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A Look Under the WordPress Hood at DannyBrown.me

Every now and again, I’ll get asked what plugin or solution I’m using on this blog to achieve a certain effect or result.

Because I use self-hosted WordPress to power this blog, it means there’s a crazy amount of add-ons, plugins and other optimization and performance solutions for bloggers to choose from.

While that choice is great, it can also be overwhelming.

Since I’m a self-confessed geek that likes to try out pretty much most things on this blog in the name of experimentation, I’ve used a fair few solutions in the six-plus years I’ve been blogging here.

It’s been a while since I last took a look at what’s underneath, so here’s what’s currently powering my blog, and why you might want to consider it for yours.

To make it easier (in case you’re already really happy with your sharing solution, for example, but looking to get more server speed), I’ve separated them into four main categories.

While some plugins may crossover into other categories, I’ve gathered them into the following areas:

Security
Optimization
Visibility
Growth

The solutions below are a mix of free and premium – what version you use depends on your need. Let’s dig in!

1. Security

While we may want a lot of eyeballs, shares, subscribers, downloads and more from our blogs, we need to make sure we actually have a blog up and running, that’s safe from attacks, and that can be restored if anything happens to it.

While there are various solutions out there, these are the ones I like and currently use.

Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI

While WordPress is a great solution for any blogger, it can also be prone to frequent brute force attacks (where hackers try and gain access to your blog by multiple username and password attempts). The Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security plugin by ELI is a great way to counter these attacks.

Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall – WordPress plugin WordPress org English Canada

Features include:

Automatic removal of known threats and back-doors
Automatic blocking of SoakSoak and other known malware
Quick Scan options to give an overview of current threat status
Complete scan to look at every part of your WordPress site

This is one of the most comprehensive plugins I’ve used when it comes to brute force protection – definitely recommended.

Check out Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI here.

Login Lockdown

Tying into the brute force attack method of trying to access your blog via multiple attempts at guessing your username and password, the Login Lockdown plugin does exactly what it says on the tin, by locking down access to your blog after a set number of attempts.

You can:

Set the maximum number of attempts to log in before locking down access
Set how long a failed attempt is locked out for
Hide login error messages
Lockout invalid usernames (useful for a blog with limited amounts of users in the backend)

While it’s a pretty simple plugin, it’s effective. And you can’t ask for more than that.

Check out Login Lockdown here.

Monitive

If your content is created for any kind of business value, the uptime of your site is crucial. Heck, even if you’re a personal blogger like me, uptime is still hugely important and something to keep an eye on.

Monitive makes this process easy. Simply create and account and they’ll start monitoring your site’s uptime.

Frequency, type of alerts and reports are determined by the plan you’re on, but even the free account’s pretty awesome.

Check out Monitive here.

VaultPress

One of the worst things that can happen to any blogger is to lose his or her content due to a crash, hack, glitch or simple user error. If you have years of content, this loss can be even more painful.

VaultPress is a fantastic solution that not only backs up and restores your site (with real-time back up options), but also protects your themes, plugins and settings into the bargain.

Given that it’s from Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com, it’s almost guaranteed that this will be a great plugin, and so it is.

Alternative: iThemes offer an alternative called BackupBuddy. I was using this, but found it was causing load issues due to continuous creations of CRON jobs, so made the switch to VaultPress. More information on that issue can be found here.

Check out VaultPress here.

2. Optimization

Along with security, optimization of your blog should be one of the things you’re constantly tweaking. Google has already advised it will penalize slow sites as well as those that aren’t mobile-friendly.

Apart from your own penalization, though, the user experience – that of your readers – should be top of mind too.

Here are the solutions I use for optimizing my blog.

Akismet

One of the granddaddy’s of the WordPress plugin world, Akismet is probably a mainstay in the majority of WordPress blogs online today when it comes to protecting blogs from comment and trackback spam.

It also allows you to see how many comments have been approved by regular commenters, and enables you to bulk clean your comments area from span, keeping your site free of extra load and bulk.

Check out Akismet here.

Anti-Spam

While Akismet does a pretty good job of keeping spam at bay, it can still be beaten by automated scripts that bypass its algorithm. This is where Anti-Spam comes into play.

It inserts an invisible checkbox, kind of like a captcha, that automated scripts don’t see. This adds an excellent second layer of filtering, and one that only real people will bypass (even though they’re not aware it’s there). This plugin has essentially killed all but the most determined of spammers on my site.

Check out Anti-Spam here.

