updated pages and posts, old comments, trackbacks, pings and so on that can add the size of your database. It will also hurt your site’s download times. (I just ran this on my site and sped up the site immensely.)
Security and Spam
Charlotte already has us covered with Wordfence, but it is probably something you want to install on your sites after the course is over.
Askimet is also useful for dealing with comment spam. It’s free for personal sites and bloggers. (I pay because I sell books on my site.)
Images
WP Smush will help you optimize your images as they’re uploaded to save you some download time.
BJ Lazy Load takes another approach to the same image-load problem. Instead of compressing, it puts in a placeholder until the user scrolls to the part of the page that needs the image — then it loads, thus saving some time.