The World’s Greatest Blog

Right at this very moment, I am going through the motions of upgrading the very last of our (great many) WordPress blog sites to WP 2.5 - probably when completed, we’ll see 2.6 hit the WordPress.org site! However, for the last of these upgrades, I’ve had to unzip locally and upload by FTP as I’m still on shared hosting for some smaller client sites (scalability and cost, as always a primary concern!).

This means that the files take a little while to upload, which makes the overall WordPress upgrading take a lot longer than it might (5 minutes is too long if you can get shell access and unzip the files on your server, which I can’t!). However, that little 15 minutes of time is enough to undertake what I call Vital WordPress Maintenance, and, since I’ve finished it, I thought I’d share what I considered to be vital, routine, regular tasks to keep your WordPress install fresh and sparkly.

Some of these are webmasterish tasks involving FTP and other such voodoo, whereas others are simple things that anyone with a WordPress install can and should be doing on a (semi) regular basis.

Remove Unused Plugins

We’ve all got them, right? That must-have plugin which actually turned out to be garbage, or it broke our favourite theme. Well, if you’re not using it, get rid of it. If its activated, it probably slows your site down a little, if it isn’t, then what’s it doing there taking up useful server and screen space - you have to scroll past it every time you go into the “Plugins” menu.

This includes, for that matter, having a good “do I really need it?” look at all the plugins you currently DO use. Trust me, if and when you have a large database on your hands, which is getting thousands of requests from millions of monthly visitors, you’ll know why it matters to keep WordPress as fast as possible. Your database server will thank you by staying below 5 millions degrees when this occurs.

Backup Your MySQL Database(s)

We (probably) all know that we should back up our MySQL databases relatively often, but how many of us actually do this? I certainly don’t do it enough.

If you are familiar - and have access to - phpmyadmin, then this is a doddle, simply click on the top level of your database, and press the “Export” button. Choose the export to file method (I use SQL but this is up to you) and write the name of your choice. Save this file somewhere safe and memorable - also it might be worth saving it on removable storage like a USB hard drive, or CD, I know from this last week’s painful experiences that even dual hard disk drives can and do fail!

If you want to rebuild your databases simply do the revers - select “import” from phpmyadmin and open the file you saved. Hey Presto.

There are also a couple of good plugins for this, but since it is so easy to do, why not have a go at the phpmyadmin way - the reason for this? See above.

There is also a way to use PuTTy to get in and import MySQL data on the command line basis, but I’ll leave that for now as it is a whole post in itself - though this is the only way I could import our MEGASIZED databases when we switched servers a couple of months ago.

Remove Unused Files

All those themes you tried that don’t work. All those images you never use. Get rid of the lot. It takes five minutes, and you feel better afterwards. Purge those pixels.

Get Out Your Red Pen

This should be done as often as you can bear to. You know the red pen, right? Its the one teacher uses to correct your work. Go through your blogs (and any other static or otherwise pages) with your red pen with an objective eye, and be ruthless! What looks bad? What isn’t working?

Get rid of the bad, and add to the things that work well.

If you keep on doing this (e.g. on navigation menus, location and size of RSS feeds, advertising etc) to make your site as pleasing to the eye as possible (even if this involves a full couple of days redesigning an entire theme) then you’ll soon find that you go onto your website and genuinely think “hey this looks good!”.

Similarly,

Evaluate Your Content

The words, or, rather, the writing, within any blog are usually the most important thing. Evaluate your content often. By this I mean go back an re-read your old work, and not in a self-congratulatory back-slapping fashion either - actually read it with a critical eye. This is much easier to do after time has elapsed since you wrote the piece in question: when you wrote it down, you had all the ideas about what you were writing floating about in your head - in your haste you might probably missed something out that was important, or didn’t explain something clearly enough.

There is an edit button - use it! That’s what its for!

There’s also a ‘delete’ button. That should also get a bit of work from time-to-time. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Everyone writes something that is ‘a piece of crap’ occasionally. That’s the nature of the beast. The best writers out there know how to use the dustbin, and what should go in it. Think about it, if you always delete your worst pieces, what will be left? Now you have something to be proud of!

All that said, my install is complete, time to go to the old familiar /wp-admin/upgrade.php and press those buttons! I wonder, will this piece make the cut in three months time…