Let’s face it running your blog can be a bit of a chore, especially when you run your own business as well. You’re pulled in multiple directions, have to contribute to the company (or companies) blog(s) and want to maintain your personal brand at the same time. Let’s hope in 2017 I can turn that around and become more active on my blog. I enjoy sharing my thoughts, insights, and experiments with others. In fact, looking back through my blog some of my most favorited articles are around WordPress itself so as my last blog post of 2016 I thought I’d share what I’m doing to clean up my personal blog
Cleaning up the design
The first major change is the theme. I haven’t found a theme I liked for quite some time, and that’s probably why the blog has been so neglected. The new theme is Hueman and I have to say it’s clean, easy to use and pretty easy to customize.
Cleaning up the codebase
Anyone that has run a wordpress site long enough knows it’s really easy to get carried away plugins. It’s always good housekeeping to go through your plugins and clear out those that aren’t important. This is also a great way to help increase security by removing potentially vulnerable plugins (maybe they aren’t yet but as history has shown plugins get abandoned and eventually can be exploited).
Fixing up the content
This really falls in line with the previous item but over the past few years I’ve tried a number of different plugins and some of them have left undesirable remnants behind. A good example is cloudinary, about 100 of my images were not being served from my site directly because I had integrated with cloudinary for about 5 months before disabling it. I had to go back in and migrate all of those images out of cloudinary.
Lastly Performance
This, like the other bullets here, are all worthy of several different blog articles. Performance options for WordPress have changed and with it a great deal of simplification these days. I’ve cleaned up my performance here but I know from our other WordPress sites there’s a good deal of improvements we can still make. I’ll outline much of that in future articles.
Well, that’s not much of an insightful, thought leadership article but it’s a good start and I think my best blog article for all of 2016. I assure you 2017 will have a lot more in store though.
