On today's episode, we are going to talk about 18 New Year's Resolutions for 2018, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 373.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we are going to dive into some things that we should be thinking about, and some New Year's resolutions we should be making for our Wordpress site in 2018. But, before we get there, I have four announcements, and a plug-in that I want to share with you.

The first piece of news that I want to share with you this week is that Wordpress – a 4.9.2 security and maintenance release was launched out into the wild. This was back on January 16th. And, it is a security and maintenance release, and so that means that all versions of Wordpress all the way back to Wordpress 3.7 have been updated with a point release. It fixes an XSS vulnerability that was discovered in the Flash fallback files in the media element in a library that was included with Wordpress. Because Flash files are no longer needed for most cases, they've been removed from Wordpress.

Not exactly sure what all that means, but basically there was a vulnerability that was allowing people to hack into a Wordpress site. All that stuff has been removed, back to version 3.7. So, if you haven't updated, or if your host hasted automatically updated you to Wordpress 4.9.2, I recommend doing that today.

The next news item that I want to share with you this week is about DesktopServer, and version 3.8.4. This is a tool that you can use for local development. You can spin up Wordpress websites, or you can copy your website, and clone it down to your local environment so you can work offline, so you can work without having to go out to the web every time you want to refresh and take a look at your website.

I love the tool, and it works really well, and helps you to develop much faster. Plus, you have a back-up that saved right on your hard drive. The cool part about 3.8.4 is now it has the use of a new top level domain called Dev.CC. So, your website could be like Yourwebsiteengineer.dev.cc. It's because of the tool – the latest changes with a top level domain, .dev, that the many browsers now force ssl on anything with that .dev extension, and so it gets really weird sometimes with Chrome, and it says that there's no ssl certificate enabled, or whatnot. So, Desktop Server has created and made this .Dev.CC as the top level extension. And, it will only work for local development. So, that is one of the gifts to the community. It is awesome, and it is something that you need to update if you are using a desktop server 3.8.3.

Alright, moving right along. I found an article this week about 12 of the best tech newsletters to subscribe to in 2018. And, this one includes wpmail.me. I've been a subscriber for wpmail.me for a few years now. I think they're up to a weekly episode, or a weekly post of 300 or so. And, this gives you a lot of great news. It really breaks things down into Wordpress news, and tips, and plug-ins, and podcasts, and stuff like that. So that is the top one on the list. But, there are a whole bunch of other ones out there. There are ones that are there by the MIT Technology Review; Tedium, is one that's there. There are just a whole bunch of them.

So, if you're interested in keeping up with the tech news, you can definitely check this out. There's one called Versioning, and it's all about making sure that your versions of your website are working well, and whatnot. Just a ton of them. So, if you don't have enough Wordpress news in your life, or even tech news in your life, I recommend checking out this article. It's in the show notes. It's for Episode No. 373. And, you can up your tech game this year, and subscribe to a few more newsletters.

The other thing I want to share with you this week – and, something that I've signed up for, and haven't had a chance to get started with – is there's a new out there Wes Boss, and it is called CSS Grid. And it is a 25 video course that includes all the html, css, and Java script for each solution for each exercise. And, it is a real good education in how the new CSS Grid works. And, it is a free course because it's been sponsored by Firefox, and Firefox is sponsoring it because a lot of the things that Wes does, and their CSS Grid development tools, are built right into Firefox.

And, so this is one where you can sign up. It's four hours of videos. And, so it talks about the fundamentals, and developer tools, and how you can size grid items, and where you can place grid items, and reordering them, and aligning them. – All kinds of things. And, so there is – Wes Boss has some other courses. There's a Javascript 20 that's a free course, and then he has a bunch of other premium course that, if you're interested to level up your game, you can definitely check out. These aren't specific to Wordpress, but they are things that you can learn, and then you can take to your Wordpress environment, and you can take to your Wordpress theme to continue to build on. So, that is the course CSS Grid. You can find that at cssgrid.io.

Alright. In today's Is There a Plug-in For That? Section, there's a cool one there I found this week, and it is called Words Content. And, this is a plug-in that will help you mark any word in your poster page, and add some engaging content to it. You can explain your words better. You can add highlighting to validate facts, or support stories. You can use short codes. You can add related posts, or related products, or offers from right into the text. It support Contact Form 7 to make it easy to get direct leads from almost every single page. You can increase engagement, reduce bounce rates, and increase leads through your blog.

It is really neat. It's a cool plug-in. It's a brand new plug-in that's out there. And, if you are interested in that, you can look up Words Content in the Wordpress Plug-In Repository, if you want to add some fancy ways of styling your text right inside of your Wordpress site.

