Ways to Improve Your WordPress Workflow

WordPress is one of the world’s most popular website builders, with tools that allow both experienced website designers and absolute beginners to set up and manage sites on virtually any category. A successful WordPress site is the product of many different operations, so your workflow on every level needs to be as smooth and efficient as possible. From deploying your site to maintaining and managing content smoothly, here are some suggestions for improving your WordPress workflow at every stage of your site’s development.

Deploying Your WordPress Site

Developing and deploying a new WordPress site can take time and open doors to costly errors, if done manually.  But designing a site on local systems and automating the WordPress deployment workflow can save time and prevent the kind of slip-ups that come from human error. These mistakes may include missing files, poorly executed code and pages that don’t match up.  By scripting all the steps that would normally be carried out manually, developers can set a protocol to run those steps automatically in sequence.
Automated deployments can work consistently across environments and deployment scripts can be applied to multiple sites, so that both new sites and those under renovation can be up and running with minimal downtime and fewer glitches that emerge once the site is live.  Services such as GitHub can support a site’s deployment with resources for managing deployment scripts and other elements needed for the site setup. This allows the deployment scripts to run consistently and reliably, and new or reconstructed WordPress sites can be put in place with minimal disruption and downtime.

Streamlining Your Site

A cluttered site that’s overloaded with unused elements can slow a site’s runtime and make creating content more complicated. Examples of clutter are too many categories and tags, or a collection of unused plugins, which make it more difficult to organize and manage content, as well as keeping track of other aspects of the site’s functioning, such as post-performance and analytics.
To streamline the content workflow, delete all unused elements such as plugins and themes from the site’s database. Deactivated but unused plugins consume resources and can cause sites to run slowly, so it’s important to delete them completely with the command to remove all the plugin’s files.
Delete all unapproved comments or spam, and empty the trash to eliminate them. Along with that, get rid of any pending or unpublished draft posts that aren’t ready for publication. Additionally, eliminate all unused and inactive media files from the site’s media library to reduce clutter and make it easier to manage the images you really need.
Other strategies for streamlining your site’s daily workflow include consolidating elements such as menus, categories, and tags to reduce clutter and redundancy. Reorganizing site menus to reduce repetition, and eliminating unused tags and categories, can make it easier for visitors to find content – and to organize the content you create.

Managing Workflow With Plugins

Along with themes and the core code, WordPress plugins are an essential part of making WordPress work. Created by designers, developers and regular WordPress users from around the world, plugins add specialized functionalities of all kinds to a WordPress site. Also, many plugins are designed to improve various aspects of the WordPress workflow.
From organizing posts and pages to optimizing a site for SEO, there is a WordPress workflow plugin to address virtually any task related to the site’s performance. These include:

Managing Social Media

Sharing content on the relevant social media channels is a must for building brand awareness and SEO, but managing the social media aspects of a WordPress website manually can be time consuming. Fortunately, WordPress has a long list of plugins that are designed to speed up the social media side of your WordPress workflow. These functions can automatically update social media accounts whenever new content appears, enabling cross-posting to outside accounts, and scheduling content for posting to selected networks and channels.

Automating SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) ensures that a site’s content (main pages, blog posts, etc.) is searchable and visible across the Internet, and many WordPress plugins are designed to automate SEO on all parts of the site. Plugins like Yoast SEO, the best known of them all, track keywords, monitor metadata and more to ensure that all parts of a site are accessible to search.

Maintaining Schedules and Calendars

A successful content management strategy depends on content flowing consistently, and a number of WordPress plugins can streamline the content management workflow. The plugins bring together content calendars and scheduling functions for creating content in advance and posting consistently, as well as coordinating content creation among multiple authors.

Tracking Analytics and Performance

WordPress site owners can choose from among a number of applications and services for tracking analytics and site performance. WordPress analytics plugins make it easier to consolidate those functions and track them directly from the site for easier viewing and faster decision making in response to the trends those numbers reveal.

Building Lists

Building email lists and the associated parts of a successful sales funnel is a key part of online business. WordPress plugins help perform these tasks by creating contact forms, email captures, lead magnets and email newsletters.  These features save users time and keep marketing campaigns organized and manageable. Plugins for ecommerce can also allow users to conduct special sales, giveaways and more kinds of promotions, and to track the performance of each individual campaign.

The workflow required to take a WordPress website from idea to fully functioning site consists of multiple subsets of tasks, each with its own demands. Tasks ranging from automating multiple aspects of a site’s deployment to streamlining site maintenance, and managing a variety of ongoing functions with plugins, can help both beginning and experienced site owners improve their WordPress workflow. Share your tips below or browse Bluehost’s best managed WordPress hosting solutions.