CDN Linker

One thing that every blogger should be concerned about is site load. Not only is Google looking unfavourably on slow sites, but visitors are more prone to leave a site that doesn’t load in an acceptable time.

CDN Linker is a plugin that makes the connection between your preferred CDN solution (more on that shortly) and your site (even if you’re using a local caching option). It’s lightweight, easy to set up, and effective.

Check out CDN Linker here.

MaxCDN

I’ve mentioned earlier how Google doesn’t look favourably on sites that load slow. A lot of these load issues are caused by sites hosting images and files on their own servers. If they’re not set up for this, cue load issues.

MaxCDN is an excellent solution that does the heavy lifting for you, and lets you just get on with the important stuff like content.

CDN by MaxCDN | Experts in Content Delivery Network Services

I use a hybrid of MaxCDN, CDN Linker, and WP Super Cache to keep my load times to a minimum. Because of the theme design I use (media rich, large featured images), this has made a huge difference in my own blog’s performance, and is well worth the monthly cost to do so.

Check out MaxCDN here.

WangGuard

Run a blog for any decent amount of time and you’ll get your fair share of spam commenters. As well as being a pain in the ass for bloggers, spam commenters (or sploggers) can ruin the experience for other commenters too.

WangGuard counters this by detecting and removing sploggers through a variety of ways – checking for duplicate emails, checking emails against DNS servers, enabling honeypot traps and more. An excellent solution.

Check out WangGuard here.

wpDiscuz WordPress Comments

While?there’s been a lot of talk recently about blog comments dying, I don’t buy into that. Sure, they may be moving more onto social channels, but there’s still life in “traditional blog comments” yet.

~~A relatively new plugin, wpDiscuz offers a sleek and elegant approach to comments, without all the bells and whistles that other commenting solutions come with.~~

~~It also uses native WordPress comments as its starting point, and this makes using wpDiscuz super easy.~~

~~Simple name and email requirement to leave a comment~~
~~Ajax powered to stay on-comment as well as utilizing “load more comments” versus pagination~~
~~Voting up and down options~~
~~Social sharing options~~
~~Customizable to fit your theme brand and design~~
~~In-depth backend to optimize usernames, commenter options, notifications of new discussions and more~~

I’ve recently started using wpDiscuz after being impressed with it on my wife’s publisher site. Its clean, simple to use, fast, and – most importantly – lets you keep full control of your comments on your own domain.

Note: After having issues with the Ajax loading, as well as mobile commenting, I disabled wpDiscuz. I now use Postmatic, for commenting via email, as well as their own commenting solution, Epoch.

Alternative: Previous to wpDiscuz, I’d experimented with a hybrid comment system on Inline Comments and G+ Comments, but have had to disable for now due to a theme incompatibility. Livefyre is also an excellent solution.

~~Check out wpDiscuz here.~~

WP Lightbox 2

When bloggers use images on their sites, it can be pretty hard to see the detail, dependent on both how much text is on the image, and the blog’s design (a small main content area will limit the image’s dimensions).

WP Lightbox 2 allows your readers to click on the image, and it’ll expand into a more optimal size (even on mobile). You can also create galleries as well as photo albums, and filter how large the image displays, based on browser screen size.

Check out WP Lightbox 2 here.

WP Smush Pro

Tying back into the optimization combination of MaxCDN, WP Super Cache and CDN Linker, WP Smush Pro helps keep media file sizes down by reducing an image file’s size on upload.

With the option to optimize existing images, and extremely simple set-up, it’s a great way to keep server load down even if you’re not using any other caching or optimization solutions.

Check out WP Smush Pro here.

WP Super Cache

As sites get heavier with load, caching content is a great way to ensure your visitors get to enjoy a speedy site. Caching simply means you’re “pre-loading” saved content, instead of having to load new files on every visit.

WP Super Cache is one of the best, as well as one of the simplest (even though it still has pretty in-depth features if you want them).

Legacy cache versus supercache, offering more options on where your content is preloaded from
Comment compatibility (comments will still show up right away)
Dynamic caching for certain pages
Cache rebuild to ensure each new visitor gets optimal load

There are a host of features on WP Super Cache, and it’s pretty easy to set up (with excellent support).

I don’t actually use it as my main caching solution – I leave that to MaxCDN, WP Super Cache and CDN Linker (and I explain here how to do that).

Alternatives: One of the most popular caching plugins is W3 Total Cache. From personal experience, I found this too intensive for my needs. A simpler solution is Quick Cache.

Check out WP Super Cache here.

