Should you be wasting your fabulous time on keeping your website up to date?

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

Should you be wasting your fabulous time on keeping your website up to date?

Is your time best spent keeping your website up to date? With all the things that must be done in your business does keeping your website up to date one that you should be spending your fabulous time on? Really, if finances were not a factor would you still be the person keeping your website up to date?

I know your to-do list is a mile long and keeping your website up to date just happens to be one of the tasks that’s at the bottom week after week. Oops. Hey, I’ll be honest with you. It does for me, so I’m not throwing any stones. I go through seasons when I simply do not have time to get out content or refresh the content on my WordPress Website.

Now that we understand the issue, what is the solution? It may be time to take those items off your to-do list and put them on our to-do list. Just sayin’

Let’s start with content

How much content do you have on your site now? Do you have a great plan in place for reusing that content? Are you going through your old posts and refreshing the images? If not, this could be something that is outsourced.

Why is it important to keep the content fresh? If you use Pinterest, adding new images to a previously published article with relevant content gives it new life. Come on, sometimes coming up with new and exciting content can be a challenge. Well, unless you’re a writer then it’s super simple for you.

The Upkeep

Yep, keeping your website up to date it needs to happen. I’ve stood on my soapbox so many times regarding the upkeep. It’s one of those things, that’s not important until it’s important.

Ya know like the upkeep of your house if you let it go the dirt will still be there. Zang it!

While you can spread out the time in between. I’d like you to really consider not doing this because your website is software that is updated with new and improved security updates on the regular.

Schedule one to two hours per month, to performing monthly backups. Applying any needed updates to the theme or plugins. Reviewing spam, checking links. Keeping your website up to date, you know all those exciting things that I am sure you just L-O-V-E to do. I talk about monthly maintenance here in a previous post.

Dubsado Is A Game Changer a blog from Miss Task OBM

Back to the question

Is your time best spent keeping your website up to date? Really, you’re the only person that can answer this question. Does keeping up with your website bring out your fabulous?

Hey, it may not seem like a ton of time, but those couple hours here or couple hours there, that all adds up to time that you're not working on items that generate revenue in your business.

When you are saying “yes” to the website to do list, you’re saying “no” to focusing on your fabulous.

What if you outsource the upkeep and freshening up of your content? Wouldn’t it feel freeing knowing that someone else is handling this for you?

Leave ya with a couple free resources – yay!

How to Use Asana to Manage Your Website Wellness

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

How to Use Asana to Manage Your Website Wellness

Hey! I’ve created a quick tutorial on How to use Asana to manage your Website Wellness.

Not familiar with website wellness? Here is a link to a previous post.

In this tutorial, I go through putting this checklist into Asana as repeatable or recurring tasks.

Asana will remind me of the items that need to be completed on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis to keep my website wellness up to date.

I’m going to walk you through how I would set this up as a project in Asana.

No worries if you use another project management system, the same principles apply.

Here are the steps:

Click on the new button in the upper right corner of Asana
Click add a project
Select blank project
Select either a list or board view (I like board view)

First Column

Rename the first column to Monthly
Begin to add the monthly tasks to complete
- Check Backup is working properly or backup the website
- Update Theme
- Update Plugins
- Update WordPress
- Check Comments & Spam Comments
- Fix any broken links
- Check your security plugin
- Check Website KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) aka Google Analytics
- New Content – At a minimum once per month

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Little Side Note

Fridays are my operations days, so I want to set this to weekly on a Friday every four weeks.

Repeat This

Click the Assign button and assign to either yourself or a team member.
Click on the date and select the due date
Set the date as repeatable

With this set up, the task will keep reoccurring

Second Column

Rename to quarterly or as needed
Add the quarterly or as needed tasks
Delete old unused images
- Do you have any images on your website that you're not using anymore? Delete images that are no longer used so they're not taking up any space on your website.
Delete unused themes
- Did you download ten themes searching for the perfect one? Go ahead and delete them, I generally have two themes installed. Obviously, the active theme and I leave the latest WordPress as my backup in case something were to happen and I needed to fall back to a different theme.
Remove any old revision
- Anytime you make a revision to a page or a post a revision is saved, you can install a plugin to delete old revisions. This could be included in your optimization plugin.

Third Column

Rename to yearly
Add the yearly tasks
Change copyright year in the footer

There you go. That is a nice checklist of how to use Asana to manage your website wellness that I can set up and have automatically reminded me what tasks need to be done on which day.

Please go ahead and let me know if you have any questions.s.

A Few Of My Favorite WordPress Plugins

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

A Few Of My Favorite WordPress Plugins

I’d like to share with you a few of my favorite WordPress Plugins. Currently, the count for WordPress Plugins is over 54,000. That’s a lot of added functionality!

WordPress is my Content Management System (CMS) of choice, it has been for years. Why you may ask with so many CMS options? The main reason for this is the ability to add in all these different bits of functionality to get what you want from your website.

What are WordPress Plugins?

WordPress Plugins are add on options. Everyone starts with the same foundation in WordPress. That is the structure. Your theme gives you the look and feels, but the plugins they add the easy and flair.

If you would like a little more information, check out this article.

Here are a few of my favorite WordPress Plugins

Updraft Backup: This is my plugin of choice for backing up websites. It is easy to set up they have the option for a freemium or paid plugin with additional features. With the free version, you have the option to send a backup off-site.

Wordfence Security or All In One WP Security: Security is a must and is the first plugin that is installed and set up on any WordPress site that I create. It is that important.

Yoast SEO: Umm, because if you’re going to have a website you need to make sure that you can get traffic to it. Plus, they have excellent documentation and learning.

Google Analytics by Monster: Because ya need to know where the traffic is coming from to your site. Love tracking the numbers.

TablePress: Do you have a number of tables that need to be displayed on your site? This is a great plugin for this. It allows you to import a CSV file and add a bit of shortcode to the page and it displays! It’s quick and simple.

Plugin for your ESP (Email Service Provider) ie Mailchimp, Active Campaign, ConvertKit you want to build your list so that you find the people that connect with you. The best way to do this is with your email list. Add a pop up to your site. I know you’re like annoying – but they really do work.

Instagram Feed: Show all that beautiful imagery that you have on your Instagram feed on your website.

Broken Link Checker: Do you have a number of links on your site? Well, this is the plugin for you, as it will keep track of all the links and if they are still actually functional.

A Little Side Note

When setting up Admin users do not use Admin, Administrator or anything similar! Find something creative to use. To create my usernames I go to LastPass User Name Generator.

Well, that’s a pretty healthy list of a few of my favorite WordPress Plugins. If you will please allow me to get up on my soapbox for just a couple minutes – I promise.

It is important to keep your plugin update and your website up to date!

While it may be tempting to go through and just update the plugin all at once, I would ask you to take your time.

Block time on your calendar EVERY month.

You need to update them one at a time and then check your website to make sure it did not cause any issues!

Plugins and updates can break your website if they do not get along with WordPress or your current theme.

Would you like more information on updating the software on your WordPress website?

This easy to follow checklist, guides you through all the tasks that you should be completed each month to keep your website running smoothly.

Download my WordPress Wellness Checklist today and I’ll send you a reminder email every month with a little information, tip or trick!

Get It Now, Girlfriend

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