Dustin: [00:00:00] On today's episode, since it's getting a little bit nicer out, especially here in Ohio, we're going to talk about spring cleaning our WordPress sites right here on your website. Engineer podcast episode number 548

Hello and welcome to another episode of your website. Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we're going to talk about spring cleaning our WordPress sites because that's what I've been doing with a couple of my sites that are out there talking about just kind of what we need to be looking at.

Some things are what are outdated. What are some Areas of our WordPress sites that we can clean up and get nicer or fresher or just remove all together, find a new plugin or things like that. We'll talk about those things in just a couple of minutes. I do have to say that as we're coming into 2024 I had a great plan of outlining and putting out episodes weekly and guess who bit off more than they can chew?

This guy. Yeah, that is right. I have been busy with all kinds of things. They're all good things. On January 1st, I started something called 75 hard program, [00:01:00] which is there's like five different things you have to do every day to 45 minute workouts.

One must be outside. Read 10 pages of a nonfiction book every day. And then I Added on a few other things on top of that for like just personal challenges for me and with some travel in January and just busyness of working a full time job and having kids and for the month of January and February we had kids activities of five nights a week and so I just ran out of time for pretty much everything I got behind in about every area of my life so I am recouping that I am off to today.

I have a flex day and I'm trying to get a few podcasts recorded and continue to just keep you updated with what is happening in the WordPress space. So with that, let's go ahead and dive into the news. The first thing that I want to share today is about the 2023 annual survey. And so this is a survey that goes out every year.

I typically talk about it at the end of the previous year and they're just trying to collect high level data about trends and themes across different aspects of WordPress itself, whether it be the users or their site builders, extenders, [00:02:00] contributors, just trying to figure out who is using WordPress so they can go through the process of making decisions better.

And it provides valuable feedback on how the project is doing, what the status is and things like. that. So there have been some highlights. There's a link in the show notes. You can go to your website, engineer dot com slash 548 and you can see all of the things there. There is some general trends. There are some logistics, some things, basically 60 percent of respondents indicated that the usage that they use Gutenberg 8 percent are unsure and 12 percent use something other than Gutenberg or the classic editor.

This is up from 54 percent who are using Gutenberg in 2022. A lot of people have about 45 percent of respondents indicated that WordPress site editor meets their site building needs. 26 percent are indifferent and 29 percent disagree. And then there's a whole bunch of things. I'm not gonna read all of these things out, but it basically talks about from the general trends of WordPress users.

And then there's some contributor sentiment. So there's some things that people are concerned about or think that WordPress is doing well and talking [00:03:00] about phase three and phase four. So if you're interested in reading more about that again, find the link in the show notes or head on over to wordpress. org slash news and then look for the 2023 annual surveys and next steps.

The other thing that I want to share today is there was a post on WP tavern called it is a live or it's alive. And this was out on February 7th, 2024. And Matt Mullenweg, it was written by him said that he has found seven people to go through a trial on WP Tavern to start writing articles over there.

If you head on over to wptavern.com you can find a bunch of news articles written by six or seven different people over the last week or so. And I think each person has a couple of week trial and then Matt is going to take a look at all the writing and the work and then figure out who is. going to be the two people that are going to be selected as the full time writers and content creators for the WP Tavern.

I'm excited because this is where I got a lot of news and just a lot of information for WordPress itself. I like getting that over from WP Tavern. So [00:04:00] excited to see that project is back up and running.

The next news item today is from WP sessions and it is a free webinar or free session, if you will, from. Chris Lema and he has 10 automations for your next WooCommerce store, and so it's a 22 minute replay that's on there. And it talks about different email sequences to automate how to back up your data for targeted emails so you can automate that automate.

All the things that you can do today, how to automate coupons and just a bunch of things there. It is a really powerful video. So if you're doing any e commerce on your wordpress site, I recommend checking out the WP sessions session on this. And as always, you can find a link in the show notes for this.

