1. Keep it clean

This means you should:

• Keep your WordPress core up to date manually or using the auto-update feature.
• Publish or delete your comments and trackbacks.
• Uninstall old or unused themes.
• Update your theme when an update is available.
• Uninstall old or unused plugins.
• Update your plugins when an update is available.
• If you have a custom theme or custom plugins, let your developer know in advance. They can create new plugins and build child themes, instead of changing the code of the original extension. It’s a little technical, but it’s worth it over the long term.
• We’ve found that sites with dirty dashboards are hacked a lot more frequently than squeaky clean sites.

2. Keep it secure

You will be surprised how frequently WordPress sites are hacked. Once these pesky hackers get access to your site, they can make a real mess that might take you a day or more to fix.

Here are some ways to make sure that you’ve secured your site:

• Make sure you have an automatic backup of your site happening. You can use a plugin like Backup Buddy or your host can look after it. This won’t help security, but it will certainly help to have a restore point if you are hacked.
• Don’t use the ‘admin’ user for creating content. Or better still, create a new admin user and remove the default one.
• Choose a strong password… by the way, ‘password’ and ‘123456’ are not secure passwords.
• Remove any old installations of WordPress on your hosting account. Old WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacking.

3. Create useful content

WordPress was built to make sharing content easy. Some business owners have a “build it (a website) and they will come” mindset. This does not work.

Paying a marketing agency to run ads or ‘do SEO’ for you might yield some results, but we hope you have deep pockets! Instead of using your WordPress site because you feel like you have to, leverage its power and really help your customers.

Take John’s site for example. If you look to the right sidebar -> there are links to hundreds of great podcasts, useful videos and honest monthly reports that are all hosted on WordPress.

John’s been able to build a great business from creating useful, valuable content that people share and we’ve been able to generate 25,000 monthly visitors with a similar approach. Content is truly that powerful!

A few tips to get you started:

• Always try to help your customers solve their problems.
• Set yourself a content creation goal – ours is 365 pieces in a year, what’s yours?
• Create a new post in WordPress with a heading and some rough notes, then come back to it every day.
• If you write blog posts in Google docs or Microsoft word, paste them into Notepad before moving them to WordPress. This will strip out the code that makes your formatting look funny.
• Install plugins like Digg Digg or Flare to make it easy for people to spread the word about your content.
• Watch your business grow!

4. Feel the need for speed

Here are a few ways to keep your eye on site speed:

• A great host will result a fast site. For example, clients who use WP Engine consistently get load times in the 1-2 second range.
• The Pingdom site speed tool will help you check your site speed. As a rule of thumb, under 2 seconds is excellent, 5-7 seconds is acceptable and over 7 seconds means you should take action.
• Large images will kill site speed. Make sure you optimize images before you upload them to the web. The Pingdom tool will pick up any issues on specific pages. WP Smush It will squish your existing bulky images.
• A caching plugin like WP Total Cache will help if your host doesn’t have caching.
• A CDN like Cloudflare will boost speed and security. Hosts like WP Engine have features like this built in.

There’s always more that you can do, but this is a great start.