Yes, it’s summer, spring just flew by. Perhaps you’ve bumped up against your media allowance and need some room, or your archives run longer than Interstate 80 and is always under construction–somewhere. So isn’t it time to clean house?
As I’ve mentioned before, I have the free version of WordPress (that’s a dot com, not dot org) and while it presents some limitations (for instance, most plug-ins), my free blog is still a whale of a program for the money. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I’m not terribly technical, but I keep reading advice posts that say it’s time to clean up the ole website. Is it? Is this something you’ve tackled lately?
Here are five easy site maintenance procedures you can do on your own–just a bit of clean up:
- Go back to the beginning and look at some of your oldest blog posts. Some of those may have been revised–delete your oldest posts that are no longer relevant.
- Take a look at all your media. Are there duplications? Don’t delete the one picture you used if you are keeping the post. There are always, however, pictures you chose not to use.
- Delete all your spam–WordPress tends to shuffle all those spammy comments into a separate folder that shortly becomes voluminous. Delete them permanently.
- Same goes for all your pending comments. Get the broom.
- Your Blog Rolls getting out of hand? I noticed another book blogger separated out her blog rolls into categories. That’ll take some doing as right now they are all lumped into one big roll. However, you might steer some other like-minded book bloggers or book reviewers into your contacts by separately labeling them. Sure makes it easier to find others with whom you’d like to connect!
Perhaps you’ve worked on a site that just isn’t going anywhere–yeah, you can dump it and start over with a whole new blog. But you can also keep your blog name and empty all the media, comments, posts, and pages by going to “Support” – “Empty Site” – then delete each of the above as well as categories. So much is done behind the scenes of a WP.com blog site, you don’t realize it is being saved and backed up automatically.
One more thought on backing up–the question was posed recently by another blogger friend. Researching the question, it would appear this is don
e automatically, 24/7. You can find the information for backing up under “Plug-Ins” “Back Up and Export.” However, you can do a separate back up using the Export tool. Note, this will only back up your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags. To do a manual export, go to:
- My Site
- Settings
- Export
In other words, it will not export your media files. They advise that if you wish to do so, you will need to install WordPress.org locally, then import. (Nah, I’ll pass.)
I’d love to know if you’ve wondered about site maintenance. Let me know what you’ve done to speed it up and/or smooth it out! ©2017 Virginia Williams 
Rosepoint Publishing 