Now dont get me wrong, wordpress is awesome, the people using it just need to take a bit of time to learn about it, how it works and how to get the most out of it.

Here are my suggestions for improving your customers/readers wordpress experience.

Caching – WP-Super-Cache / Hyper Cache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your wordpress site is installed on to do less work. I have typically seen on busy wordpress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved. Dont use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing wordpress sites less.

To install, search the plugins from the Wordpress admin panel and install them, double check the configs, but most can be used out the box if you have a pretty standard installation.

Permalinks
These making your website more visible. Instead of having your sites link looking like this: http://www.slingsby.za.net/?p=225 your link can look like: http://www.slingsby.za.net/2009/08/29/tour-of-cape-town-2010-stadium/ – Google likes it more, its also a lot easier on the eye! Google uses keywords from your link to determine what the content in the article is, this means it scores higher on searche, which means you get more traffic! You can turn permalinks on in the settings tab on the admin menu.

Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps allow search engines to crawl your website easily and look for your new content, check old content is still there etc. Sitemaps give Google, Bing & Yahoo more confidence in your website, ranking it higher than the next website. This is easily installed, in wordpress search for the “Google Sitemaps’ plugin, install & activate. This creates http://www.slingsby.za.net/sitemap.xml

Google will like you even more if you tell it where the sitemap is. Use Google Webmaster tools, go and create an account at http://www.google.com/webmaster/ – then update the sitemap location on Googles site. There are simple instructions on the site on how to do this.

Unused plugins
If you have plugins that are enabled but you arent using, disable them and get rid of them. You can always reinstall them. The more junk you have clogging up your site, the worse it is.

For Wordpress Hosting in South Africa.

So, there you have it. I have worked with many wordpress sites and seen some interesting things! If you need any advice, hosting or assistance, post me a comment.