228 - 'J' is for Jobs

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

This is another A-Z of WordPress where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP.  Today is J is for Jobs…

Preamble

So, this could just have easily come under ‘T’ is for Tasks, but here we are with J!

This episode is about all the many, many, many jobs that you do each and every time you build a WordPress website for yourself or for a client. There are so many!

I’m not too sure that I do quite as much as David does, because, as you can see, he’s does rather a lot. This is a post he created a few years back to highlight what his website creation process looks like, it’s more or less the same as what comes below…

https://wpcornershop.com/blog/our-web-building-task-list/

He’s the first to admit that he does not do all of these all of the time, but it gives you some insight into just how much is involved.

It’s really only when I see this list that I think about just how much there is to do, and it’s likely a good cheat sheet for clients who are hovering over the ‘Squarespace / Wix’ button, to show them what they’re getting themselves into!

Debatable Points

Perhaps this will be the most boring podcast / blog post of all time, but here’s the tasks you might do on a typical WordPress website build. Many of these are not seen by clients, and perhaps they should be?

Basic Set Up Tasks

1. Set up a domain name record (for the development site)
2. Create space on the server
3. Add security certificate
4. Set up database
5. Set the PHP version
6. Install WordPress
7. Set time zones
8. Add coming soon page
9. Create user accounts for all
10. Send Account passwords securely
11. Delete the standard plugins and theme (leaving the newest theme as fallback)
12. Delete sample page and post
13. Install premium themes and plugins and activate licence keys
14. Setup transactional email system to send emails from the server
15. Configure SEO plugin (set no follow on templates)
16. Configure WordPress security plugins (firewall, alerts scans disable xmlrpc etc.)
17. Make the site connect to our master maintenance site
18. Set up site backup schedules
19. Set up Project Management System and personalise on boarding
20. Customise image cropping
21. Clear Stencil’s image library account and set a new password for the client’s use
22. Configure automatic image automation to the sites requirements (ShortPixel)
23. Reset Userback for client design feedback
24. Set up blog (if needed)
25. Customise blog comments setting to the site requirements
26. Add blog spam protection
27. Set up Forms (spam protection, email notification GDPR settings, limit submissions)
28. Test forms
29.  Set up Google Search console and add Analytics code
30. Anonymise Google Analytic (as appropriate)
31. Check WordPress permalinks
32. Add social share
33. Set up Newsletter subscriptions
34. Change all post and pages made by us is set to the client’s account
35. Optimise database (clear revisions, transient data and any orphan database tables)
36. Check server resources used (High RAM resources or long Time to First Byte issues)

Basic Design Tasks

1. Add Favicon
2. Create Pages
3. Create custom 404 (ie. page not found)
4. Create a custom privacy page to GDPR standards
5. Create and thank you pages and connect to forms
6. Set up WordPress menus
7. Set site header and text fonts
8. Save brand colours to the theme and page builder
9. Set up header layouts
10. Set up footer layout (with Copyright details)
11. Set up Search layouts
12. Set up blog (any other dynamic achieve pages)
13. Set up blog singular pages
14. Basic Browser testing (Chrome Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge)
15. Check console for errors
16. Basic mobile and tablet responsiveness

Launch Tasks

1. Set DNS record for the new domain
2. Turn off “coming soon” page
3. Check robot txt (allow search engines to crawl)
4. Set www and non www redirects
5. Rewrite the database to the new domain
6. The security certificates working on all pages and post (no mixed content)
7. Configure and test caching
8. Check forms again
9.  Run speed test (Core Web Vitals)
10. Take external back-up
11. Remind clients of Google Business pages and the benefits of encouraging reviews

Monitoring & Health Tasks

1. Check uptime monitoring with domain expiry checks (Better Uptime)
2. Set up visual monitoring (Hexowatch)
3. Set up keyword ranking if appropriate (Accuranker)
4. Check security Scans (Malcare and Virusdie)
5. Set up automatic clearing of the database
6. Updating of software and php versions ongoing
7. Checks on email delivery done monthly  (Mailgun)
8.  Checks server resources done manually and automatically

Conclusions:

Well that really was rather a lot to take in, and I’ll bet that we missed a bunch of stuff that you do as well! Speaking of which, if we did miss something off the list and you want to tell us about it then you can do that on this page, or head over to the WP Builds Facebook Group, search for episode #228 and post a comment there.