Continuing to post new content—book reviews, questions and answers, pictures of your cats, or whatever attracts the sort of people who’ll like your stuff—is the best way to build a subscriber base. When you publish something new, you want to already have a bunch of people who’ll be glad to hear about it.
Additionally, there are a few things you need to do to keep your site running smoothly.
Table of Contents
Accessibility
It’s easy to forget that not everyone who visits a site can see it. Visitors with limited vision may have trouble reading print that’s small or low contrast, or might experience your site through a screen reader program such as JAWS. These programs don’t report the size of your text or how it’s indented or where on the screen it appears. They treat your page as an HTML document, report on the outline structure, and read out the text sequentially as it appears in the HTML.
For your overall site design, the theme and plugins work with this in mind. Your color and choices for the site may cause problems, though, and when you write pages and posts, you have opportunities to make the contents accessible.
There’s been a lot written about this, and I encourage you to find a website accessibility guide and follow it. I just want to mention a few key points.
- Images should have helpful “Alt” text, unless they are purely decorative.
- Infographics (say, a bar chart) should use the Description field in the Media Library to summarize what the image shows (“Line graph shows upward trend in arrant nonsense from 1950 to the present, with a sharp increase in 2016”).
- Link text should include enough words to tell what it’s linking to. “Click here” is unhelpful even if it’s followed by “to register for the seminar” because when someone tabs through the page using a screen reader, they’ll hear the link text but not the surrounding text.
- Use section headings (the “Heading” block) to organize content as an outline.
- Don’t use Heading blocks just to make text large. Block settings let you control text size.
- Don’t make text bigger just so it looks like a heading. If it’s intended as a section heading, use an actual Heading block.
- Don’t use H1 headings in the page body. The page title is an H1, so the content is subordinate to it. The first heading in the content must be H2.
- Increase heading levels by only one step from the previous heading – an H4 can’t follow an H2, for instance. If the heading is too large, use block settings to adjust font size. Or if it’s a general problem, use custom CSS to fix it, or take it up with the theme developers.
- Use an accessibility tester such as https://wave.webaim.org to evaluate your site for potential problems. Not for every blog post, but your main pages, and any widgets or other elements that appear on every page. WebAIM lets you navigate the site to quickly check several pages.
- Just pause and consider whether a person who can’t see the size or color of your text, or who can’t distinguish between colors, or who has trouble with low contrast, or who can’t hear, will be able to easily get all the information you meant to convey.
Delayed Publication
When you publish a blog post, by default it appears immediately.
The publish panel of the post-editing screen contains an option to delay publication until a date and time you specify. Use this to space out your posts and reduce your stress level. It’s best to maintain a regular schedule of posting, which is easier if you queue up a few posts in advance. Depending how you like to work, you may allocate a block of time to write several posts, but don’t post them all at once, because then people will read them all in one visit. You want them to come back and think of you (and see your advertising) more often.
What dates and times are best to schedule publication for depends on your audience. People write articles about how to decide that; go read them. Your site statistics are helpful in seeing what days and times people tend to visit.
Note: If you have a queue of upcoming posts, be aware of what’s coming up, so you don’t accidentally post something that’s insensitive in the context of that day’s news.
Moderation
In the Settings > Discussion screen, there are options to control what happens when people make comments on your pages and posts. This includes:
Set these options as works best for you.
When comments are held for moderation, regardless of whether you’re notified by email, the dashboard shows them as a circle, usually orange, with a number in it beside the “Comments” link in the dashboard.
Go to the Comments screen. The comments pending approval are listed first; you can decide their fate from there.
Applying Updates
WordPress is designed to automatically keep your site up to date when new versions of themes and plugins are released to fix bugs, tighten security, or add features. You just have to enable this feature for each theme and plugin, which you can do en masse from the plugins screen of the dashboard, or individually per plugin.
For themes, there’s no option to enable auto update for them all at once. Go to Appearance > Themes in the dashboard and click each separately to find the auto-update control. You don’t need to keep unused themes on your site, so deleting them is also an option (doing so will delete any custom settings you have set while you were using them previously).
The automatic update system sends you email when updates happen. This happens so often that it’s a nuisance. We’ve been promised a way to turn those notifications off. Meanwhile, there are plugins to disable them.
The dashboard will also let you know when there are updates available. A circle beside the Updates link tells how many software updates are available for your components.
It’s best to apply updates promptly. When that circle shows up, take action. Go to the Updates screen and it’s all there.
Many releases of the base WordPress software contain security updates. Your hosting provider wants to keep your site secure, and may automatically update your WordPress version. Expect to be notified by email in advance of such updates. Don’t wait, but apply the update yourself so you can test whether anything broke.
Running a backup of your site before major updates is smart.
Also update plugins and themes that aren’t currently activated, if you choose to keep them. Deleting a theme or plugin often deletes any configuration data you entered for it, so if you think you might still need it later, leave it. It does no harm sitting there unused, but the software should still be kept up to date.
Monitoring for Site Out of Service
You can’t monitor whether your server is up from your server, because if the whole server is down, the monitoring code can’t run. Monitoring has to happen from outside.
If you search the Internet for “website monitoring,” you’ll find many services to do this checking. These are not WordPress specific, and many of them are free. I like Uptime Robot, but they all do basically the same thing.
The monitor will notify you somehow if your site is down, generally by email. If you prefer a text message and the service doesn’t offer that (or charges for it), check with your mobile carrier to find out the email address of your phone’s text message service. For instance, with T-Mobile it’s phonenumber@tmomail.net.
These services typically let you login to their site and check historical information, also, so you can get an idea of the percent uptime of your website.
Site Stats
The setup tool installed the plugin WP Visitor Statistics (Real Time Traffic) by osamaesh. This simple tool collects information about your website visitors without using any external service – it doesn’t use Google Analytics, for instance. It’s basic, but fine for starting out. The information stored is the IP address the request came from, what page they were requesting, their browser type, and the time, so it’s not any personal data, and you’re not sharing it with advertising companies. Your privacy statement can reflect that.
With this data, you can see which are your busiest days and times of day, which are your most popular pages, how many people are accessing your site by phone versus tablets or PCs, and how they found you – what site they followed a link from. This helps you plan when to release new blog posts and what topics to write about, and to direct your publicity efforts where they’re being most effective (or adjust your approach in places where there’s less click-through).
In the dashboard, go to Visitor Statistics. Go to the Settings tab and select your time zone. Visit the various tabs and see what information is available. There’s a paid version showing more detailed information, including city, which might be useful (but readers can buy your books from any geography, so for writers this may be less important).
You find out interesting things this way. For instance, I learned that on my own site, my post about how to clear the error code from a Honeywell water heater thermostat so you don’t have to replace the whole thermostat, is viewed more than the rest of the site put together. A distant second is my analysis of how long elephants can stand after death, followed by the one on topical use of chocolate. These would be good pages to insert an ad into.
There are more comprehensive statistics modules and analysis tools. It’s possible to waste huge amounts of time tracking your statistics and trying to react to them. It’s nice to check in now and then, and maybe tweak your publicity strategy, but I suggest you mainly focus on writing.
My setup program will activate this plugin by default, because even if you’re not ready to use it immediately, if you do start, it’s more useful if it’s been collecting data for a while.