Don't be as confused as this pooch about WordPress Backups!

Backing up a WordPress site is very important and very simple, yet many people don’t realize this until it is too late. The intention of this article is to provide a reference for people new to backing up WordPress websites without the bias of pushing a particular backup product. Let’s dive in…

Emergency Blog Recovery?

Before we dive into the reference guide, if you have lost your website and do not have a working backup already then we strongly suggest reaching out to your web host to see if they have a backup handy. Backups from web hosts can be deleted quickly (sometimes within 24 hours) so act quickly.

Reasons to Backup Your WordPress Site

Creating a backup process for your WordPress site can seem unnecessary, so it’s fair to want some compelling reasons to do it.

These are common reasons people make backups, or wish they had made a backup:

1. You upgraded WordPress and now your website is broken
2. You installed a plugin, and now the website is just a white screen
3. You accidently deleted a file, page, post, and it’s gone for good
4. Your site gets infected with a virus and you don’t have a clean backup to revert to

You really don’t want to deal with rebuilding your site when something bad happens, right? So now that you understand the importance of backups, let’s take a look at how to make them.

Overview: How to Backup Your WordPress Blog or Website

A good backup process for your site will automatically create a full backup of your website at certain intervals and will alert you if there were any problems that stopped the backup from being created. The first time you setup your WordPress backup, you’ll have to test it to make sure that the backup it creates isn’t faulty. Let’s take a look at what exactly needs to be backed up…

WordPress “Pieces” That Require Backing Up:

WordPress is made of two separate pieces that need to be backed up. They are:

1. MySQL Database (all of the posts, users, pages, and more…)
2. Files (this includes themes, images, movies, and the files that make WP run…)

A surprising number of so-called backup solutions only backup either the MySQL database or the files. Make sure that you are getting full backups of both the files and database, or you won’t be able to recreate your site when it needs to be backed up. Let’s take a look at some common backup solutions…

Free WordPress Backup Plugins:

There are a lot of backup plugins out there. Some are free and some cost money, and paid plugins aren’t nessesarily better. The free plugins I’ve used and like are…

1. WordPress Backup to Dropbox - Makes a backup of your site and uploads it to Dropbox!
2. XCloner - Makes backups and also helps you restore the backup if need be.

Paid WordPress Backup Plugins:

1. BackupBuddy – A lot of people seem to like this plugin, but I personally had a hard time getting it set up.
2. VaultPress – Vaultpress is run by the folks behind WordPress.org, so they are very qualified. Vaultpress also scans your site for viruses while it makes backups. This is a great solution but you pay for it!

Non-Plugin Backup Options:

If you are technically-minded or your web host offers the service then you can always have your web host create the backups on your behalf. In my opinion, this is the easiest way to have backups continually created. You just want to make sure that your backups are stored either in multiple physical locations or in a different location than your host. In other words, if your host’s physical location gets hit by a tornado, you don’t want your backups to be ruined with your site!

Some hosts make this easier than others. Arguably the best host available, RackSpace, has an excellent service called CloudSites that didn’t have an easy backup solution so I helped create one at Backup Sites in Cloud. What I mean to show you is that your host may have the ability to make backups, or may be making them already, but it’s crucial that you don’t just assume that there will be backups if you need them.

How to Create Your WordPress Backups

Once you choose your favorite backup plugin, follow the instructions to get it setup. I won’t discuss the steps for each plugin as they all differ and there are plenty of resources out there to help you. If you have specific questions, feel free to contact me or ask in the comments.

You Must Test the Backup!

Most people don’t test the results of their backup build and occasionally it can really bite you on the rump. So to ensure that your backups work perfectly, make sure to take this extra step and test your backup.

Testing your backup is as simple as using a throw-away url (or make a subdomain url if you don’t have a throw-away domain for this) and trying to restore your site on the new blog. If you restore your blog and it doesn’t look exactly the same as the blog you backed up, you have some problems to solve.

Your WordPress Backup Should be Automated

Backups need to be automated to protect you from forgetfulness, procrastination, and allow you to focus on more important things than backing up your website. All of the plugins list above allow you to automate backups with cron jobs. Make sure to setup the recurring backups when you install the plugins.

Now Your WordPress site is Backed Up!

If you have automated backups being created and you’ve tested the backups to ensure that they are valid, then you can rest easy knowing that if your WordPress site gets a virus or you accidently delete something essential, you’ll have a backup handy.

Photo from flickr.

WordPress Backup Guide – How to Backup WordPress on Google, Dropbox, or with WordPress Plugins is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Rob Ftizpatrick

After writing this post about the 10k Pound Boostrap Challenge, I decided to reach out to Rob Fitzpatrick and see if he’d like to answer a few questions about his project.  He was kind enough to agree and below is our conversation:

What made you decide to start this Bootstrap Challenge?

