Category: WordPress

Is your website a Disaster-In-Waiting?

As someone who writes a lot, I love WordPress!

Simply write a post, make sure the SEO is good, select categories, and WordPress makes sure it is easy to find and share.

I am also addicted to GTranslate and put it on all my WordPress sites. I am not sure how many people use it, but I think it is absolutely amazing to have your site instantly translated to one of many languages.

The translations are likely to be imperfect, though I think they are helpful to non-English speakers.

However, I had experiences with my GoDaddy Ultimate hosting package that risked my websites for quite some time.

Running Out of Resources

Even though the sites on my GoDaddy hosting plan, including some near abandoned sites for clients now doing other things, the sites were extremely slow and I was getting reports of resource limitations.

Then JetPack started reporting that the sites were unresponsive because they were so slow to respond.

Then I could not add images or do much of anything with the sites because the file usage exceeded 250,000 files.

That is more than 200,000 more than I could account for with File Explorer.

Numerous calls to Technical Support revealed that they could not account for the number of files either and recommended purging some files on the account.

Here are some of the files I purged.

Email from Spammed Comments

The first area where I found a lot of files was in the mail folders.

Some of the WordPress sites had tens of thousands of comments waiting for approval.

I manually deleted the email messages from the email folders.

Removing the Comments from the Database

WordPress will allow you to delete comments 20 at a time.

That can take ages if you have over 80,000 comments!

A plugin like WP Bulk Delete can help you purge the comments quickly.

Preventing Spam Comments

WordPress defaults to Allow Comments and Allow Pingbacks and Trackbacks.

I recommend turning these off on individual posts and in the general settings.

There are various plugins to block spamming and a security plugin like WordFence can help secure your site.

Remove Unused Themes and Plugins

I resisted the idea that removing themes and plugin could eliminate tens of thousands of files.

Turns out WordPress is a real file pig!

Deleting a single Theme would sometimes eliminate many hundreds of files.

Who knew!

I was eventually able to remove enough files so that I could install a plugin or add a photo.

Backup. Backup. Backup!

An incompatible plugin or a theme update can leave your WordPress website FUBAR (military slang, look it up).

You can’t log in to fix the problem. Your only recourse is the restore the entire site from a backup.

If you have not installed a backup service or done a manual backup, you may find the hosting company can’t help you either.

So when WordPress tells you to backup the site before making certain changes, heed the warning.

Keep WordPress, Plugins, and Themes Current

If you don’t keep the various components up to date, you might find that you can’t update the components at all. Not a good place to be.

Again, backup before updating anything!

Beware the Hosting Plan Upgrade

I was able to restore my account back to being slow and unresponsive.

So I decided to upgrade to a GoDaddy Launch plan, which is a Virtual Private Server.

The GoDaddy rep said that I would lose nothing and and the migration would take up to 48 hours.

After 48 hours of Coming Soon! Messages, only one of my websites would load.

It turns out that the migration did not update the Add-On domains properly.

I few more calls to technical support and another 48 hours, the sites gradually came back online.

So the sites were down for four days.

Your Hosting Company May Not Have Your Back

Before there was WordPress, I created a system for data-driven websites using ColdFusion and MS SQL Server.

I paid quite a lot monthly to host a Superb.net because they considered it a Legacy platform.

Superb had been great about fixing problems with MS SQL Server and ColdFusion on the rare occasions when there was a problem. Mostly SQL Server logs building up and ColdFusion stalling.

Then one day MS SQL Server Crashed and they could not fix it.

Turns out they had no backup of the server either.

Then the web server itself was hit by ransomware.

Toast.

Turns out they had no backup of that either.

Backups from a year ago would have helped.

But Nada.

Be Prepared! Avoid Disaster!

The lesson in this is that you need to have backups of all your important sites so that you can recover if needed.

Backup so that you can recover, even if the hosting company goes out of business.

Don’t let your WordPress website be a disaster waiting to happen.

Why Kartra is Different

When you use a hosting account for a website, you are renting space on a server, use of the webserver, and a connection to the internet.

You are responsible for all backup and security.

Kartra runs on Kartra services.

Kartra is completely responsible for the backup and security of your account.

A problem on their servers will cause problems for tens of thousands of accounts.

They protect the servers with all of the backup and security needed to keep all of the Kartra accounts and their business safe.

Why Kartra Won’t Replace WordPress

Although you can create beautiful websites with Kartra, there are a few things missing that WordPress provides.

• Search
  Visitors cannot search the site like they can with WordPress.
• Blog Posting Management
  Blogs are automatically presented newest to oldest with a rich set of categories to help the visitor browse.
• Near Endless Configuration
  No matter what you want to do, there is probably a plugin for it or you can create one.

I prefer Kartra for simple websites with few pages and a landing page and marketing focus.

I prefer WordPress for pumping out a lot of content.

Kartra-WordPress Hybrid Solutions

You can have the best of both worlds with a hybrid solution.

You can embed a Kartra page into WordPress using the Blank Slate plugin.

You can use subdomains to blend the two.

For example, www.YourSite.com could be your main WordPress site.

Programs.YourSite.com could link to Kartra pages.

Or Vice-Versa.

You have options.

— Greg Dixon

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