Along with hosting, we would like to share a few additional blogging tech tips.
Content Delivery Network
Once your site is pretty popular and the site contains large image files, to lessen the load on your server, I recommend using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We’ve used Arcostream and are currently using MaxCDN due to price. Arcostream is $29 dollars per month while MaxCDN is $40 a year for 1 TB of data transfer. CDN hosts files (especially the heavy images) so your server doesn’t get overloaded with requests.
Thesis Theme
We’ve been using the Thesis Theme for WordPress for about 2 years now. The benefit of Thesis theme includes easy customization, a tremendous amount of articles available and awesome Forum support. There are a ton of articles out there on Thesis customization.
A word of advice: always back up your custom_function.php file before making changes, otherwise your site will become inaccessible if the code has issues.
Link to the Thesis Theme for WordPress
There are also other themes specifically for food blogs, such as Food Blog and more. We have only used Thesis, so we can’t speak about how well these themes work.
Filezilla
This is a great FREE ftp software. I use it to manage file transfers between my site and my local PC. The ftp tool is very helpful in managing and backing up files. Cool features include the ability to export ftp setting so you don’t have to set up the information over and over again on multiple computers.
Akismet and Captcha
When you run a blog, a ridiculous amount of spam hits your inbox everyday through comments. Akismet is a spam filter so your site doesn’t get spam messages. Sometimes spam messages still get through, so we also use Captcha plugin. Akismet is $5 a month and the Captcha plugin is FREE!
W3 total Cache/WP Super Cache
They are caching plugins for wordpress site so it runs faster. Both are FREE and there is quite a bit of information out there.
Link to Host Gator Support for setting up W3 Total Cache on your site
Link to Host Gator Support for setting up WP Super Cache on your site
Google Analytics
FREE web analytics from Google so you know more about your visitors and what they are looking for on your site. If you use the Thesis theme, it’s very easy to start tracking with Google Analytics. Simply create the account and follow these simple instructions.
Ziplist Plugin for Recipes
Great FREE plugin that puts all your recipe ingredients, instructions and details in rich snippets.
Link to Ziplist plugin.
Sitemap
Just a reminder for SEO purposes: always have a sitemap so Google understands how to crawl your site. Here is more information on Sitemap from Google. There are many FREE sitemap plugins on WordPress.org. We use BWP Google XML Sitmaps.
Link to BWP Google XML Sitmaps
Professional Help
Once you get your site going, you might run into some issues you can’t resolve. In our case, the loading time was the issue and we didn’t know how to resolve it. I was roaming around the Thesis forum and found Matthew who runs diywpblog.com. We were very happy with his service. He clearly communicated what the issues were and what he was going to fix. You can contact him at matthew {at} diywpblog {dot} com.
I will add more information to this page in the future if I can think of other helpful tips.
– Shen
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Great tips thank you for sharing this
Very helpfull tips these are I really improve my website
Hey would you mind sharing which blog platform you’re working with?
I’m looking to start my own blog iin the near future but I’m having a difficult time making
a decision between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal.
The reason I ask is because yur layout seems different
then most blogs and I’m looking for something unique.
P.S My apologies for being off-topic but I had to ask!
Hi Jasa,
We use WordPress on WPEngine. Our theme is Genesis with a custom design.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Mr. JOC
Nami, thank you so much for this incredibly helpful information, you rock!
We use most of what you use, so I guess we’re okay :D. Thanks for the tips!!
Julie & Alesah
Gourmet Getaways xx
Thanks for all this information – I’ve learned a lot just over this weekend – it’s that thing of not knowing what you don’t know!
More great information!!! I use the Canvas Theme from WooThemes on WP. I went looking for the custom_function.php file and couldn’t find it. Where is it stored? That’s interesting that you use a ftp for file transfer. I guess my files are small enough because I’ve never had a problem uploading into WP using its software. I do use an ftp for a website I work on at work, because you can’t upload large files (>2Mb) through the front end and therefore, have to use a ftp. Anyhoo – great stuff!! I’m checking out Ziplist now.
custom_function.php is specifically for the Thesis theme. For the Canvas theme from Woo it uses functions.php.
Always use ftp to backup functions.php before making changes, otherwise your site could go down if there are errors in the new code. With the backup file you can be back up in seconds.
http://www.woothemes.com/2012/05/transform-the-default-canvas-category-archive-into-a-magazine-style-grid/
There is so much information on this page which I don’t know about. You are right, when I first made the move from blogger I was not aware of the number of spam comments you receive on an independent blog. Akismet is very good in filtering spam. How does captcha helps? The questions they ask are very simple.
The captcha ask you a question before entering a comment (so a computer cannot generate a comment). It works as double filtering.
Great tips – I’d love to add a couple of points which I’ve found useful as well, I hope you don’t mind:
– CloudFlare.com is a great CDN as well, which is free, in case people aren’t able to pay for a dedicated service. It includes a security service (presents a challenge page to known bad IPs (spammers/hackers). Granted it may not be *as* speedy as a paid CDN, but you still get global static content delivery and it’s super easy to set up (no file pulling/pushing – your domain name nameservers are set to CloudFlare’s and they do the rest).
– To eek out a bit of extra performance, one could consider spriting the images (menus etc) on a site. This will create one file containing all the menu items, and then dynamically render them from the file into the site using CSS. It’s really simple to do – you can get full instructions at SpriteMe.org
Thanks Charles! 🙂
I think Shen should open his own DIY blog support service!
I can still remember when how Nami taught me a few things about the “back-end” of my blog when we were starting out two years ago. I continue to learn from you both. Thank you for the well researched information and clear descriptions. Have a great weekend!
What a fantastic post, Shen! I have felt as if it was one huge answer to so many blog-related questions I have been asking myself… I am not familiar with many things you have mentioned or just have a vague idea (for example about the sitemap). Thanks so much for all the useful advice!
I’m going to have to do some homework on this page. 🙂 Again, much appreciated!
Great tips, Shen! Thank you so much for sharing!