I was spending too much time talking and not enough time building. I was feeling a bit cynical about how I made my money and unexcited about my days, so I decided to get back to products.

As for why I chose to publicise it… So it’s definitely a perk that more people will hear about what I build. Visibility is always good. But at the same time, I just want to leave an honest case study of how it went, regardless of whether I succeed or fail.

Lots of people have bootstrapped successful companies, which usually happens behind closed doors. If I can peel back some of the hand-waving and mysticism about starting a company, then that’s a win.

Do you have a particular school of entrepreneurial thought, ie Lean Startups or something else?

It’s changing as I go. I’ve studied most of them and have learned a ton from founders of all different perspectives. I’d say lean startup is my core perspective, but I didn’t get real value out of it until I started tempering it with other bodies of knowledge. Any business approach tends to become a caricature of itself when you go completely “pure”.

As a coder, what percentage of success in entrepreneurship do you attribute to your coding talent versus your business talent?

A little coding and a little business are both necessary. Though you’ll get farther as just-a-hacker then you will as just-a-business-guy (unless you have a great team, a ton of cash to burn, or are willing to work on non-tech businesses).

How do you choose a niche to build a product for?

I prioritise things which are fast, and then things which are fun, and then those which might be profitable. I’m not exactly approaching this as serious business though. If I was, I’d basically follow Amy Hoy‘s approach of finding a customer segment who makes money and who you like, finding out their problems, and then building subscription software to address those.

Why only 3 hours per day?

I would love to be able to productively code for 10 hours a day, but I just can’t. However, I can be extremely productive for 3 hours of coding a day. Plus, there’s all the other junk. I spend an hour a day updating the blog and my financial reports. Two hours a day talking with other founders. I spend at least a day a week at events and conferences and whatever else. I kind of think 3 hours isn’t so bad, all things considered.

It’s so easy to get into the hours-worked-spiral-of-guilt where you spend more and more hours staring at the screen, getting less and less done because you’re too tired to focus. Or you work real hard, but end up doing the wrong thing extremely well.

I heard about a “luck test”, where people were asked to count how many pictures were in a newspaper. The people who considered themselves lucky ended up averaging like 10 seconds to finish the test, whereas people who thought of themselves as unlucky would spend 100x as long. On the second page of the newspaper was a big square which said “There are 55 pictures in this newspaper”. Were they lucky to see that? Na. They were just relaxed, so they were able to take in the unexpected.

And finally, the whole point of this challenge is to see if it’s viable to build my dream business. My dream business doesn’t involve me coding for 8 hours a day

Has your mindset changed over the course of the first few weeks?

I initially thought I would build a new product every week. I don’t really think that’s viable anymore, but I haven’t quite figured out how to cope with it.

Do you have any suggestions for people who want to start their own web/mobile company?

Start building stuff with your friends. Projects turn into businesses. And if you’re like me, choose small projects you can finish in a weekend or they’ll never get shipped!

Interview with Rob Fitzpatrick of the 10k Pound Bootstrap Challenge is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Google is usually very coy when adressing SEO, so it was really refreshing to see a simply-worded response from Google Employee, John Mueller, about how the search engine uses the sitemap.xml file.

Mueller starts out by explaining what the sitemap file does:

A Sitemap file helps search engines to discover new and updated URLs on your website. In particular, if your website is fairly large, then this can help them to be able to focus on the new & updated content, instead of having to blindly crawl through everything to see if anything has changed. That can result in new content being found much faster, which can be quite noticeable especially if the site is larger or more complex.

None of that information is especially interesting.  But it gets a bit more interesting…

Find the number of indexed URLs for your website: These statistics are recalculated daily and very accurate. You can find these in the Sitemaps detail page.

Interesting.  I wonder why Google would recalculate these every day.

Discover canonicalization issues: If the numbers there don’t match up, that’s frequently a sign that you’re specifying URLs in the Sitemap file that don’t match what we find during our crawling. That’s usually a sign that you need to work on canonicalization.

This is handy.  Canonicalization issues are notoriously hard to define and then ensure that you’ve fixed, so this is a helpful tool to that end.

Help with canonicalization: When we find multiple URLs on your site that show identical content, we will give any URL that’s listed in a Sitemap an extra edge, even if you don’t use other canonicalization methods.

Well that’s clear.  Sitemaps are a tie-breaker.

Find badly-indexed parts of your site: These counts are supplied per Sitemap file, so you can create separate Sitemap files for logical sections of your site, to discover areas where Google isn’t indexing as much as you’d like.

This is an idea people have talked about (this post on Video Sitemaps comes to mind) for a while but you don’t see in use very often.

Prioritize crawl errors: In the crawl errors section, URLs that were specified in Sitemaps files are listed separately. Since you specifically supplied these URLs, we assume that you want them indexed, and that any crawl errors there are important.

