0:12 – Dealing with spam comments

2:30 – Ensuring that your WordPress website has a fast loading speed

4:31 – Choosing the best WordPress theme for your website

5:13 – Maintaining your WordPress website

6:32 – The importance of having a mobile responsive website

Hi, Fiona Lewis here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s website news update.

0:12 – Dealing with spam comments I often hear clients come back to me after their website was launched and they are really excited because they have a whole pile of comments on their articles and blogs within their websites.

The problem is, however, that a lot of comments that you often get on WordPress websites can tend to be spam. And so the question was posed to me by a client today, ‘How do I know which comments are spam and which are legitimate ones?’.

M.1

p. 1

Maintaining Your WordPress Website: Dealing With Spam

Comments, Choosing A Theme & Maintenance Issues

M.1

p. 2

Well, there are a few simple things that you can take into consideration:

Generally speaking, comments that are spam are usually poorly written, they have bad grammar, bad spelling, they don’t make a lot of sense.

The other thing to watch out for are comments that are very broad and general and not specifically related to the content of your article or blog. So for instance, an example might be, ‘Nice post, I’ve been looking all over the internet and you are a really talented writer!’. That’s the sort of thing that generally speaking will be a spam comment.

The other thing to look for when you are trying to decide whether a comment is legitimate or whether it is spam is looking at the URL or the website that the comment person has put in there. If it is spam it is probably generally leading to a sales page of some sort, where there is some sort of product or service for sale. Watch out for that, you really don’t want to be giving links back to them – your WordPress website should be set up so that the links are no-follow anyway – but it is a very big giveaway if it is leading to a page where there is something being sold.

So these are just a couple of tips that can help you identify spam comments. If you do find yourself getting spam comments please trash them or if you are getting a lot of them please ensure that you have the Akismet plugin activated on your WordPress blog. This is something we do as standard on all of the Super Savvy websites that we develop for our clients.

You can go to www.supersavvywebsites.com and you will see that this is actually the standard procedure for the websites that we develop for our clients because we really want to reduce the amount of spam that people are getting.

2:30 – Ensuring that your WordPress website has a fast loading speed

The other question I was recently asked is, ‘How can you keep your WordPress site running smoothly and loading quickly?’. There are a couple of standard things that you can do that will really help your WordPress blog to load quickly and this is a very important thing when it comes to Google: they want to be able to provide sites to people that have a fast loading spend.

So here are some things to consider:

First of all, make sure that you don’t jam your WordPress blog up with too many plugins. It can be tempting to load plugin, after plugin, after plugin to get your WordPress site to do all sorts of fancy things. So if you find that you have dozens of plugins have, a really good hard

M.1

p. 3

look at them; decide what you really do need and then not just disable the rest of them, but actually get rid of them out of your WordPress blog – because if you have lots of them, it is really going to start slow your WordPress blog down.

The other thing that you could do is make sure that you optimise any images you upload to your blog so that they are small file size. So these are called ‘web optimised images’. You don’t want to be uploading really large files because that is going to slow your site down.

Another simple thing is to install a cache plugin. What this will do is make sure that your WordPress site doesn’t have to go through and read all the files every single time it loads. It will only do so for the first user and after that we won’t have to go through that process again.

Another simple tip I can give you is make sure that you have a good hosting provider. Make sure your hosting provider has a solid server that it is going to be able to load your page nice and quickly.

Make sure you also get rid of any post revisions – some WordPress sites automatically keep revisions of your posts as you are saving them – you can get rid of those as well.

4:31 – Choosing the best WordPress theme for your website

And the other thing which I really like to touch on is to make sure that you choose your theme wisely. Not all WordPress themes are equal and just because a WordPress theme might look great doesn’t mean it is great under the bonnet. It might be really heavy in the coding. This is why at Super Savvy Websites we only use Thesis and Genesis WordPress themes. They are coded really well and in fact, what they have done is they have created a framework where the design code is separate from the actual content code.

So it is important that you choose your theme wisely. You don’t want to end up with a theme that looks great but the engine underneath it is really heavy and doesn’t work well.

5:13 – Maintaining your WordPress website

So, speaking of all of these plugins and themes and looking after spam comments, one thing I do want to touch on is the importance of maintaining your WordPress website. It’s not just a matter of having your site built and then just leaving it. You do need to service it – a bit like a car.

So your WordPress site needs to have the most up to date version of WordPress and of course every time WordPress is updated, then any plugins within your site also need to be updated. This is something that is constantly going on and if you don’t update your WordPress site then you stand a chance of leaving it open to hackers.

A lot of people don’t get around to maintaining their WordPress site because either they don’t really know how to do it without breaking it or perhaps they are just too busy or they

M.1

p. 4

forget about it. Which is why at Super Savvy Websites we have actually recently launched a maintenance package which you can purchase on an annual basis where our team will maintain your site and make sure it has the latest versions of your theme, your WordPress instalment and also all of your plugins. We’ll also do database backups to ensure that in the unlikely event your site does get hacked or something happens to it, you’ve got a recent backup of it.

6:32 – The importance of having a mobile responsive website

Finally I’d like to touch on the whole idea of ensuring your website is mobile responsive. Now when I recently went to Google Australia’s headquarters, I had a chat with Nick Leeder and Nick was telling me how much importance is being placed on websites that are mobile friendly and this is an area they are really looking at these days and how people are using your website via mobile devices.

Now why is this important?

Well, in fact, did you know that by 2015 it is estimated that more people will access the internet from a mobile device than from a standard desktop or laptop?

This is pretty sobering news to have – especially if you are a website owner who doesn’t have a website that displays nicely on mobile devices. This is once again a standard practice for Super Savvy Websites: when we develop websites we can actually put in a plugin that will allow your site to load nicely on mobile sight, but also we have full customized mobile sites ready to develop for you.

So if this is something you think you might be interested in please contact us so we can chat about the different options.

My name is Fiona Lewis and you have been listening to the Super Savvy Business websites news update and we’ll see you again next week!