On today’s podcast, we are going to talk about how to automate your WordPress site right here on your website engineer podcast episode number 381.

Hello. And welcome to another episode of your website engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today we’re going to be talking about how we can automate our WordPress website. Some of the things that we can do just to make sure that our website just keeps running without any input from us, without any extra work on our behalf. So, we’ll talk about that. But first I do have two announcements and a plugin that I wanna share with you.

The first piece of news is a very old or a very tardy piece of news that I should’ve brought to you about three weeks ago. But every week or every month, I guess, on the WordPress.org website underneath the news or the blog section they have, “The Month in WordPress.” The recap. And so, the most recent one is from February 2018. Again, that’s like three weeks ago. But it just talks about some of the things that have been happening in the area or what’s been kinda going on in the WordPress space. And so, it’s a really kind of a neat overview and I’ll try to bring up this more often in shows in the future.

But if you wanna kinda keep an idea on what’s happening in the WordPress space, this is a great piece of news to read through. It talks about the differences between WordPress 4.9.3 and 4.9.4. It talks about the WordCamp Incubator. It talks about WordPress Meetup Round Tables. And it talks about the GDPR Compliance in WordPress Core. It talks all about this information plus it’s got a bunch of other – about a handful, a half-dozen or so articles for further reading to just keep you up in the look at what’s happening in the WordPress space. And so, if you haven’t checked that out, I do recommend checking that out and just seeing what all’s going on in the WordPress community.

The other thing that I wanted to share with you now is about Let’s Encrypt. And this is a free service that allows you to have the SSL Certificate installed on your website. A lot of hosts are starting to use this, especially like Pressable and Flywheel and some of these other companies are just having the SSL certificate built right in. That way when people are using your website, no data is being sent across the web unencrypted. And so, what they talked about in this article that came from WP Tavern is now that the wildcard certificates are now available. So, what this means is now you can have one certificate and it’s going to cover all the subdomains on your network or your site. So, for example, we can have yourwebsiteengineer.com, that can be secure. But then I can also have stored@yourwebsiteengineer.com or blogged@yourengineer.com or membship@yourwebsiteenginner.com. And it’d all be covered. So, that’s something that I just wanted to point out and it’s something that’s come out in the last week or so. That’s the news for the week.

Up next, I do have a plugin that I wanna share with you today. And this one is an unusual plugin. It is one that definitely works if it’s perfect for you. But this one is called Publish Control. And it’s one of those things that maybe you’ve done this before in the past, maybe you haven’t. But it’s a plugin that helps you to make sure that you are 100 percent certain that you want to publish your post instead of saving your post. And what this does is basically when you hit the publish button, it brings up a pop-up button and it says, “Are you sure you want to publish this piece of content?” And you can say, “Yes, publish,” or, “No, cancel.” And so, it’s just that one last check.

If you have a blog maybe. If you’re running a website that you have hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people that are reading your blog posts or even thousands of people and – I don’t know. Like, there’s just some instances that I can think of that this may be helpful that instead of when you – every time you hit publish, it automatically just pops up and says, “Are you sure you want to publish?” And then if you wanted to save it as a draft, you can always go in and do that. So, that’s what this plugin does. It’s very simple and if this is something that’s interesting to you, I’d recommend checking it out and searching for Publish Control on the WordPress repository or you can find it in the show notes for episode number 381.

All right. Today I wanna talk about automating your WordPress site. So, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And this is news that I’m sharing here on the podcast for the first time. But my wife and I are – and my family, I guess, but mainly my wife and I are building a brand-new house. We are wanting to move to another area of Dayton that is a little bit closer to the things that we use and do regularly. So, where my daughter goes to school and where we go to church and where we get most of our groceries is about a 20, 25-minute drive from where we live. And every time we go somewhere it’s like okay, we’ll get in the car and we’ll drive 20, 25 minutes. And so, it’s just like we’re never in the – we don’t live close to the areas that we’re currently using, or we use a lot.

