On today’s episode we’re going to talk about different ways that we can hack on our WordPress website right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, episode No. 297. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we will be talking about an idea that came to mind because it’s a slow week in the news, there’s not a lot happening. We’re getting really close to the next launch of WordPress. We’re waiting on WordPress 4.6. It should be coming out about next week or so and so there wasn’t a lot of news to talk about. And so I wanted to share kind of what we’re doing at Automattic.

But first let’s just go ahead and dive into the ‘is there a plugin for that’ section. Today’s plugin is one called All in One WP Migration. You can find these on the WordPress repository. It is the only tool that you ever need to migrate a WordPress site. It’s amazing that it does this. The only tool you’ll ever need and I’ve never heard of this plugin before. I found it while doing a little bit of browsing in the WordPress repository today. Now this plugin will allow you to export your database and media files, plugins and themes. You can apply unlimited find and replace operations on your database and the plugin will also fix any serialized problems that occur during the find and replace operations. So it sounds a lot like BackupBuddy, when it can transfer, it sounds like what you can do with BackWPup and Duplicator and some of those other plugins that are out there, but this is one that you might wanna check out. It’s called All in One WP Migration.

All right, let’s dive into the show and just talk about hack day. And what – this actually just came up to me today as we were doing a hack day inside of Automattic. And this means that we spend a few minutes, a few hours, whatever that may look like. For support people like myself it’s not really the easiest to take off an entire day of answering tickets because we still have customers and we have people that have problems with setting up their WooCommerce and their shipping modules and all that good stuff. So I couldn’t take an entire day off. I wanted to take off a couple hours. I got derailed just doing some work trying to figure out some bugs in some of our different plugins.

But a hack day, we have these about once a quarter or so and they’re time to set aside for us to work on things, just to clean up the overall aspect of WordPress, or not necessarily WordPress, but things inside of Automattic, whether that be internal tools, whether that be external facing documentation, whether that be a whole list of things. The list of items goes on and on and on. Today I will be spending my time just trying to fix up some of the demo themes that we have for our premium themes at WooCommerce. And so like I spent a lot of time on Canvas and what that experience looks like to somebody that’s brand new who’s just installing Canvas for the first time and then downloads the demi content and then they got a bunch of messages and what does that look like? How can we document that a little better? How can we make it better so that we get less tickets? So we get less people writing and saying, “Hey, the demo doesn’t work right. I don’t know how to install this,” all that good stuff.

So that’s kind of like overarching – brought me the idea of talking about WordPress hacking and what we could do to hack on our own websites, just some ideas that – things that kind of may be out there, have been out there for a little while, but you just haven’t got around to doing them. So I put together a list and let’s just go ahead and dive right through them. And some of them will be easy things, some of them are gonna be a little bit more time consuming and a little bit more difficult to implement, but let’s go ahead nonetheless and just take a look.

The first thing that you could do on a WordPress hack day is you could update your plugins, you could update Core, you could update your theme. You should make sure that everything is updated; everything is working in tip top shape condition. That’s something that I like to do regularly, I like to keep my plugins and Core files updated all the time so I do this on a regular basis. But this could be something that maybe you’ve just been a little busy, maybe you haven’t posted in a while so you haven’t logged into your website. This would be a perfect first step to get going.

Another thing you could do is you could spend a little time evaluating if every plugin that you have on your website is actually necessary. Things could have changed, you could have found a better plugin that does two or three of the things that you have four plugins for, there’s just a lot of things. Some plugins could be outdated and the new versions don’t work well with your theme. It just really depends. There’s a lot of reasons why you may not use a plugin anymore. You could be like me back in episode – I don’t know how many episodes ago it was, it was a dozen and a half episodes ago, where I had way too many opt-in plugins.

And that was just a big deal because I had too many of them and they were having a disjointed – it was a very disjointed experience when you came to my website. And so I took some time and I evaluated and I took a look at the plugins I was using. I had more than five contacts – five plugins capturing leads and so I eliminated two of them and I kind of downsized and things are starting to work a lot better. So that’s something else that you can look at.

