{"id":877,"date":"2014-03-24T01:34:35","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T06:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=877"},"modified":"2014-03-24T01:40:14","modified_gmt":"2014-03-24T06:40:14","slug":"spring-cleaning-4-steps-to-rehab-your-old-wordpress-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2014\/spring-cleaning-4-steps-to-rehab-your-old-wordpress-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Spring Cleaning – 4 Steps to Rehab Your Old WordPress Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m thinking about doing a bit more writing, and to be honest I have left this blog pretty unloved since my last redesign in… hmmm… 2008? Much has chanced since then – for example, a huge percentage of visitors these days are on tablets and mobile devices. Your old WordPress theme might not look very nice on an iPhone or Nexus 5 (I know mine didn’t).<\/p>\n

I spent a couple of hours shaking the cobwebs off my old WordPress site, taking it from this:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

To what you’re looking at now. I also made a few small changes to speed up my blog.<\/p>\n

Step 1: Update your theme<\/h2>\n

This used to be a huge pain, requiring you to download files, customize the HTML and CSS, and upload it to your server. The WordPress theme system is a lot friendlier now. I just went to to Appearance -> Themes and clicked the “Add New” button. This gives you search box, but I found the “Featured” link was the best place to start. I chose TwentyThirteen<\/a>, it allows me to set a nice big header image and it looks good on different screen sizes. The current header is a photo of the Sierras from Lone Pine, CA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Step 2: Clear out old widgets and code<\/h2>\n

I used to have a bunch of extra widgets in my blog, but many of them were never really useful for my readers or now pointed to defunct services (I still miss you, Google Reader!). I cleared out a Feedburner widget, an old version of the Google Translate widget, and a few other things. You might be surprised how much you can improve your site’s loading time just by deleting some inefficient Javascript.<\/p>\n

Step 3: Speed it up<\/h2>\n

Speaking of loading time, my site was abysmally slow. Not slow enough that I noticed on my fast connection at home, but faster sites make users and search engines happier<\/a>. One of the best tools to find bottlenecks is Google PageSpeed<\/a>. You can have Google analyze your site and get a detailed report of the problems or install a Chrome or Firefox extension to check from your browser.<\/p>\n

A few things worth checking:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Are you compressing your files? You can set up Gzip compression on your server<\/a> or use a plugin like WP Super Cache<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. Are you telling browsers when they can use their own cache? Instead of sending a page or image to a user, you can let them know they can use their cached version with a 304 Not Modified HTTP status code. WP Super Cache also has a setting for this.<\/li>\n
  3. Are you hosting your own copies of common libraries like jQuery? I’m using a plugin called Use Google Libraries<\/a> that points to widely-cached copies of these files on Google’s servers.<\/li>\n
  4. Are you regenerating pages from PHP and MySQL every time someone visits? If your pages don’t change very often, use WP Super Cache.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Step 4: Actually start writing again<\/h2>\n

    This is the hard one. I feel like between work, family, and posting small things to social networks, I’ve lost the time and energy to write longer-form articles. I have a fun project coming up that will definitely prompt some posting, and this article itself is a start, right?<\/p>\n

    If you have any other tips for cleaning up a WordPress blog or getting back into writing, let me know in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’m thinking about doing a bit more writing, and to be honest I have left this blog pretty unloved since my last redesign in… hmmm… 2008? Much has chanced since then – for example, a huge percentage of visitors these days are on tablets and mobile devices. Your old WordPress theme might not look very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[460,80,88,260,110,500],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-blogs","tag-google","tag-how-to","tag-javascript","tag-wordpress","tag-wp-super-cache"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":882,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions\/882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}