And the last news article that I found this week was it's not really a news article per se, but I was just really impressed by post status website PostStatus.com and they have a category on their blog from WordPress and make WordPress and it talks all about the things that are going on in the WordPress space from kind of a outsiders [00:05:00] point of view, you know, on wordpress.

org slash news, we get, Oh, this new beta is coming out. This is coming out. This was released, things like that. These are articles. And again, this is linked in the show notes, but basically it talks about the different betas that are coming out, some of the releases and the release parties that are happening and things along those lines.

It looks like they report out about once a week or so. And it is been very thorough. There's a lots of information there. And again, if you're interested in reading more about WordPress, you can find this link in the show notes as well.

One last thing, it wasn't on my list, and I'm seeing it here as I'm reading through post status, was one of the WordPress versions recently, I think it's WordPress 6. 4. 3, has a bug in it, if you zip up a plugin or a theme on your desktop computer, then it will not be able to be uploaded into WordPress. So what that means is if you download a plugin from the WordPress repository, it goes to your computer, your computer automatically unzips it, and then you have to right click and zip it back up.

That folder will not be able to be uploaded back into WordPress. It's a bug. They're working on it. There's a couple workarounds. There is a [00:06:00] workaround that you can use the command line tool to zip it back up, or you can just use the WordPress repository or use the file directly from wherever you got it, whether that be downloading it a third party developer or a theme where you purchased a premium theme. If you've downloaded it from their website, those should work. But if you unzipped it and then rezipped it, that's where problems lie. And again, they're working on it, but that is something that is out there that's happening in WordPress 6. 4. Okay. That's enough news. Let's talk about a plugin this week.

The plugin that I want to share with you today is called Restaurant Menu and Food Ordering. And this is by a team called Five Star Plugins. And basically this will allow you, with the block editor, to be able to go in and create a restaurant menu that is responsive and you can set it into different sections.

So if you wanted to have like appetizers and main courses or lunch or desert drinks, things like that, you can do all of those things and their blocks in there can filter. And it's really nice. It also has the ability to set up a food ordering system. So it's almost like a mini e commerce [00:07:00] thing that's built in.

So you have the ability to sell food on your website with the food ordering part. There's a demo for both things, the menu demo and the food ordering demo. And it is a plugin called restaurant menu.

Dustin: sometimes it's hard to come up with topics of what to talk about. I haven't talked about this. Haven't I talked about this recently and I was listening to a podcast and it was basically doing a recap of like what happened 10 years ago at this point in time of this creator's podcast. I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

I wonder what I was talking about 10 years ago. And I kind of browsed back through the archives just a little bit and I was looking at episode number 170 was released in March 2014, and that was called Other Awesome Services by Automattic. So that talked about Jetpack, and SimpleNote, and VaultPress, Akismet, PollDaddy.

It's kind of fun to go back through some of those things that we used to offer at Automattic. PollDaddy, that's not a thing anymore. Gravatar, that's there. We still do video press intense debate. Yeah, that's really not a thing. Code poet, not really anything anymore. Cloud up is really not a thing too much [00:08:00] anymore.

And then of course, then that got me sidetracked. And then I went to automatic calm to see what we're actually like some of the things on there. And that has long reads and day one and texts and tumblr, like some of those big things that Are now part of automatic that weren't back then. And then I clicked a one more time.

I went back one week to just kind of see what I was talking about. I guess episode number one 68 was spring clean your WordPress site. And I was like, I kind of had that in mind for today. Just because it is that spring time. I know that in Ohio it is today. It's 54 degrees and been outside a lot this month just because it has been warm. But I want to talk a little bit about a few things that I talked about 10 years ago, and I think a lot of them are still compelling and still still could be used today.

And so let's go back into the archives. Think about some of these things on our WordPress site this week as we are working through our sites. And I'm just going to run right down this list, check your sales, take some time to look at your site and see what is selling and what's not. If a product isn't selling, maybe you remove it from the site. [00:09:00] Maybe you add it to a bundle. Maybe you have to revamp the picture or revamp the description or put it on sale or something.

Like if you have these products leftover, let's go ahead and check out some of the items that aren't selling on your site. There isn't a really great way to do this. What I would do is I would go into the analytics section of WooCommerce and then look at products and then you can sort those by the last year, or you can look at a window of the last year or a custom timeframe.