Another thing you can do on the way of plugins is you could try a plugin that you heard on the show recently. I try to outline a plugin every single show. I haven’t done this since the beginning of the show but there’s probably at least 200 plugins that I’ve recommended over the course of the last couple years that could really do – add extra functionality to your website that you may or may not need. Like today’s, the one about the all in one importer or the All in One WP Migration. This could be a perfect tool for you to add so you can duplicate your site onto a local testing site and then you could make some changes or do updates or things like that.

Another thing that I like to do when I have a little bit of time and I’m kind of hacking around on my website is to find and replace outdated text. I know the one that gets outdated the most and the most frequently is the one on my website, which it still needs updated because I haven’t had a hack day lately, but it says that there’s more than 43,000 plugins in the WordPress repository. And that number – I specifically put that in there as a number like that so I could go in and find and replace and now it should be over 46,000. So I’m like 3,000 plugins behind so I need to add that to my to-do list to make sure that I go in and I find that – I do that find and replace and update that text across my site. So that’s something else that you can do.

Another thing that you may wanna do is maybe you wanna fix formatting across your site. I did this a few years back when I changed the formatting for my podcast. I set up the show notes and I had very specific H tags wrapping around things. I had a very specific flow, and at that time I think I had 100 or 150 shows, and I went through one by one and I went through and I made sure that every one had the exact same formatting so that I could customize and style each page individually or I could make sure that every page looked very consistent with the look and feel of my site.

Another thing that I haven’t done that I should do is go back and add corrected size images. I know when I very first got started my plugin – or my theme that I used, I could pick any image on the web and it would auto scale that and kind of crop it so it would fit in the header area. Well, it turns out that I have a lot of images when you go back through the first 50 episodes that don’t – some of them are more square than rectangular, some of them are huge, huge images. I’ve just done a very poor job of managing that way back when. Now granted I don’t necessarily have to do that because that was a long time ago, but on the other hand, if I wanted to I could go back and I could make a change to these and I could do two or three of them every time that I do an update or a hack day or whatever that looks like. So that’s something you can think about as well.

Another thing that I like to do is analyze the sidebar widgets. Are you using the most updated things? Are there things in your sidebar that you no longer need? Do you have registration for an upcoming webinar and your webinar was two months ago? Like that kind of stuff needs to be removed and taken off your website. So those are some things to think about. You know, just make sure that that area looks good. Do you have an opt-in form that is being showed even if people have already opted in? Those are some things that you could look at as well. You could actually – with some of the newer plugins with opt-ins you could actually display different content for people who have already subscribed to your website so that they’re not seeing that opt-in form on every single page. So that’s another thing that you could think about.

Another thing you could do is you could go in and you could start categorizing and tagging your specific posts. Maybe you started off your website and you’ve got 100 different categories. Now you wanna pare those down to maybe ten categories, or maybe you have 1,000 tags and you wanna kind of narrow those down, you could go through one at a time, and it’s, again, very time consuming depending on how big of a site that you have, but you could go in, you could make sure all of your posts have the correct categories and make sure that they are tagged to the right thing. That will just make your website that much more navigatable, make sure that it is easy to get through and people can find the content that they are looking for on your website.

Another one that – this one I can’t say that I have ever done, but I do have multiple backups so I’m okay with that, but this is verify your backup works. And I say that I don’t really verify this, but I am running a local version that’s an exact replica of my live version. So if something happened on my live I could just take – duplicate the content that’s local and move it out. So I do test this regularly I guess because I do have – I make sure that my dev site is open and it works and it’s always running. And so that’s something to think about.

But make sure that – you know, go in, you download your files and then try to, on a external site – you don’t wanna try to upload over your regular site. But this would be just something good to just see what the process is like, how long does it take. After you do this a couple times if you’re in a panic and your website actually goes down and needs to be restored, if you’ve done this a couple of times you’ll know all the steps, you’ll know the gotchas, and you can get your site back online very, very quickly. So that’s something to think about as well.

Another thing that most people get – or most websites get overlooked is the about page, the resources page, the contact page, those static pages that just…they don’t get updated that regularly. So you could spend some time on a hack day just going through and looking at all your pages within your website. Some of them – you may only have five pages in your menu, but you may have 15 pages in your WordPress backend. So you could go in, you could remove pages that are no longer necessary and do all that good stuff as well to make sure that all of your site is most updated, you don’t have outdated content there and other places and whatnot. So that’s something else you wanna do, especially if you’re family has grown and you had one kid before in a picture, now you’ve got two or three kids, that’s gonna make a big deal. You wanna make sure that at least the about page, the contact page, if you’ve changed phone numbers, email addresses, all that good stuff, that those have been updated as well.