Alright. Moving right along to the main topic of the show today. I found this article last week on 18 New Year's Resolutions for 2018, written by the team over at iThemes. And, it was just too good not to share, so I give full credit to them, and I will link in the show notes to the blog post, and that article. But, basically, I just wanted to take some time today, and this week to talk about some of the New Year's resolutions that maybe if you haven't been doing them in the last couple of years, or you've kind of been ignoring your Wordpress site, then these are some things to kind of get you back in, going, and getting excited about Wordpress again.

So, the first New Year's resolution is start running a scheduled automated website back-up. So, do you have a website back-up in place? This is one of the things that I find that happens so infrequently, especially working with wu commerce customers all of the time. And, WooCommerce customers are the one who really need that back-up in place because if something happens with your store, you could be down for hours and days and not be able to sell anything.

But, you want to make sure that your back-up solution – whatever that may be, whether you may be using Back Wordpress Up, or Back-up Buddy, or Back-up Wordpress Drop Box, or Vault Press, or any of those ones that are out there – you want to make sure that you're doing a complete website back-up; that it's scheduled; and it's automated so you don't have to think about it; and, that it has support for off-site back-up, so whether you're sending that to Amazon S3, or sending that to Drop Box, you're sending it somewhere other than your server. You want to make sure that's happening, and you want to make sure there's a way to restore your website from a back-up.

If your website crashes, you want to be able to get that back-up up and running very, very quickly without having to spend a lot of time trying to configure, and figure out, “How do I get my website back up and running?” The tool that I use for all of my websites is Vault Press, and I know that it's a little bit more expensive, but it is the simplest solution that I've found when it comes to backing up. You can start for $5.00 per month, and get backed up.

And, they have a great tool where you can either bundle up a back-up, so if you say, “I want to restore from two days ago,” I can click the button, and you can have a zip file downloaded right to your computer, and then you can restore it, or if you enter your ftp credentials, or your ssh key, you can automatically back it up and restore it right to your current website, which is really nice. And, so it is the easiest tool that I found to back up and restore.

So, a lot of the other tools do a great job of backing up, and sending your data somewhere else, but Vault Press is the one that I found that is easiest to restore. So, if you don't want to have to deal with any technical things, or even any settings, you turn Vault Press on, and it just starts working, then I would recommend checking into Vault Press, and for that $5.00 per month – There are a couple of different plans that are out there, but it's around $5.00 per month to have a fully automated back-up solution.

This second New Year's resolution is to start practicing good Wordpress security measures. This basically just helps you to get around some of those most common security issues, and this is the best tip for this one – is to install iTheme Security, or it used to be called Better Wordpress Security. And, it has a check feature that's built in that will analyze your site, and activate the recommended security settings.

It will make sure that you're not using Admin as a user name. It will make sure that you have your site locked down if somebody tries to use Admin as a user name to log in. It will lock down your site if somebody tries the same user name and password four or five times, and it will lock them out so they can't get into your site. Lots of cool security features that are built in. That is one of my favorite plug-ins to recommend. And, that is iTheme Security, and you can find that in the Wordpress Repository.

Another resolution – the No. 3 one for 2018 – is to update out of date plug-ins, themes, and Wordpress Core. If you're running anything that's outdated, it's definitely a chance to make amends, and do some fixing. Even if you've done some work, and you've – illegally – I’m going to say illegally. If you've taken some time, and you've maybe hacked into one of the plug-ins, you've hacked into some of the code, and made some changes that weren't necessarily right, and so now you're running an outdated version of a theme or a plug-in, this year is the year to take some time, and to fix those things, go back and try to figure out where all the fixes were, and where all the hacks were, and get your website back up and running to the latest and greatest version.

We just heard earlier at the top of the show that there were some vulnerabilities in Wordpress 4.9.1 that were fixed. That just came out. And, so we want to make sure that your site is not susceptible to any vulnerabilities. We're doing, now – good security measures. And, the worst thing you can do is you can have good security measures, but then you could do nothing, and have outdated themes and plug-ins – and that's not going to help anything at all. So, update those things. Get them up to date, and make sure that you are running the latest versions of everything on all of your websites.

Item No. 4 is to set up two-factor authentication. This is kind of a pain to have two-factor authentication, but I find that it's super helpful, and I have two-factor authentication enabled for every site that I could possible think of, or every site that enables it. But, what this does is it allows you to have an extra layer of protection when you're logging in. It requires you to have a password and a secondary time-sensitive code to log in. And, so there is some plug-ins that will do this for you. It allows you, though, so you have to log in with your password, and then you have to generate a code so – that only works on specific devices.

