When I decided to start a self-hosted blog I chose WordPress so that I can spend more time writing stuff than developing the blog itself although I spent some time customizing the theme and optimization. And in this post, I’ll share how I automate the workflow for 📝writing and 🛠 maintaining my blog.
SEO is the Key 🔑
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a key factor that determines the visibility of our website to search engines. I’ve also written a series of articles on SEO for beginners and programmers. So basically we need to add meta tags for every article based on the title and topic of the article. Most blog platforms automate this process and trust me WordPress is famous for SEO optimization. Setup once and forget about it.
And good SEO = better ranking, some of my articles do rank on the first page 🥇of Google. For WordPress, famous plugins like RankMath and Yoast SEO automate meta tags and other SEO operations for you.
Post scheduling is a Gift 🎁
With college and work together, sometimes I may not get to spend enough time on the blog. So, I write my posts whenever I like and schedule them so that all my posts are published consistently, this feature is inbuilt in WordPress. There are also many other integrations with WordPress to do more post-publish tasks like sharing published posts to social media, I do this for the Twitter account of Matrixread blog.
PS: I’m scheduling this post to be published on 5th June 2021 at 09:00 AM IST⏳
Automatic security updates 🔐
Maintainance is one of the tiring tasks for any website and it was a painful thing for WordPress users until a few years ago WordPress introduced automatic updates. The best part is you can just opt for the security updates if you worry new changes might break your site. I also get a mail on what plugins are updated. So, even if I’m away for a week or month my blog takes care of itself.
Spam protection 👿😇
The number of bots that attack and comment on any website is huge yes, even I was surprised in the beginning. This is also the case with social media and online forums. But, thanks to WordPress and Open Source 🎉 there are a variety of security and spam protection plugins that fix most of these problems like blocking bad bots, removing spam mail and comments.
Pages and Chronological order 📆
A blog is not just a few posts, we need to list posts based on category, tags, and need other pages like author pages. WordPress got all of this covered and it also does this based on time, this is one of my favorite features. For example, if we visit matrixread.com/2020/10/ i.e October 2020 we get all the posts of that month. [How cool is that]
WordPress ❤️ Open Source
Whatever feature you need, there is a plugin out there to make it work. Most of them are free to use and as our revenue grows we can upgrade to a pro plan to automate more stuff. Even the WordPress community is very welcoming both for developers and no-coders.
Freedom and Control 🙌
When you build a site with WordPress you are in control and you are the owner of everything. No platform lock-in as I can export 📦 all my data into an XML file and continue my blog on a different platform or code my own if needed.
And there’s more WP can do …
- Generate RSS feed and sitemaps,
- Automatic image compression and resizing and
- Ping search engines after a new post are published
Fun Fact: You can start a free WordPress blog in under a minute.
Visit wordpress.com to know more.