Another thing that you could do is you could actually spend some time modifying, updating your wording on your giveaway button, changing those opt-in forms, adding a new image to the opt-in form, like playing with colors and styling and button sizes and all that good stuff. You can change whether you’re collecting just email addresses or if you’re collecting first name and last name and email addresses, you could see which one is actually working better, which one are you having more opt-in forms for for your website and just spend a little bit of time updating and revising those.

Another thing you could do is you could actually update that giveaway, whatever that giveaway is, maybe it’s time – the one giveaway that I had a long time ago was the 50 free most useful plugins and I wrote that like two years ago. And I’m sure that there’s more useful plugins out there now that that document should be updated and I should make sure that that – I’m allowing the most recent download or the best version of that to be downloaded when people opt-in to a list. So that’s something else that you can do.

You can also make theme modifications. How often have you looked at your theme and you’re like, “Oh, I’d really like to change this,” or, “This really needs to be – this font needs to be just a little bit better or a little bit bigger,” or, “This copy needs to be changed a little bit in the footer of all of the pages,” whatever that is. Spend a little bit of time and make those small modifications. If you got two or three of them at a time just spend a little time and batch those out and work on them one, two, three at a time and just dedicate a little bit of time to say this is going to be my hack time, let’s fix all these little nagging issues that I’ve had that I just don’t have time to do on a normal basis.

Another thing that’s really good on a hack day is to go through your broken links if you’re using the Broken Link Checker plugin. This is something that’s kind of tedious, it makes your website rank faster – or rank higher because you don’t have broken links and Google definitely likes that. It’s just kind of a pain and inconvenience. You have to go find – you have to verify the text, do you wanna unlink it, do you wanna change it, do you wanna remove some of the text. And at one point I had 80 plus broken links on my website and I just slowly – a few times I just set aside 15-20 minutes and I would go through a batch of ten and then I would fix those. And then the next time I had a hack day on my website I’d do ten or 20 more and just kind of work through those slowly and methodically and eventually you’ll get those all taken care of and you’ll get all of your links updated on your website.

The last thing that I have here on my list is test the responsiveness of your theme. Maybe you’ve added some new pages or different things and you’ve never actually tested to see if the responsiveness works. I know when I was building my resource page I had it all perfect, it was all laid out exactly how I wanted it and then I tested it responsively and it looked terrible because it didn’t actually respond to the size of the screen because I was using fixed widths and I was doing some things that were not proper. But I haven’t had a chance to go through and look at some of my other pages that have embedded content. What if you put a large image? Does that shrink down to the right size? And just spend some time on your phone playing around with your website and navigating. Do the social buttons work? Do all of those good things. That’s something that you could spend a little bit of time on as well.

And this is kind of the list that I came up with rather quickly today as I was thinking through all of the things that we could work on within Automattic. So there’s tons and tons of different things I’m sure that you can think of. There’s just nagging little things that make your life a little bit easier or maybe you could even go in and you could – this isn’t even that hard or it wouldn’t take that long – but you could go in and you could change the default category to be whatever post type that you use the most. So instead of saying uncategorized is the default category, you could go in and say that podcast or blog or video or whatever that category is. That’s something super easy that will save you seconds every time that you publish a new blog post. So that’s something you could do as well.

So those are the things that I had listed this week, tons and tons and tons of things that you could do on your own website. You can tweak them till you go blue in the face, till you get tired of your website and you don’t wanna look at it anymore, but I do recommend spending time – at least once per quarter maybe, so four times a year spend – put a couple hours on your calendar to go through and fix some of these nagging issues, some of these small things that just have been overlooked when you just don’t have a lot of time. So I would say two hours once a quarter that will be good to keep you updated on some of these things.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. I am excited to write up my post and finish out my hack day project. I bit off a lot more – I thought I could get a lot more done, but the tickets and stuff today just really threw me for a loop. But it’s fun every once in a while to do something that’s outside the norm, spend a little bit of time making the tools that we use every single day better. And so for that I’m truly grateful that Automattic allows us to do this about three or four times per year. So with that, let’s wrap up the show. We’ll talk again next week and till then take care. We’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.