Wordpress Websties

[saptastic]

Useful info thanks SM
+1 for Yoast

[Spoiler]

Good info, thanks !

I manage ~6 WP sites, and have peaks and troughs of interest in maintaining them. Host them on Siteground, which does auto WP core / plugin updates, so they are reasonably up-to-date (although some plugins don't seem to auto-update each time).

Will check out MainWP though, could be useful that...

[SimonMac]

Started running a few Wordpress sites, now well into double figures so was looking at trying to find a way to maintain them all easily as it's normally just a pittance of an income for MyCo, but it's half the fun of getting back into something technical as the day job has moved fully away from that, but also a bit of an earner if I was to do it right (at the moment the clients more than cover the costs of MyCo hosting meaning I get to play for free)

Starting to pull everything together under MainWP, created a subdomain of my main and using this as a dash board, install the MainWP Child plugin, configure it up and away you go, one site to control all updates and maintenance.

Second task was to speed up the installation of plugins, I can install them through MainWP pretty easy enough, but realised there was a list of 11 plugins that I would always install into every site, have a look at a tool called WP Favs which lets you create a list of plugs and install them all in one go, and as such that list is:

• Yoast SEO - Seems to be the best SEO plugin, still getting to grips with it but it's very comprehensive, not seen any upturn but the google returns are at least looking tidier.
• iThemes Secuirty - If you install only one, install this. Does the basics like making sure you change your admin user name, table prefixes etc, but also if you enable the Brute Force Protection it gives a shocking insight as to just how often wordpress sites are exposed to hack attempts!
• Cookie Notice - neat little click through bar if you use cookies on the site.
• MainWP Child - see above
• Shareaholic - quick and easy way to share site content on various social media sites
• WP-Piwik - I use a self hosted instance of PIWIK rather than Google Analytics, YMMV but I prefer it to GA
• WP Mail Logging - A log of an email that the site attempts to send
• WP Easy SMTP - A better way of sending emails from the site rather than the inbuilt php_mail() function which is tulip!
• WP Time Capsule - File and database level back up, set it up once and connect it to your could storage provider of choice, god little GUI for restoring the site too.
• Redirect To Homepage - One of the things the iThemes Security picks up on is people trying to access files that aren't there, this just redirects everything back to the home page (or any other page) on anything not found with a 301 redirect.
• LoginPress - Purely vanity, but a way to customise the login page for the wp-admin, makes it look less Wordpress-y but also a way to pimp out MyCo

Other key Plugin I am playing around with is Authy for 2FA, it's not perfect (one touch approval through the phone app is flaky), which is why I am not putting it up for recommendation, but trying to find a good alternative is hard.

I have also started to use a self hosted version of OSTicket to try and control the emails that come through, I may be a one man band, but I am doing what I can to not look like one