Are you struggling to build your own WordPress sites without the technical skills or knowledge to do it well? Does your website look more like a home-made hot tub than a professional website? Pat Ramsey shares his best tips for building your own websites using WordPress. #diyordie

1. DIY or die
Pat Ramsey
@pat_ramsey
Marketing Clique

2. –wise carpenter
“measure twice, cut once.”

3. General Tips

4. web hosting
• host your site somewhere other than with your
domain registrar
• Semi-managed to managed hosting tend to have
fewer issues with permissions ( “WordPress can’t
write to the .htaccess file” situations )
• Unmanaged hosting ( AWS, Rackspace Cloud )
gives you wide-open opportunity but it’s on you to
set everything up

5. Use protection
• Protect your site with good regular backups
• VaultPress
• Protect your code with versioning
• Github
• Bitbucket
• Gitlab

6. backups, versioning
=
ounce of prevention

7. Harden your site
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/force-strong-
passwords
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-user-
password-generator

8. Themes & plugins

9. simplicity is key

10. use few plugins
• The more you have, the more likely there is of a
conflict occurring now, or down the road (
updates )
• Tip: some good plugins do the job of many
• WordPress SEO, Jetpack
• Audit your plugins ( & theme )

11. Sliders Suck
• https://yoast.com/opinion-on-sliders
• http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-
image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad
• http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-
are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496

12. One-page themes
• Maybe not a good idea
• Shareability
• Search results probably not optimal

13. Tools & Tips

14. • Nice redirect URLs for PDFs, ugly links:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-links-to/
• Resize all your images after a redesign:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-
thumbnails/
• Clean up orphaned options:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/options-optimizer/
• *be sure you know what you’re cleaning

15. View Source
• Look for multiple instances of jquery.
• Look for jquery not being loaded from “…/wp-
includes/js/jquery/”
• The body tag - does it have the class attribute?
class=“page page-template”

16. In your theme, this is bad
• <script
src=“http://google.com/code/script/myscriptrawks.
js></script>
• WordPress, plugins, and your theme’s functions
do not know that exists
• Ripe for conflicts

17. In your theme, this is good
• Use wp_enqueue_script() to load javascript
instead of hard-coding links to javascript files
• Use wp_enqueue_style() to load CSS ( including
links to Google Web Fonts ) instead of hard-
coding <style> tags

18. It’s a process, not a race
A website, like a business, is never
“done,” unless you pull the plug.

19. ?

20. http://goo.gl/dWVJ3L
Mòran taing, sláinte!