3. Visibility

Of course, it’s all well and good having great security, and optimizing your blog ready for all the traffic that will come your way, knowing they’ll be presented with a safe and optimized blog. Not so fast, Skippy.

Making sure your content is seen is, surprise surprise, pretty key too – and if you think that’s an obvious statement, you’d be wrong, sadly.

Working on the visibility of your blog will be a constant challenge, but doesn’t have to be one you’re not prepared for.

Infinite SEO

There are a lot of blog posts that will tell you SEO is dead and content is the new king. While SEO as a standalone tactic may not be as important as is used to be, it’s still a key part in any successful content plan.

Infinite SEO is a great plugin with a host of features that anyone can use:

Control over page or post SEO
Preview for how your SEO will look in search results
mozRank and Page Authority based on external links
Intensive sitemap creation and indexing
Automatic internal linking for better cross site authority
Multisite and BuddyPress integration.

While there are several other SEO plugins around, for me this one beats them all.

Alternatives: I’ve previously used the hugely popular WordPress SEO from Yoast, as well as the All-in-One SEO Pack, and both are excellent alternatives to Infinite. Yoast is more involved, and probably better suited to more advanced needs.

Check out Infinite SEO here.

RSS Footer

This is a bit of an older plugin, so you may not want to use it (often older plugins can cause conflicts with later versions of WordPress or, occasionally, a security concern).

However, I’ve used RSS Footer for years with no issue. When used, it adds a simple sentence to your RSS feeds, and shows where the content was first published. Great for more visibility if your content is syndicated, even better to beat content scrapers at theor own game.

Alternative: RSS Footer has actually been enveloped into its developer’s SEO plugin (it’s from the same guy that built WordPress SEO). However, you can still download the original plugin on its own if you don’t use WordPress SEO.

Check out RSS Footer here.

Social Warfare

Perhaps the most effective way of getting any content seen is through social sharing, and there are no shortage of excellent solutions around, both free and premium.

I’ve experimented with more than my fair share, and the one I’m impressed with the most currently is Social Warfare.

Social Warfare: Your Ultimate Social Sharing Arsenal

The name alone should tell you this plugin means business.

Cached share counts for faster loading
Sort posts by social popularity
Customize tweets for optimized sharing
Optimize images for sharing on Pinterest
Optimized images for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn
Use different meta descriptions for open graph sharing
Integrated Sniply Buster plugin to combat the Sniply content hijacking script
Multiple design options, including responsive buttons, and sticky share options

As I mention, I’ve used countless sharing plugins and this one has really impressed me. The developers are also great at listening to suggestions and pretty fast with support issues.

Alternatives: Two great alternatives to Social Warfare are Flare from Filament Apps, and the Monarch sharing plugin from Elegant Themes. Both offer multiple design options, stats, mobile sharing options and more.

Check out Social Warfare here.

4. Growth

Ironically, this part of blogging is one I never really used to care about. And, to a degree, I still don’t: you won’t see any annoying pop-ups shouting at you to subscribe before you’ve even seen the content, and I don’t use my newsletter to sell anything.

However, as content consumption gets even more fractured, and audience attention dwindles, growing your blog and its community is key to any kind of success and longevity.

Elastic Email

There are a host of email service providers when it comes to blog newsletters – MailChimp and AWeber are probably the two best known.

However, depending on the size of your list, these can get costly, which is why Elastic Email is such an excellent solution.

While you can use Elastic Email as your newsletter form builder as well as sender, I prefer to use MailPoet for my forms (as shown further down), and Elastic Email for my delivery.

Features are excellent:

Easy subscriber cleansing tools
Real-time reputation monitoring to show your current status (spammy or trusted)
Activity reports
Single API to integrate other newsletter services (the way I do it with MailPoet)

Perhaps the best feature of Elastic Email though is the price.

Starting at $0.99 per 1,000 emails, the cost goes down as your email numbers increase. I’m currently only paying $0.39 per 1,000 emails – a small fraction of what I’d pay with other providers. And it’ll only decrease in cost as I continue – result!

Check out Elastic Email here.

Magic Action Box Pro

Look to the bottom of this post, or any other on my blog, and you’ll see only one call-to-action (CTA) – a subscription box for my weekly newsletter.

As I move more into personal content and interactions, the newsletter is perfect for me, and Magic Action Box Pro is perfect for what I need.

Support for any autoresponder service
Gated content options
Multiple and responsive templates
Sales box and sharing box options
Simple placement choices

While I don’t use many of the features (gated content and sales-oriented CTAs), what I do use has made a huge difference in email sign-ups. And for something that’s been built to provide that lift, you can’t ask for much more than that.

