Running a WordPress website can sometimes be a little hectic as it requires a lot of time and energy. From creating content to publishing, processing emails, and handling customers, it’s likely that one might feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes. However, this doesn’t, in any manner, mean that we shall stop doing them. Instead, we need to take things seriously and get the work done smartly. Fortunately, automation exists and we can automate the most essential maintenance tasks in WordPress, saving you some time and energy. To ensure that you save some time from the trivial things and tasks in WordPress, today, DevotePress will provide you with some tips to automate your WordPress website and work smartly. So, without any further ado, let’s get started!
Ways to Automate your WordPress Website
Updating WordPress
One of the most common but important tasks is keeping your site updated with fresh releases. Updating WordPress core, Themes and Plugins is crucial for both your site security and performance. With every update, whether in core or theme or plugin, developers release bundles of new features and bug fixes. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial that you keep everything updated and the best thing is, you can automate these updates in WordPress.
The automatic WordPress core update can be enabled from the dashboard. Whereas, for theme and plugin automatic updates, you can now enable auto-update for WordPress themes and plugins. WordPress 5.5 introduced us to the automatic theme and plugin updates feature. If you have a limited number of plugins and customization, we suggest you enable the automatic updates option for themes and plugins. However, we also suggest you take a site backup and read over the changelog before updating.
Auto Site Backups
Taking a backup of your site regularly is essential as there’s always that uncertainty of your website being hacked, the server being crashed, or the data being accidentally deleted. Therefore, you need to set up a good security habit to schedule for backing up your site regularly.
You can use simple WordPress plugins to automatically backup your website. There are many free WP Plugins that you can use, for instance, Jetpack Backups, WPvivid, Updraft Plus, etc. You can check out our list of 5 best free WordPress Backup plugins that are simple, easy to customize, and absolutely free of cost.
Scheduling Posts and Articles
Consistency in publishing articles and blog posts is vital if you are trying to run a successful website. However, at times, we’re unable to give time due to some reasons and this might hurt your audience viewership rate. By scheduling posts and articles, you do not have to worry about your content going live on time. Your content will publish automatically and will be sent to the newsletter as well.
In order to schedule your posts, you can simply open the Document tab in the Block Editor and expand the Status & Visibility option. Then, click on the Publish: Immediately option. Here you can select the date and time as to when you want the article to be published. And…you’re done! Your article will now be published at your desired time and date.
Social Media Sharing
Sharing your content in your different social media streams is equally important as publishing fresh new content on your website. It can keep your audience interested and engaged. As we all know, the influence that social media streams hold nowadays is growing massively globally and it only gets bigger. Therefore, at a time like this, you need to make sure you are on for the ride too, and share your content through different social media sites. You don’t even have to worry about performing the social media sharing task separately; thanks to the WordPress plugins! You can automatically share your content on social media streams as you publish one on your website.
To automatically share your new posts and content on your social media streams, you can download and install different social media sharing WordPress plugins. For instance, Social Media Auto Publish, Jetpack Publicize, NextScripts, etc.
Auto Check Spams
Spammers are always lurking under your vision, looking for ways to get into your website. And that is exactly why we need to keep ourselves alert and check for the spams on our website.
WordPress has made things easier and pre-installed their powerful Akismet anti-spam plugin in every WordPress download. You just need to activate the plugin and you’ll receive an API key. The plugin will then automatically start checking for spam comments and contact form submissions. The plugin, then, filters out the ones that look like spam with suspicious hyperlinks.
Auto Compress Images
Another aspect we need to be mindful of is the speed of your website. And one of the awesome ways to boost your website speed is to optimize your images. Images can improve the experience on your website and also elevate your brand in many ways. Unnecessary and large images can increase the page load speed of your site and make it slower and frustrating. Compressing your images and then uploading them can be time-consuming. Therefore, you can automate the image compressing and optimizing process from your side to improve your site speed.
There are many awesome WordPress plugins available that automatically optimize images every time you upload a new one. Check out these amazing image optimization WordPress plugins to automatically compress and optimize images in WordPress.
Find Broken Links
One of the vital maintenance tasks in WordPress is ensuring all the links on your content work properly. Broken Links are not healthy for both SEO and user experience in the digital arena. You need to find and fix them to stay relevant and reliable. Checking all the links on your site manually could take you forever. That’s why, you can just simply download a plugin and let it handle the broken links on your website.
Here’s a quick tutorial on finding the broken links on your website automatically with the help of a simple WordPress plugin available for free.
So, these were a few tips to automate WordPress websites. Automating these few tasks can help you save some time. Focus better on content creation and worry less about your website maintenance!