50 Actionable Tasks You can Do Today

A checklist for increasing conversions, boosting traffic and making your WordPress fast and secure.

[source: wplift] Blogging with WordPress is a lot more work than just writing each day and pressing “publish”. To keep your Website running smoothly and keep the traffic coming, there are a few maintenance jobs that need doing as well as a lot of improvements you can make. I have put together this list of over 50 small jobs which you can do to boost your WordPress Website, none of these jobs should take more than half an hour to complete so you can use this list and check one off each day or power through each section in a block.

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I have broken the tasks down into sections: General tasks are ideas you can use to make your Website better for visitors. The SEO section contains tips which can help you gain more visitors from search engines. The Speed section focuses on how to make your site load quicker for users. Theme improvements will help you make your site look better. The plugins section contains a couple of ideas for recommended plugins. Security has quite a few tips to prevent hackers gaining access to your site and the Spam section will help you keep them at bay

General Tasks

  • Create a detailed about me page — A good about page can help you connect better with your readers and give an insight into the person behind the blog.
  • Start a mailing list — Everyone should be building a mailing list, it’ one of the best ways to get your content in front of people.
  • Add a notification bar — Draw people’ attention to an offer, special blog post or call to action.
  • Add a members area to your site — Turn your blog into a community of people with a— free membership plugin.
  • Organize your categories and tags — Remove unused categories and consolidate related tags— together.
  • Create a great contact page — Make your contact page great by adding Google maps, an introduction message and all your social media accounts.
  • Add your Social Media Profiles — Let users connect with you on other sites by displaying your social media links.
  • Conduct a Survey of your readers — Find out what content they like, ask about future product ideas etc.
  • Run a competition — Give away a prize to encourage engagement with your site, use Rafflecopter to power it.

Boost Your SEO

  • Install and Configure Yoast SEO — This is the best SEO plugin and contains everything you need to get your site fit for the search engines.
  • Setup Google XML Sitemaps — You can do this using the Yoast SEO plugin, once setup you can submit your sitemap to Google here.
  • Configure Permalinks — Update your permalinks for nicer URLs, recommend using /%postname%/
  • Add a Related Posts Plugin — Offer more content to your readers once they have finished reading a post.
  • Add breadcrumbs to your site — Again, this can be done using Yoast and your breadcrumbs will show up in Google search results.
  • Check for broken links — Scan your site for broken links and update or remove them as needed.
  • Setup Automatic Interlinking — Automatically links words on your site to posts or external sites.
  • Add a rich snippets plugin — These make your site stand out in search results.

Speed up Your Website

  • Install a Cache Plugin — WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache will significantly improve your site’ loading speed.
  • Setup a CDN — A CDN will make your site assets such as images, CSS and JS files load quicker for visitors by serving them from a location nearer to them.
  • Minify Javascript and CSS Files — This condenses your files and removes whitespace, making them smaller in size.
  • Optimize your Image sizes — By compressing your image file sizes they will load faster.
  • Clean up and Optimize the Database — Use phpMyAdmin to repair and optimize your database tables.
  • Clean up Post Revisions — Removing old post revisions will make your database smaller.
  • Optimize your CSS File — Merging CSS files and cleaning it up will result in a smaller file size.
  • Prevent Scrapers — Blocking scrapers from accessing your content will lower the load on your Web host.

Theme Improvements

  • Optimize your site logo and placement — Make sure your logo looks good and has plenty of space around it will help with branding.
  • Modify the color scheme to match your branding — Tweak all relevant colors in your theme to match your branding will tie your theme in better.
  • Add a Slider plugin — Use a slider to draw attention to important posts or pages.
  • Add a hero image — Or choose to use a hero image with accompanying text to grab the reader’ eye.
  • Configure your sidebar and footer widgets — Clean up sidebar clutter and focus on the important widgets.
  • Create a child theme — Use a child theme to make any theme changes to ensure they wont be lost when updating the theme.
  • Link to your popular posts — Create a popular posts section so you can point visitors to your best content.
  • Add a call to action block with button — Place call to action blocks to funnel visitors where you need them most.
  • Add customer testimonials — Social proof is a powerful tool to increase conversions… testimonials can help with this.

Plugins

  • Add an optin plugin and start collecting email leads — These types of plugin are proven to greatly boost your email signups.
  • Add a Social Sharing plugin — Encourage visitors to share your content with easily accessible social buttons.
  • Add a detailed Analytics plugin — Get a better understanding of how people use your site so you can optimize it better.

Security

  • Add a Captcha on Login — Prevent automated bots from trying to brute force their way into your WordPress admin.
  • Update all Plugins to latest versions — Keeping your plugins updated can help security if any vulnerabilities were found with them.
  • Strengthen Your Passwords — Make sure your password is strong with a mix of uppercase, numbers, symbols etc.
  • Change admin user name — Never use ╥admin╙ as the admin username, use something unique and not the name of your site.
  • Limit login attempts — Another tool to help prevent brute force attacks.
  • Setup Daily Backups — Use a plugin or service to make sure you have a full backup of your site everyday to prevent data loss and help restoration if you are hacked.
  • Remove unused plugins — Delete old plugins as the code could contain vulnerabilities as you are not updating them.
  • Delete Extra accounts — Remove unneeded accounts with access to your WordPress admin
  • Check your file permissions — Make sure your file permissions are set up correctly.
  • Install SSL — Installing a SSL certificate is a great way to secure your site and now also helps with search engine results, this is essential if you are running any type of eCommerce site.
  • Perform a security scan — Use a security plugin or service like Sucuri to run a full security scan on your site and correct any issues it finds.

Spam

  • Install Akismet — Akismet is a great free plugin for stopping spam comments.
  • Turn off trackbacks and pings — This is an unnecessary feature which is open to abuse by spammers.
  • Install a Captcha — Any forms should have a Captcha added, otherwise your form could be abused by spammers.
  • Setup Discussion Settings — You could manually approve a users first comment and hold a comment in the moderation queue if it contains a link.