So, we looked at houses in the area. We’ve got a whole huge epic saga about what’s going on. And the old house that we looked at and we were gonna buy it’s got a big lawsuit against it. And finally, we’re just like, “Okay. We’re not gonna go against this house. Let’s see what other options are out there.” And one of the options that we really liked was to build our own house. And so, this is what’s making me think about home automation. Because I’ve tried to make this house and the current house that we’re living in was built in 2001. And so, I’ve tried my best to make all of the things work or make it as smart of a home as possible. So, I’ve got some integrations that turn lights on at automatic times and that’s about all that I’ve done. I’ve got a smart lock on the front of my house that I could open with my phone. And that’s pretty much it. Like, I don’t have a lot of things. And so, when you’re building a brand-new house you have to think like, “Okay. What can I do? Where do I need wires? What do I need to do? How do I prewire this house so it’s all ready for all the little tech tools that I want to be distributed about the house?”

So, as I was thinking about that, I was like, “Well, maybe there’s some things that we can automate on a WordPress site.” And that’s kind of how I came up with the topic of today’s show. So, I’ve got nine different ways that you can automate your WordPress site. And the first couple are automating just like how to run your entire site. And then I’ve got a couple tools here at the end that we’ll talk about how to automate just setting up a WordPress site or deploying some of your changes and updates across your website. So, let’s go ahead and we’ll dive right in.

The first thing I wanna share is you can automate plugin updates with Jetpack. There’s other plugins out there that will do this as well, but if you’re already using Jetpack, you can just turn this on. And this basically allows you to just automate your plugins. Automatically update them. You can of course control which ones you do this. You know you probably don’t wanna do this on WooCommerce. If you’re running a store, an automatic update to one of the WooCommerce plugins could break everything. But a Jetpack update or one of those smaller plugins that you may be using for comments or anything. Like you can set those to automatically update.

This is kind of like the new trend, if you will. Like, I know that in IOS for the Apple phones they’re starting to turn this on as well. So, you can just automatically get all the brand-new updates for your plugins or your apps on your phone. And so, this is just a way to keep things updated and running. And you just turn it on and Jetpack kinda manages it and makes sure everything works. And so, this works also with WordPress itself. With WordPress the small point revision. So, 3.9.2 and 3.9.4 or 3.9.8. Whatever number we’re on, those are the ones that you can update automatically and it just kind of works. And so that’s one way you can automate your website. Just turn on these auto updates and it just automatically works. So, that’s the first one.

The second one is to do full-site backups. And you can do this with a slew of plugins, you know? There’s Jetpack out there that now has the Jetpack backup that’s built in. There is UpdraftPlus and Backup Buddy and BackWPup. And I’ve talked all about these in plenty of episodes before. But to make your website automated you just set them up and then you turn them on and you let them start running and you let them start backing up so that your website is always up and it’s always running. And so that’s just another way to keep it automatically going. So, those first two were kind of – you know, they’re easy ones. They’re ones that we should be doing anyways to be automatic in our website.

The next one is taking some time and creating all of the content for your website all at once for a month or six weeks or eight weeks or whatever and then scheduling the posts to come out at those given amounts of time. Now, this isn’t something that I do with this podcast mainly because I have news sections. If I didn’t have to highlight news each week, I could knockout four, five, eight, ten of these podcasts all in a row. I could sit down, and I could outline them and then I could record them all, I could get them all edited, I could publish them and then I could – or instead of publishing them, I could schedule them to be posted on Wednesday mornings, every Wednesday mornings for the next eight, ten, 12 weeks. And this was something that I definitely could do. And this is a way to kind of automate your website. Automate your business. Could you spend one day per month and generate all the content for the rest of the month then you don’t have to worry about this? I’ve thought about doing this in the past and it just doesn’t really work with my schedule. And like I said, with the news coming every week, it doesn’t really, really work for me. But that’s something you could think about and you could automate – you can turn on this auto schedule and then let your posts automatically go out and be automatically published.

And that was item number three. Item number four is a cool plugin that I found while I was researching for this podcast episode and it is called Revive Old Post. And this plugin is a pretty nifty plugin. It actually will go there. It’s a plugin that it used to be called Tweet Old Posts, but this is called Revive Old Post. And there’s a free version in the WordPress repository. It’s got 70,000 active installs and then it has a premium version as well. But basically, the plugin will go in and it can share old posts and new posts. You can choose a time between posts. You can select the number of posts to share. You can put hashtags to focus on. You can do all kinds of things. There are a lot of things that you can do to automatically schedule these and push these out to Facebook or Twitter. And so, it’s really, really nice.

