I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year!
New Year’s Day can be a time when people feel fresh and renewed. It is a time when you can start over. A time to begin anew!
The New Year (and new month or quarter) is also a good time to make some updates to your website. Take a few moments over the next week and handle some of the following:
1. Make sure your copyright date is 2015! This is probably something that gets over looked too frequently. Generally speaking at the bottom of your page you have a copyright date. If it is NOT automatically updated (some WordPress themes do not), you will have to go in manually and change this. Nothing says ‘Neglected site’ more than an out of date copyright statement!
2. Start taking backups (or continue taking them) on a regular basis! I use WPTwin as a total backup solution. There are others out there – find which one you like and use it!
3. If you have been taking backups, start to clear out unnecessary archives. I have gigs and gigs of disk space used by from backups. I do not need to have backups from last March! Time to delete them. As a general rule, I am very comfortable holding onto 3 months back of backups.
4. Start to think about domain names you might have that should be let go. I have many, many, many domains. Some I am holding onto, and many are live. Think about which sites are ready to be let go, or flipped.
5. Review the users that are registered on your site. Maybe you had a vendor do some debugging for you on your site. You may have added a new user for him/her to access your WordPress site. If they are not using it, delete that user!
6. Check the security on your site! If you have taken my WP Security Course, you know what needs to be done. If not, one of the biggest security measures would be to change the file and folder permissions (644 and 755 respectively) and change the database prefix.
Are there things that you do on your site at the start of the new year? If so, I would love to hear them! Leave a comment below!
Some great tips! I have to check my copyright date…ha! just looked and there is NO copyright date on my blog. Does blogger not provide that automatically. I’ll check into it.
Hi Shannon – Be careful when using Blogger – when you use them, you give up some of your rights to your content. While you retain the copyright to what you post, they have the right to do a lot of things with your content! Currently in their Terms of Service, it states:
When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
Check out the full list at http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Good to know! I’ve thought about moving the blog over to WP over the years but hadn’t made the ‘leap’ yet. I’ll investigate it this year.
Glad you are taking a leadership role in UBC. Your expertise and niche will be very helpful to those of us in business and wanting to blog on a regular basis.
I’m not clear on all your points in this blog. Would be helpful if you would expand on them. It seems like short notes rather than educational.
Hi Carol! Thanks for the kind words! Danni and I are doing our best to make each challenge successful and to improve each time!
This site is a mix of topics from the beginner level towards the more advance level. Somethings will seem basic to certain folks while others may seen over their heads! If there is something you would like more information about, let me know and I can cover it in more depth!
Thanks for stopping by! Happy New Year!