Automated WordPress Maintenance and Security
Knowledge
Base
Knowledge base
Tips, tricks and guides for all things WordPress, Optimisations and Hosting.
WordPress Guides
FINDING YOUR LOGIN URL
The default URL to login to WordPress is the same as your site URL but with “/wp-admin” added to the end of it. For example, if you visit a WordPress website at www.example.com, you would go to www.example.com/wp-admin to access the login screen.
LOGGING IN
Here are the instructions to log into your site.
1. Go to your login URL: www.examplesite.com/wp-admin
2. Enter your WordPress username and password.
3. Click “Log In.”
You now have access to your WordPress dashboard where you can manage your WordPress site.
ONCE LOGGED IN
Your WordPress dashboard should look similar to this:
Most of your WordPress functionality will be available from the links on the left hand bar – we’ll run through a few of the most common ones you’ll use.
WordPress started as a blog platform originally, with posts making up this aspect of the site. Used these days for the blog or news section of your site, WordPress posts contain content written in order of publication, easily arranged or categorized.
The Media section controls all of your uploaded media assets – Video, Sound and Images. These are ordered in the backend by type and date for ease of use.
Pages contain the content used in the structure of the site. Typical pages include the About Us page, the Home page, Contact pages, and general informational pages that form the structure of your site.
While you can create blog or news content using pages, this is typically handled by the Posts function of WordPress.
The comments section handles control of user comments on your page or blog content.
You can approve or delete comments here before the content is publicly displayed on your site which is helpful in stopping spam or offensive content from appearing on your site.
The Appearance section controls the primary theme, widget and menu functionality of your site.
You can add or edit themes here, any specific content they may allow, menu creation and any widgets specific to the theme.
Plugins – one of the options that has made WordPress one of the most widely used CMS systems available. Plugins are specify items used to enhance the functionality of your site.
Examples of plugins would be –
• Contact Form Plugins
• E-Commerce Plugins
• SEO Plugins
• Image Galleries
• Security Plugins
The User section is used to control a few aspects – site administrators that have control of all aspects of the site, content creators that would need to edit or add posts, or users that may have registered if your site has an e-commerce function.
The Tools options control functions like manual imports of data, theme options for example, posts and content from external sites, or custom settings added from Themes or Plugins.
The Settings section in your dashboard control a few core elements of your site – reading, writing and discussion options, your permalink structure, and default media options.
All things Hosting
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), better known as a web address, is basically just the user-friendly name of your website address – www.yoursite.com – for example.
When starting a new website, chances are you are already looking up available domain names or trying to come up with a creative domain name for your site.
One thing you’ll want to consider is which domain extension to target – there are multiple extensions available, with the list growing seemingly on a daily basis. We’ll dig briefly into two – the .com and the .co.uk domain extensions.
Given the choice, a lot of people opt for .com but in truth, a .co.uk extension could be a better choice depending on your website’s target audience or primary customer base.
Let us break down exactly what .com and .co.uk mean and explain what their differences are.
When it comes down to it, .com and .co.uk can both be useful for a UK-based business, but they indicate, to both consumers and search engines, different advertising and business focuses.
.com is a domain name extension that is widely recognized to be general and international -it does not imply by its name or its search parameters that it’s primarily intended for use by UK citizens. Because it is so generalized, people associate this extension with a legitimate company and may trust it more than one that has a .co.uk.
A .co.uk in turn, attracts more regional traffic (i.e. from UK-related consumers and businesses) and will direct more UK Google traffic to your website. There are several advantages to this if you’re promoting a local business. When people see a .co.uk extension, they assume that they are dealing with a UK business that specifically caters to local needs. This, in turn, can imply things like lower cost of shipping and lower shipping time, more responsive customer service, and so on.
In a nutshell – trust. While Gmail accounts are becoming more common place, having an address that uses your domain can create more trust and legitimacy for your business. In theory, which would you be more likely to trust – optimightinfo@gmail.com or info@opti-might.co.uk?
There are two aspects when it comes to a domain – registration and hosting. Domain registration is simply securing a domain name – www.example.com. It doesn’t allow mail accounts, FTP or any site uploads by default.
Domain hosting allows your domain to be used for email and your actual website to be uploaded and visible to the public.
A content delivery network, (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDN nodes are usually deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple Internet backbones and benefits include reducing bandwidth costs, improving page load times, and increasing the global availability of content.
Site Optimisations
The User experience is really the big reason that search engines think website speed is such an important factor, and that’s why it’s part of their ranking algorithms.
It’s a universally acknowledged fact that on the internet, no-one has an attention span of more than a few seconds. So if your webpage is taking more than 20 seconds to load, chances are the majority of users won’t be bothered to wait around for it to load.
Whiile the timing given above isn’t the 100% timing rule, a faster website creates a better user experience and so, in turn, search engines want to promote those websites above the slow ones with higher bounce rates.
Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your script files and web pages. It is one of the standard ways to reduce bandwidth usage and accelerate page load times.
Applying this to your site enhances the user experience by significantly improving site speed and accessibility.
When creating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS) files, developers typically use comments, white space, and long, coherent names in the code, making code and markup legible for themselves and others who might work on the files later, and although this coding technique work in the development phase, it creates extra network traffic without providing any functional benefit when it comes to serving your pages. Besides, web browsers and servers don’t need them for content in any way.
Images, and media in general, can be one of the biggest factors affecting site speed.
Knowing what image types work best for your needs is also important – .pngs, for example, allow transparent backgrounds while .jpgs don’t – but this comes at the expense of file size.
There have been significant advances in images formats, with .webp and .svg images being accepted as the preferred option for web images.
Resources
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