And then it’s got a bunch of extra features if you do upgrade to pro you can do to multiple social accounts and custom post type support and you can actually send it out to Linked In or whatnot. But this is a cool plugin that just is another automatic thing that you turn, and it automatically starts pumping out data, pumping out different content that you’ve created that you wanna share with your community, but you don’t necessarily want to do it yourself. There’s other plugins out there or there’s other products out there. MeetEdgar is one that I can think of that you load up a bunch of social information and then you set the schedule and it just kinda does the same thing. But this Revive Old Post will do that specifically on your WordPress site. And so, if you want to share past content, this is the plugin to look at. If you look that one up in the WordPress repository you can search for Revive Old Post.

You can also quickly and easily optimize your database with a plugin called WP-Optimize. And this one again also is in the plugin repository. It’s a free one. And what it does is it goes in there, it automatically cleans your WordPress database, so it runs at the maximum efficiency. So, it removes unnecessary data, maybe those trash posts or unapproved or spam comments. Any of those pingbacks or trackbacks or anything that you don’t really need. It defrags the tables and goes through – like that one you have to do an actual button press to do. But then it also goes in and it creates automatic or weekly cleanups. So, however you set them. You can retain a set number of week’s data during the cleanup. So, you could do a backup and a clean all at the same time. You can automatically trigger a backup through UpdraftPlus which is really cool. And there are just a lot of features that it’ll do to kinda speed up. And it’s almost like a cleaning service. You’re hiring somebody to come in and clean up your database every week. And you can use WP-Optimize to do this. This one’s got 700,000 active installs. And so, there’s a lot of people using this and a lot of people keeping their database nice and clean with this plugin.

Going back to the social sharing, we talked about reviving old posts, but what about those new posts that are just happening right now? Well, you can use the automatic social sharing within Jetpack and of course there’s other plugins that will do this as well that’s called – in Jetpack it’s called, “Publicize.” And there are a few other ones that are out there. But that basically allows you to say when this thing publishes, it automatically posts it out to Facebook or Twitter or Linked In and then it just automatically works.

So, if you wanted to get the full bang for your buck, what you could do is you could actually go back from the third point that I talked about and do eight weeks’ worth of content and you write it all, you schedule it all and then you prepopulate your Tweets and Facebook posts for all of those and then you can go ahead and you can schedule those all to be done. And so, you could go on an eight-week break without having to have any new content added to your website. But then you’re there and you’re able to interact and be live with people when they’re on your social media account. So, that’s a thing that you could do. I really like using the social share within Jetpack because you can customize what it says, and you can customize when you send it different places. And then once the post is published, you can actually go back in and you can share it and publicize it again which is really nice.

Another thing that I use on my website to keep it automatically up and running and working well is I make sure that all links are working and not broken by using the Broken Link Checker plugin. And this is a plugin that runs automatically, and I don’t get an email or anything, but every once and a while or every time that I open up my WordPress site, down in the tool section there’s a little icon. Whether it says ten and it’s got the number and it’s circled in whatever color that the plugin update number is. Whatever that looks like on your WordPress site, it does the same thing for Broken Link Checker. And it basically looks through your posts, your pages, your comments, your blog roll, any custom fields and then detects any links that don’t work or missing images or redirects or things that are broken. And you can set up an email if you want to or you can just get notification via the dashboard. And it allows you to once you go in there you can say, “Oh, well, I had a typo in this.” And so, you can edit it right there. You don’t necessarily have to go and find the post or the page or the comment or wherever it was and then fix it there, you can fix it right inside the Broken Link Checker.

I know when I first installed this I had something like hundreds of broken links. And a lot of those come from an old plugin that I was using to do comments. I was using a plugin called Livefyre. And in each one of those every time a commenter came in then they could leave their website URL. So, a lot of those became broken over the years. And so, I was able to go in and I could just strip those away. So, the comments still stayed, but then the link back to the website could just be completely removed. So, you can do all of that. I love being able to just edit that right from the plugins, the page. It’s basically like when you go to the posts page and you look at all your posts, it’s essentially like that. It’s just one of those pages in WordPress and you can go and you can say, “Oh, I don’t need this link anymore,” and just spam it. Or, “Oh, this has got a typo and I’ll fix it right now.” It’s really, really nice. It’s a free plugin. There are 500,000 active installs. I recommend running this one on every one of your WordPress websites.