So, if somebody is hacking into your website, and they finally guess your password, they also have to be able to generate a six digit numeric code to plug-in to actually log in, as well. So, two-factor authentication just makes it harder for people to gain access to your Wordpress site. If you are starting to use two-factor authentication, you're using Smart Security Matters, and running more difficult versions of passwords for your log in accounts, then I'd definitely recommend, in 2018, to start using a password manager. There are a couple of them out there. Last Pass, is one I am a big fan of. One Password is a paid for plug-in for the Mac, and all of the other environments out there, as well. But, this allows you to easily generate passwords, and save passwords, and save secured notes. And, I save social security numbers, and bank account information, and it's all saved in one password.

So, wherever I am, I have access to One Password on my phone, and I have to put in the master password, or use my touch ID on my iPhone to get in, but it is so helpful. And, I don't know any passwords for anything, really. It's only the one password that I've committed to memory, and then all the rest emerge as jumbled text, and very secure – high secure passwords. So, start using a password manager in 2018.

The next item, No. 6, is to blog more. I know that it may fall to the bottom of your to-do list, especially when you're juggling other high priority tasks, but if you blog more, then if you double what you're currently doing, so maybe if you're only doing one post per month, if you go to two posts per month, or once a week, or whatever, you will get more traffic to your website, and then more traffic is always good because more traffic will lead to more eyes, and more eyes will lead to more clicks to your shop, or to your store, or your affiliate links, or whatnot. So, blogging more, and having more visitors to your content is always a good thing.

No. 7 is to develop an SEO strategy, and it just depends on what you're looking for, for your website. If you don't have a strategy, this is a great place to get some, you know, just to have a strategy. I'll put a link here. There's a link in this article for a giant library of free SEO training with SEO expert Rebecca Gill. And, so, just go through some of those, and just learn, and try to figure out how I can best market my site, and how can I get my site results to show up higher in search rankings. So, that's another thing that you could plan to do in 2018.

2018 also gives you the opportunity to optimize images on your website. A lot of website owners get into the bad habit of just uploading a giant image to a poster page, and the larger the file the slower the page is going to load. So, you can optimize these images. You can use the Smoosh image compression and optimization plug-in to re-size and optimize all of your images, or you can spend some time in Photoshop and export them from the web, and that's going to be a lot smaller of an image than a giant, full resolution picture that you've taken from your dsl or camera.

Item No. 9 is to update my website design. If your website hasn't had a refresh in a while, 2018 may be the year to roll out a new design. And, this doesn't have to be the entire website. I've been working on small, little fixes the last couple word camps I've been to. I find that word camps are great opportunities for me to sit into sessions, and spend some time debugging, and fixing some things on my website.

And, so they're just small, little incremental improvements, but if there is something that's bothering you, that you just don't like the way that it looks anymore, or it doesn't work as it should, then 2018 is a great time to make some incremental updates to the design, or to completely scratch what you have, and start completely over.

No. 10 is update your portfolio. If you have spent some time – if you're a software as a service company, or you're building websites for people, or you have products, or whatever – if you haven't updated your portfolio in a while, this would be a good idea to update, and add some of the projects you've done in 2017. Does your website reflect the most current work that you've been doing with your clients? Then, if not, spend some time this year just updating that, and making sure that looks all good.

No. 11 is to get informed about Gutenberg. You know that Gutenberg is coming. It is a new editor for Wordpress. It's coming in version 5.0, which is going to be due out some time in April. But, if you haven't had a chance to play with it yet, I recommend going to the Wordpress Repository, loading up your site – maybe on Desktop Server or Local, by Flywheel. You have a local version of your website at Gutenberg, and start adding a post or a page. Just start playing with it. It is going to be here.

It is going to replace the current version of the editor that we see, and it's going to be the current editor. It is cool because it can add blocks. You can add block quotes, and bullets, and all kinds of things. It's going to make formatting a Wordpress post and page much, much easier. So, that's – Get ready for Gutenberg.

The 12th item, or the 12th New Year's resolution is to get involved with the Wordpress community. Wordpress has a thriving online and in-person community, and it has the ability to – Part of the community is the Wordpress meet-ups; the word camps that are local in your area; and, there are all kinds of ways that you can get involved, whether you volunteer your time, and answer some questions on the forum, or help out the video team editing the videos that go onto wordpress.tv. There are tons of different ways to get involved with the Wordpress community. And, I would recommend doing that this year.