Check out Magic Action Box Pro here.

MailPoet Newsletters

~~While it’s all well and good getting new subscribers, if you’re not delivering emails that are appealing, you’re simply turning these new subscribers off.~~

MailPoet is an excellent email template builder that also comes with analytics around your subscriber actions, multiple list options, the option to implement in widgets and pages, and more. There’s also a WangGuard MailPoet Connector plugin to stop spammy email sign-ups.

~~I moved to MailPoet from Feedblitz?earlier this year and I wish I had done it a hell of a lot sooner. Easy to use, far more design options, and simply a better experience – recommended.~~

~~Check out MailPoet here.~~

Note: As of June 18, I’ve made the full switch to Postmatic for email delivery and comments by email – you can find out more about that here.

Future Plugins and Solutions – And You

Of course, as any blogger will tell you, just as content direction and voice is always in flux, so are the plugins and solutions we use on our blog.

While the options above are my current choice, they’ll be added to very soon with two very cool solutions that take content interaction and discussions in very interesting directions – more info on that soon.

Also, being on self-hosted WordPress, we’re so very lucky to have an amazing community of developers who are always trying to improve every experience – front end, back end, reader, blogger – that to stand still would be foolish (and impossible).

I can’t wait to see what comes next – in the meantime, though, I’d love to hear what you’re using.

Fire away – the comments are below, and all yours!

Remember When We Just Hit Publish?

Remember the good old days of blogging? Come up with something to say, write it down, hit Publish, and onto the next piece whenever that came to mind.

Now we have to worry about content authority, author rank, Hummingbird, content overkill, content optimization, etc, etc.

It seems we spend so much time worrying on the presentation, we lose track of the real reason we blog -?love.

Love for the content; love for the experience; love for the audience; love for the?reason to publish.

Sometimes we need to say “Screw you, content rules”, and Just. Hit. Publish.

There Is Zero New Content on the Social Web Today

Instead, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc., are merely re-imagining everything that has come before. Originality is a long-gone word and recyclability is the “new original”.

Let’s discuss -?the comments are open.

image: Francisco Sanchez

Why Our User Experience Should Be Determined by Data

Anyone that follows this blog regularly will know there’s a wee bit of a running joke at how often the site design changes.

What started out as a semi-regular update (say, once or twice a year) to keep the look fresh, and the content front and centre, has become almost as regular an occasion as Facebook platform updates messing up everyone’s privacy settings.

Now, while I’m really happy with the current design and the way everything flows, there’s a reason behind the recent design changes, tweaks, and community feedback – simply, data informs our decisions and user experience.

Yes, gut instinct comes into play too, but when it comes to content and how that’s displayed and acted upon, for me data analysis, community feedback and AB testing is key. Here’s why.

The Data of Trends

The world is ever-changing. What we found popular and best practices 10 years ago is nothing like the best practices and popular trends of today. Heck you could halve that timescale at least, and find we move in a constantly-changing cycle of new trends, methodologies and preferences.

This is particularly true when it comes to content.

While there are several areas where the consumption of content has changed in recent years – curation, syndication, and accessibility, for example – perhaps the biggest game changer is how advanced mobile browsing has become. For example, in a study from June this year of U.S. consumer habits:

76% access social networks, with 46% using a mobile browser versus an app;
68% access news sites, with 63% using a mobile browser versus an app;
56% watch video, with 58% preferring to use a mobile browser versus an app;
41% read/access blogs, with a whopping 75% using a mobile browser versus an app.

Make no mistake, mobile is fast becoming the default browsing option for many of the platforms where we create and share content today. If we’re not ready for that, we’ll lose visitors, readers, subscribers and customers.

From my own analytics, mobile visitors now make up 27% of my audience. If my site wasn’t set up to accommodate these folks, that’s a big potential loss in traffic just waiting to happen.

From that angle, and from the continued advances in the way people consume content on the web, the move to responsive design was key.

The Data of Analytics

I’m a data geek. It’s what got me into marketing to begin with, and it’s what drives me today. By understanding the data we have access to, we can make informed decisions on pretty much everything around us.

When it comes to content, that’s a given – or should be. It’s the one single biggest piece of advice I recommend whenever people are talking about blogging, whether they’re new bloggers-to-be, or existing ones: always be tracking and watching your analytics.