Two more tips that I wanna share with you today. And these are more on the developer side of things. But the first one is automate your local development set up. And I’ve got a couple links here in the show and it’s on two different ways to handle this. But basically what you wanna do is when you’re setting up a local environment, whether it’d be with Local or by Flywheel or DesktopServer or whatever the case may be, like you wanna automate and you wanna make sure that you have a base installation of WordPress with all the themes or plugins or anything that you typically want to use. You wanna set that up and save those as what they’re called blueprints.

And so, for example, when I set up a WooCommerce site, I wanna make sure that – I only need the 2017 theme and the storefront theme. I don’t need any posts or maybe a couple pages I preset up. I configure a WooCommerce. I set that up. And then I get rid of any plugins that I might not need. Maybe the Hello, Dolly. Maybe I install a couple more of the premium extensions and then I save that as a blueprint. And then when I’m troubleshooting for a customer and I need a brand-new WooCommerce environment, I can go out and just roll out the blueprint for WooCommerce and it automatically sets things up, it gives me storefront as the main theme and it installs WooCommerce, the most recent version that I have stored in the blueprint. And then if I need to update that then all I have to do is click one button in the dashboard. And I’ve already got pre-filled in information. It’s really, really nice and it saves you a lot of time.

So, there are a couple automated blog posts to talk about how to set up some of these types of things. And then the last one that I wanna share with you is how to set up a system. And I’ve got a webinar that I’ve linked to here in the show notes. But basically, how to automate the process of updating your plugins and saving them and things like that. My process, and I’ve been using this for probably three or four years – I found this system a few years ago and I just really, really enjoy it. I love how it works and how it feels. And so, it’s just been my go-to system.

And so, what happens is I run two versions of my website. I’ve got the local version that’s on my computer and then I’ve got the live version. And what I do is anytime I get a plugin update, I update that plugin on my local. So, I have it right there on my computer. And then as soon as the plugin updates – say I’m updating iTeam Security, okay? I’ve just updated that. I do a quick search around the site and make sure nothing is broken, nothing is obvious that has gone astray with that plugin update. And then once I like that, then I save all the plugin files or all the files that have changed, I save that as a version inside of Git or GitHub. Then I eventually push it to GitHub.

And then I have my hosting company, or I have another service in the background that’s looking at GitHub that every time I make a change on GitHub, it pushes it to my live server. So, I make an update on my local environment. Whether that be a theme or make some code changes or whatever I wanna do. I save it as a version and that version gets pushed automatically to my life site. So, I’m not duplicating the efforts of updating on my local site. Yes. Everything looks good. Okay. Now I’ve got to go update on my live site. So, that cuts down a step. And I’ve got a link in the show notes for a podcast or it’s a webinar replay that I talk all about this process and how I set it up. And even though it’s a little bit older of a webinar, it’s the exact same process I use today in 2018.

So, those are things. What did I miss? Are there things out there that you’re automating with your WordPress site? How do you make either building a website from scratch faster? How do you keep your website running so you don’t have to be tweaking knobs and pushing buttons all the time just to keep your website up and running? If you have any comments, do go back to yourwebsiteengineer.com/381 and leave comments there. I’d really like to hear what types of other things that you’re automating in your WordPress site or your WordPress business or whatever the case may be.

And then lastly, when we’re talking about automation, what do you have in your home that you automate? This is something that I’m just really curious about because I wanna make sure that my new house has all of the fixings and all of the wires in all the places that it needs. So, what types of things are you automating? Or do you have a security system that monitors this, that and the other or cameras here or there? I’m just interested in what you may have in your house or maybe things that you wish that you have or connectivity things that you wished that you had in different places. I’d love to hear that too. Head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/381 and leave your comment there.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week and I’m gonna have fun this week researching more ways to make everything in my life more automated. Until next week, take care and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.