No. 13 is to set up and review website analytics. This is one that – I went to a presentation at word camp Albuquerque, and it was really interesting because I've set up analytics before, and I've just kind of let them run and don't really look at things. And, the whole point of the presentation was how to set up and configure, but then how to also go in and start looking, and kind of tailoring your website based on who's looking at your website.

So, you can look in the analytics, and you can see, “Oh, 90 percent of the people are using a mobile device, looking at my website. Maybe I should check out the mobile layout, and see how I can optimize that, and see how I can just make sure that is the best version of the website that people are being able to see.” So, just spend some time looking at the analytics, and seeing what the results are telling you.

No. 14 is to raise my prices. So, if you are a developer, or a consultant, and you're building things for people, or even if you are just running a business, I would recommend raising your rates at least 5 percent each year, and if you are in the client space, and you are consulting, like, you could probably double your rates and still be okay. Now, if you double your rates, you're going to have fewer clients, but those clients are willing to pay more, and so you'll need less work to make the same amount of money. So, raising your prices is always a good thing.

Just a couple more here as we round out the list. You want to continue to build, or start building, and email list. If you don't have a way on your website for people to sign up and subscribe for updates, I recommend doing this. I use Convert Kit for this purpose on my website. And, then it gives me a direct line of communication that I can email people if I have a special offer coming up, or I want to let them know about new and cool things that I'm doing. And, this is especially important if you have things and products to sell, and you want to be able to email them and say, “Hey, I have this promotion running,” or, “I'm doing this,” or “I'm doing that.” So, that's start building and using an email list.

Three more here. I want to talk about writing an e book This could be a resolution that you have for 2018. Writing a book, or even an e book can be overwhelming, but if you have a lot of blog posts on similar content, you can bundle those into an e book You can have those e books as a free download on your website, or you can even turn those into an epub, or a kindle version, and you can put them on – Kindle, you can actually sell them on a Kindle, on the Kindle platform, and whatnot, or you can just use it as a free give-away to build yourself as an expert in your email newsletter – for your list.

So, when people sign up for that email list we just talked about, they can come, and they can get an e book, and talk you through all of the points of whatever you want to share about whatever your blog posts are about. So, that's writing an e book.

Maybe in 2018 it's time to learn a new coding or design, or marketing, or some sort of other skill. Maybe you want to improve html, or php, or css, Javascript, spice up your web or ux design, maybe work on your digital marketing. Spend time each month, and maybe this is Friday afternoons to watch tutorials, or take classes online. Be sure to track your progress, and see how far you've come in a year.

Commit to consistently learning, and growing in 2018. This is something that I had on my list, like I really wanted to get better at Javascript in 2018, but I've done almost nothing for that, and it's almost the end of January, so we're about 1/12th through the year, and I've done virtually none of the courses that I said that I would do. So, that's something then. This is a big one for me that I have to work on this resolution, or this new practice.

Then, No. 18 is have more fun, and practice self-care. One of the things that you may not think of, and you may have all these dreams, and goals, and desires – is to take some time for yourself, and have some self-care. So, what does this mean? This means eating healthier; exercising or getting outdoors; having a better work life. Does this mean, like, you have a standing desk, and you work standing up most of the time instead of sitting down?

Do you spend some time, you know, each hour, like getting up and moving about. Maybe you work for 45 minutes, and then you take a 15 minute break, and you get away from the computer, and you go do some push-ups, or you go do some pull-ups, or you go for a walk outside, or whatever that looks like. Like, just spend some time in 2018 instead of being in front of your computer all the time, spend the time that you need in front of the computer, and then spend some time away from the computer. And, this does a great – this is a great way to just let your brain refresh.

I know that a lot of times I'll walk away from my computer after struggling on a specific issue for a while, and then all of a sudden I come back, and I have the answer, and I didn't have to spend – You know, like, your brain keeps thinking of it as you're doing laundry, or as you're putting things away, or you're going for a walk, or whatnot. So, that is the last thing that I want to share with you. Have more fun, and practice self-care.

Again, I said, this article came from iThemes. I have a link to it in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing. But, it is just some great pieces of advice, and some great things to think about in 2018. Some things where we can continue to get better, and continue to move our business, or our websites in the right direction, and I'm excited to see what 2018 holds. I can't believe that the first month of the year is almost over. This year is just flying by like crazy.

And, so that's what I wanted to share with you this week. I have more information, more specific Wordpress stuff coming to you next week, but I wanted to share this one because I felt like it was very timely, and we need to start focusing on what we're going to accomplish this year, and when it comes to Wordpress. So, that's what I wanted to share with you this week. Take care, and we'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

For more great Wordpress information, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com.