Analytics are key for several reasons:

They offer knowledge into how your content is being received and where it’s lacking;
They offer information about your visitors and their behaviour on your blog (entry point, pages visited, actions taken, exit points);
They offer actionable insights into improving your audience reach, interaction and participation (comments, shares, subscribers, downloads);
They offer opportunities to new audiences, based on external discussions (trackbacks, bookmarks, referrals).

Simply put, without analytics, you’re essentially producing content in the dark, whether that be blogging, video production, podcasting, or similar. And if you’re doing that, you’re wasting good resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

From my own analytics of the first half of this year, the following became clear:

While traffic was good, people weren’t staying on site long enough;
The entry page was usually the same as the exit one, so people weren’t exploring;
My bounce rate (how long people stay on site) was horrendous.

Digging deeper into my analytics, especially around the stats highlighted here as concern areas – Pages Visited, Duration of Visit and Bounce Rate – a few things became clear.

The incentive to check out other pages wasn’t prominent enough;
Certain “drivers of traffic” were doing anything but (more on that shortly);
The content wasn’t conducive to long stays and participation.

Clearly things had to change. So they did.

I changed to a design that had a sticky navigation menu, where the Page tabs would follow you all the way down the post. This increased additional page clicks;
I stopped using Triberr, the content curation / blogger platform;
I deliberately changed to longer form content, as opposed to the standard 300-600 word approach.

The results? While it’s just one month’s analysis, they’re encouraging (click to expand).

As you can see, the three key metrics I wanted to improve have done so:

Pages per Visit rose from 1.40 to 2.23;
Average visit duration rose from 1.09 to 1.37;
Bounce rate dropped from 81.45% to 35.68%.

Now, it’s early days, but the signs are good. If I keep tracking where visitors hover their mouse/keypad, and what actions encourage them to stay on-site, I can optimize even further and improve these stats even more.

The Triberr thing? I applaud the guys over there for what they’re trying to do for bloggers, but I’ve been finding – both myself, and with other bloggers I talk to – that Triberr is referring less traffic, and simply adding to social proof. ?The number of tweets may be up, but the desired action – traffic to the blog – isn’t.

Indeed, Triberr placed at a lowly #73 for traffic sources, and accounted for a mere 9 visits in the last 30 days.

Then again, looking a little bit deeper into one of the larger Tribes I was part of, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise that the level of traffic provided by Triberr was so low.

As you can see, the activity within the group is very low, and it almost appears that people have left, or forgotten about the group, or simply don’t share anymore.

Looking at my own Google Analytics, visits from Triberr had a high bounce rate and low site duration time, so by removing that option, it added to the positive impact on these stats.

However, this is my own experience, and I’m sure Triberr woks well for some folks.

The Data of Community

For any content creator, but especially bloggers, the community around the content is hugely important to the success of the blog. Without a community, there’s pretty much nothing there except a part of the web that’s for an audience of one.

From regular readers to occasional commenters, and discussions elsewhere via Twitter discussions, Google+ threads, Facebook wall comments, etc., a community not only helps promote content, but improve its creation as well as its presentation.

This was evident from the excellent feedback and suggestions I received when I implemented my new design last week. After finishing, I dropped an update on my social networks, asking for thoughts, feedback and suggestions – and got great advice.

On Google+, marketer and blogger Ana Hoffman mentioned the font size of the headlines looked great on mobile, but looked too big via desktop browsing. After analyzing, I agreed, and dropped the pixel size down a few points. And Ana was right!

On Twitter and by email, social strategist Mila Araujo really delivered, with some great advice on dropping the Archives tab for a Topics one (to improve access to content), as well as advising of some areas that weren’t showing up on mobile. This information helped immensely, as did the suggestions to offer a separate tab for each of my books, particularly useful for mobile browsing.

By asking for, and acting upon, the fresh eyes of my community and their suggestions to improve the user experience, I was tapping into a rich source of data that helped improve the presentation of the content here, which should (hopefully) build upon the improvements on how it’s consumed.

Data is Everything and Everything is Data

Like I said at the start of this post, I don’t discount gut instinct at all when it come to making decisions. Some of the best experiences in my life happened because I acted on gut instinct over logical reasoning.

But for content, or for anything that has some form of marketing slant, for me data is everything.

By utilizing the data I had access to – archival analytics, visitor behaviour, trends in browsing, etc – I could immediately see where changes needed to be made. By accessing the experience within the community around this blog, I had even more data points from which to make choices to.

For me, this is invaluable, and can only help us grow, improve, and continue to make the user experience more enjoyable. Which, at the end of the day, is what really matters, no?

image: Marketing Charts