When you give a URL to Google in your sitemap, any errors on that page are listed separately so they are given a heightened priority.

Finally Mueller came back to the discussion and added an addendum…

Edited to add: another thing that I personally find extremely useful with regards to Sitemaps is that if you’re not generating them directly with your CMS, you invariably find out a lot about how your website is crawlable, and what kind of URLs are discovered during that process. I’ve seen many cases where crawling a website with a tool on your side (eg a Sitemaps generator) will bubble up issues that you might miss otherwise, be that session-IDs in URLs, duplicate content through URL differences, infinite spaces (such as endless calendars), or even parts of a site that aren’t linked at all.

We’ve found the same thing Mueller is talking about in doing SEO Audits for clients.  Running a spider through your site (especially one like Screaming Frog for Mac or Xenu for Windows) is one of the most enlightening things you can do for any site.  Over time, you get a sixth sense for how search engines view a site and spot problems quickly.

All and all, it’s nice to see Google Employees in public forums giving concrete answers.  Hopefully this continues!

5 Purposes of a Sitemap.xml as Explained by a Google Employee is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

A captivating new website I’ve been checking out each day is called the 10k Bootstrap Challenge.  The website is an online journal written by an entrepreneur living in London who has decided to give himself until his cash reserves are gone (10k Pounds or about 4 months) to build a business that sustains him.  Each day he has an update of what he has accomplished and his thoughts from the day.

What makes the website so unique is how very condensed the experience will be.

Plenty of people dream of starting their own web startup, fewer people give startups a try with a big safety net, and then there are the handful of folks like Rob Fitzpatrick (the entrepreneur) who purposefully paint themselves into a corner so their only option is to succeed.  It’s truly inspiring to see someone stare the potential of failure directly in the face and keep going.  No hedging there!

Check out the 10k Bootstrap Challenge if you are interested in starting your own web business.  I think you’ll like it a lot.

How to Launch Your Startup Before You Run Out of Money is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Have you noticed lately that sometimes the author’s face will show next to a blog post?  This post will show you how you can have your own lovely face show next to your website or blog!

We’ve talked about the importance of Click-Thru Rate in the SERPS and Rich Snippets in SEO before, but this is the best tip I’ve had yet for you guys.

I was delighted this morning to see the Search Engine Results Page showing this:

New Search Engine Results Page

See my face next to the Search Result?  Now it’s one thing if it shows when people search for you by name.  That’s cool but it’s not going to help much because people are already looking for you.  What if it showed in a more competitive search?

Author Picture in SERPS

See my face on the 4th result down?  Now even though my site is still showing at position 4, I guarantee there are more clicks on it than there were before because we know that faces help conversion rates.

How to Add Your Face to Your Google Results

It’s as simple as following these instructions from Google.  If you have any questions or problems, just leave a comment!

How to Add Your Face Next to Your Blog in Google is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

We are lucky in the US that we are able to use Akismet to help cut down on comment spam and contact form spam.  Yesterday, I had an email exchange with a German citizen who isn’t able to use Akismet because of German privacy laws [Correction: This is not against German law, but is a sticky issue because German Citizens' data is held on US servers].  He had to find another way to cut down on all of the contact form spam he was receiving.

After trying a few different plugins, he eventually settled on Cookies for Comments, which takes a very unique approach to cutting down on spam.  From the plugin’s description:

This plugin adds a stylesheet or image to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet or image a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. The plugin can also check how long it took a user to enter a comment. If it’s too fast it’s probably a spam bot. How fast can a legitimate user enter their name, email, web address and enter a well thought out comment?

His blog has been spam free since installing the plugin yesterday.  So if you ever need to cut down on comment spam without using Akismet, give Cookies for Comments a try!

Thanks to Marco for all his help with this!

How to Eliminate Spam When You Can’t Use Akismet is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

I was working with a Squarespace site recently and needed to put some tracking code on the success page after a contact form.

I’m not as familiar with SquareSpace as WordPress and had to write some javascript code to run on a contact form tracking page.  Since no PHP was available to write, Eric and I did it strictly in Javascript.  Here’s the final code:

<script type="text/javascript">
if ((location.href)=="http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage") {
/* <![CDATA[ */
var google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxx;
var google_conversion_language = "en";
var google_conversion_format = "1";
var google_conversion_color = "000000";
var google_conversion_label = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
var google_conversion_value = 0;
/* ]]> */
}
</script>

Naturally you’ll need to change these three values:

1. Change http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage to the exact URL of the transaction URL.
2. Replace the xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_id to whatever your actual conversion is is.
3. You’ll also need to change xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_label to whatever your actual label is, too.

Javascript Conditional Code for Conversion Tracking in Google Adwords is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Without the proper protection, comment spam is an absolute nightmare in WordPress.  Fortunately, the proper protections are very easy to come by.