And then from there you could go through and look at the ones that are on the bottom of the list. Like, oh, I've only sold four of those products. Maybe, okay, maybe it's time to get rid of that. You can also check out page views. This is very much similar to the last one. But check out page views. Which pages of your site are loading?

Which ones are getting the most page views? Do you have specific calls to action for these pages? What is, what's happening with some of those pages? Again, you can do this with Jetpack. You can do this with several other plugins that are out there. Look at even the Google analytics and things like that.

Check to see what pages are being hit or what's not. This is also probably a good idea to see [00:10:00] like how long are people staying on your site? You know, are they coming to your website? They're there for three seconds and then they leave. Do they not get the information that they want?

Like things along those lines. That's something to think about when you're looking at page views and it's probably not of best interest to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. All throughout your site, it's hard to manage. It's hard to keep them updated and things like that.

So I would recommend removing the pages that are no longer necessary. I'm sure that on your website, engineer. com, I have some about past webinars. I have some about like meetups that I was hosting and things like that. All of those could get, you could get rid of those. They're no longer needed. I do also want to say like, if you are going into work on pages or work on different parts of your website, like if you haven't upgraded those to Gutenberg, or maybe you're using one of the other block editors that are out there.

Maybe you take a little bit of time to upgrade those and add the reusable blocks or the reusable patterns or things like that that you're currently using. Now, just do a little bit of reformatting on your site. I know this is a project of mine to go through all of my old podcast and then convert them and get the patterns right and then copy all of [00:11:00] the data into Notion so I can have a list of everything there and then I can kind of look to see how often has it been.

How many times have I talked about spring cleaning your WordPress website? Maybe once a year for the last 14 years. I don't know. But yeah, getting all that information and kind of going through and systematically updating them. Like if you have 500 different blog posts or pages like it's going to take a little while, but you know, how do you eat an elephant? It's just one bite at a time.

You work on one page, maybe five pages here, five pages there, things like that.

Look at your product links. Add a product to your cart and work through the process of purchasing. Is the process intuitive? How can you make the checkout process more seamless? Do you want to add payment buttons on different pages? Like, you know, do you want to put a PayPal button or a Google Pay button on every product page?

What does that look like? Work through that process. Do you want to have upsells or downsells or cross sells or whatever kind of sales you want? Do you want? Other things to happen when people check out. Do you want people to add a product to their cart? Click? Okay. They've added their payment details.

They, they go almost to the order confirmation page. And then it's like, wait for only 2 more. You can add this thing. You want to add [00:12:00] that part? Look at those things on your WordPress site and see if we can make any improvements of that flow in that process. It's always really important to do this in an incognito window and look at your site with a new, fresh set of eyes.

Pretend that you've never seen it before. I know that's really hard, but that's a way to make sure that you're seeing what your users are seeing. This is a good time of year to check the speed of your site. You can use a couple of different services. There's Pingdom, there's GT metrics, see how fast your site is loading.

Look into the security of your website. Are you using the, the I themes as security pro, I think it's now called solid WP. Are you using that to lock down your website or any other plugin that's going to limit the number of people logging into your site, or do you have two factor authentication turned on?

Things along those lines. How are you limiting like who has access to your WordPress site? Do you have a bunch of users who have admin access, but they're no longer needed or no longer using it? Make sure that all of those things are okay.

The next thing on my list, and this is probably a bigger deal back in 2014, but is your site compatible with [00:13:00] new devices? The new devices were always coming out at that time we used to have to do mobile silliness to make sure that they would work on well on different platforms and different versions.

That's really not a big thing right now. We were getting more to responsive themes, especially if we're using a block based theme, it's going to respond and work well on different sizes. But that is something that you can always take a look at and make sure that on this X device, yes, it is looking good.

Is your content fresh? When was the last time that you added new content to your website? And has it been a while? Write a new blog post or revamp your about page. Do you have things that are outdated? I know that I've have on the front of Your Website Engineer, some of the places that I've spoke at WordCamps and I haven't spoke at a WordCamp in years. And so is that something that's really necessary to continue on the site? Are you not using social platforms anymore? Should you remove those? What about comments? Do those types of things need to be turned off? Like, think about those sort of things.

Do you have a compelling offer for your visitors? How do they take action on your sites? Are you asking for an email address to give them something?

Is it the offer still good? Are you still offering [00:14:00] a 50 most used WordPress of plugins download? That is five years old. Like I am, you know. Think about those things. Look again at your site at a new set of eyes. How is the navigation for your site? Do you have the right tools and the right buttons in places that you need?

Do you still use the about page? What about resources? Webinars? Like, what kind of things are in your menu? Your latest services? Are your pricing pages updated? Like, look at all of these things. Again, it's a bunch of things that we're just kind of repetitively going through and making sure that things are not outdated on the site.

That is one of the biggest things that I do not like when I go to WordPress sites or any websites in general is like, oh, this content is completely outdated. A side note is for one of my wife's sites, it has expiration dates of when the CE content is no longer available or is expired.

And so I created for every program that we have in Asana, it just has an expiration date. And so that when those expiration dates come up, I know that that needs recertification. And then that way we can make sure that the website gets updated once we get the new [00:15:00] documents in. So that is good.

Social media links. Are they the right going to the right places? Have you rebranded? Are you still using those? I mentioned that earlier. Like if you're not using the platform anymore, do you still have those links going on if you've completely given up on X or Twitter? Like, is that still there? Think about those types of things.

You can get rid of some of the database tables that are there. There is a plug in called WPDB manager that you can remove unnecessary tables from your WordPress databases. So that's another thing that you can do and that's you just get rid of like some of that stuff that kind of that junk and these plugins will allow you to go and get rid of revision.

It's like, you probably don't need to have 14 revisions from a podcast episode that was released 15 years ago. So that is something to think about. Let's see what else you have, you have old plugins or themes hanging around, if they're from the WordPress repository, let's just go ahead and get rid of them. It cleans up your site. It removes that mental energy of keeping them updated. It removes the mental energy of like, am I using this? Am I not? Like, why is this still here?

That sort of thing. And then again, if it's in the WordPress repository, you can always download it again. If it's a [00:16:00] premium plugin, like most of the time it's going to be outdated and it's not going to work if you haven't updated or haven't paid for it. So let's just go ahead and remove them.

And then The last thing that's on the list from 2014 is newsletter auto responders add your email Or fake email or whatever to a sign up box on your site and see what happens. Where does it go? Look at the messages people will see do and does any of the language need updated?

Can you make it simpler? Can you make the offer more appealing? Does the, the free giveaway or whatever you're giving, does that still make sense these days? Should it be updated to something else? Should you have links to other social profiles? There's lots of things that you can do.

Is there an auto responder sequence that when somebody signs up for a newsletter, do they get? Regular content for the first 15 weeks or whatever, like whatever that looks like. Think about those things when it comes to your WordPress site.

And as I've been alluding over the last few episodes talking about how I'm going to be updating to block themes across all of my properties, my web properties in 2024, again, as part of a spring cleaning, this would be a good thought. It's like, okay, well I have this, this, and this is should [00:17:00] be fixed.

And this, and this could be fixed, or this is really broken, like think through some of those things, and maybe it is a good time to create a new theme, or start with a new theme, start fresh, use 2024 as a good baseline, and then just start tinkering away and doing it. I've started that with the Functional Medicine CE website, and created a Cloning site or a staging site for full site editing and working through the process of creating blocks and all that kind of stuff.

And it takes more times than you absolutely think it will, but it is a good exercise in understanding and figuring out how this all works and how the pieces of the puzzle work with this new flow in this new type of editor situation, the new type of site editor builder. So that's what I want to share with you this week.

I think an episode from 10 years ago is really, really good. I think they all stand the test of time. These are things that we'll have to regularly check in every year and make sure that our sites are updated and we're doing all of these things. I was hoping that I could find easily like what we were doing with WordPress 10 years ago.

Maybe on the next episode, I'll share like 10 years ago, we were just now getting [00:18:00] menus or whatever the case may be, like just to kind of give a good idea of where WordPress has come in the last 10 years. And so maybe on the next episode, I will do that. But until then, take some time this week to spring clean your sites, look through them, update plugins, and all the things that we just discussed and talked about. And we'll talking in next week. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com.