How to Automate a Self-Hosted WordPress Website

We’ve covered automating aspects of a self-hosted WordPress CMS website before, however it is well worth revisiting again. WordPress automation is far more than just covering the basics, such as backup, but also going further and this article covers administration, marketing and SEO.

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Administration

It must be noted that before you consider automating parts of your WordPress website, you should assess what you are currently running. Many WordPress administrators find that their WordPress CMS site and accompanying WP plugins do not easily update, due to the wide variety of servers configurations used around the world – instead being reliant on manual upgrades. So the first consideration is what plugins do you use and do you need them all? If you don’t need a plugin or two, then you reduce your administration time, which is same reason for wanting to automate a website.

Review installed WordPress plugins

Example: Place Google Analytics and Adsense directly into the theme, rather than use plugins.

Next you should look at automating your backup of your WordPress MySQL database. It is possible to automate the backup of a whole WordPress website with a

Automate your Backup

backup plugin, however this can be a bandwidth heavy process, requiring a large amount of file space if you have a large WordPress website. Automating the backup each day of your MySQL database should be a quick process though.

Marketing and SEO are a blurred world, however for this post I’m referring to getting the word out about your latest blog posts, which will naturally also can help with website SEO.

Marketing

Using theUpdate Facebook Page Walls and Twitter

Twitterfeed

Another option is to install the

service you can easily update your Facebook walls and Twitter accounts without being involved. You give Twitterfeed the RSS feed then access rights for your Facebook Page Walls and Twitter, then tell it how often to check.

WP Tweet Button plugin, which serves two purposes. First of all each time a new post is published it will ‘tweet’, but also it will place a tweet button within each post. So with this plugin you can encourage visitors to ‘tweet’ your posts, as well as automate your own tweeting.

Search Engine Optimisation

In an ideal world you would list related posts for each blog post you have on a WordPress website, this is create internal SEO, especially if using keywords for the anchor links. However what about your legacy posts? With the help of the

Internal link building

Yet Another Related Post Plugin you can automate the process. YARPP will list related posts at the bottom of each post and the results are quite impressive.

Checking whether internal website links are broken is a time consuming process, If you were do to it manually. However there is a

Broken link checking

broken link checker plugin that can automate the process, then email you if / when it finds broken links.

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