As a primer, comment spam is any comment left on your blog that adds nothing to the conversation and was likely mass posted.  These comments sometimes look like:

Great post!  This makes me really think.

Or something like….

Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can spot spam comments because they are usually positive in vibe and could fit just about any blog post.  The spammers do this in the hopes that the link behind their name will help their website rank better.  So if you aren’t sure if the comment is spam, a good way to tell is to look at where their name links to.  If it looks fishy, then you’ve got a spam commenter on your hands.

How Bad is the Spam Industry?

I was amazed and what I found this evening when searching through “WordPress” related keywords.  Check this out:

Top Searched Keyword Terms for WordPress

If you look closely at the terms with the red arrows, you’ll see a disturbing pattern.  These are all terms that spammers would use to locate blogs that are powered by WordPress and accept comments.

What’s most disturbing is the fact that the relative volumes of the 5 spam terms add up to 72, while people legitamately searching for WordPress are only 88 in relative volume.  That means the spammers almost outnumber real people searching for WordPress!

But this article isn’t meant to employ scare tactics.  It’s not a scary situation once you get your blog setup correctly.  So let’s talk about setting your WP blog up to avoid comment spam.

How to Kill Comment Spam

1. Have Akismet Set-Up
2. The stats above would imply you should remove the ‘powered by wordpress’ and ‘leave a comment’ text from your site.  I’ve never tested it before, but it can’t hurt!
3. Finally, if your spam is coming from a contact form and not from a comment form, read Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam.  It’s a bit more involved to protect your contact form than your comments form, but it’s well worth the time.

WordPress Comment Spam: How to get less comment spam on your WP Blog is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Google released a breakdown of thirty changes to their search algorithm on January 5th.  If you didn’t make it to the bottom of the list, you missed something special:

Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

In other words, if Google sees you are searching from a mobile device, they’ll send you directly to the mobile version (if there is one) of a website first.  This is huge news if you really think about the logistics behind this change.  This change means…

• Google is taking note of websites with mobile versions of their website.
• Google acknowledges that mobile users prefer a mobile version of a website.  (How long will it be before websites with a mobile version will get a boost in rankings for mobile users?)
• Google sees a future in mobile and is preparing for it already.

Google’s December Algorithm Change Hints at a Focus on Mobile Websites is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

There is a lot of of advice about recovering from Panda, but I felt like this advice from Mike Gordon, the Toronto SEO Guy, was the most elegant:

In most cases, sites that have been hit with Panda were over-optimizing their on-page factors (keyword spamming) with the intention of ‘gaming’ Google while offering no additional value (or lesser value) to visitors. Other sites got hit for using link farms and other forms of paid links that are against Google’s policies, and again, are designed to manipulate the engine without offering benefit to the user.

For sites in the above scenario, it’s time to recognize that they’ve gotten away with undeserved traffic for a long time and now they’re paying the price. What they need to do is kill the link farms and paid links (which are almost always crappy links anyway) and edit their pages to remove the over-optimization.

So, for example, there’s no need for a 5-10% ‘keyword density’ (keyword density is a myth anyway). Bottom line here is to just write naturally without thinking much about keyword usage and you’ll be fine. Of course, you do need your primary keyword(s) in the title tag, body text, etc., but 2-3 instances of the keyword in the body text is all you need. More than that really doesn’t help contrary to popular belief – but it might hurt (and probably will).

Most importantly, sites need to pay more attention to structural issues (which in most cases haven’t been an issue for Panda, but having a good site structure will go a long way to helping a site prevail post Panda). For example: ensure that there are no duplicate content issues (the vast majority of sites have this problem to some degree in Google’s eyes and don’t even know it e.g. URL issues, parameter issues, etc.); ensure that there are minimal pages returning 404s or other errors; have a user friendly and consistent global navigation; remove unnecessary keyword-rich footer links sitewide; etc.

In a nutshell, site owners/webmasters need to ask themselves this question when creating/editing anything on their website: Does the change I’m about to make help Google *and* users, or just Google? If it’s the latter, you need to seriously reconsider whether it’s a wise move. Making websites easier for Google to crawl, understand the content, and index pages – and making sites more relevant for users – are still the keys.

Yes, I know, I sound soooo white hat – and I am – but I truly believe that in the long term, that’s what works best (though there will always be smart black hat guys out there who succeed for a period of time, but it’s getting *much* tougher).

Unfortunately, some legitimate sites got undeservedly Panda’d. Beyond doing all the kinds of things I’ve outlined above, they should attempt to contact Google and make their best case. For most of us, this isn’t easy as Google is not the most responsive company to the little guys (surprise surprise). If you can develop a Google contact through a friend or even via an AdWords rep, you may have a better chance of your message being responded to, and if the request is reasonable then you have a much better chance of a reversal of penalties on the SEO field.

SEO Tip: How To Recover From Panda is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme