In his second guest post, Joost de Valk guides you through getting the best out of WordPress for you and your traffic.

Now that my previous post has helped you optimise your sunPress installation, this post will help you to make your life and that of your visitors easier.

Speed optimisation

WordPress, although it’s in my humble opinion the best CMS in the world, is far from fast when loaded with plugins. One of the best things you can do to start with is optimise the header.php, though this does require a bit of coding skills, and if you upgrade to a newer version of the theme you’d probably have to do this again.

What you should do though, is replace all the occurrences of get_bloginfo(wpurl) etc with the real complete URL to those files. Why would you want WordPress to do a database call to know where your stylesheet is, for instance, when you know perfectly well yourself where this file is?

Another thing to do is install a caching plugin. Depending on your needs you can either go with WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache, though I must warn you that the last one has a few known issues with other plugins.

Admin tricks

Another thing that becomes annoying when you’re working with WordPress for a while is how the menu works, though 2.7 improves on that. Until then though, Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu is a plugin you can’t afford to miss. Remove Max Width is another plugin to remove a post 2.5 admin annoyance: it removes the max-width from the admin pages, making them use the maximum available screen size. Also one you can probably ditch when 2.7 comes out.

Another thing you might find yourself doing a lot is reordering pages. If you do, pageMash is for you, it’s the best plugin I’ve seen so far to rearrange those pages and make your site structure sane again.

If you allow comments, you’ll soon start hating the WordPress comment mails too, and will want something cleaner. Clean Notifications does just that: clean up those emails.

Housekeeping

Another thing that is very important if you’re serious about your site is to do proper house keeping. 404 Notifier will tell you, through e-mail or RSS, when one of your pages has gone missing, or someone linked to a misspelling of a URL.

If you do that, you can immediately create a redirect using Redirection, and prevent people from seeing that probably wonderful 404 page you’ve made.

Oh wait, you haven’t customized your 404 page? Do it now. Go to 404.php in your theme, and make sure it actually helps people who didn’t find what they were looking for.

Another thing to do is to make absolutely sure you stay up to date all the time. I use Wordpress Automatic Upgrade for it at the moment, but it seems that WordPress 2.7 has it’s own built in automatic upgrade system. Let’s see if that works!

Branding

Now you’ve got all that figured out, be sure to work on one of the most important things in marketing: branding. Start with making sure you have a cool, nice looking logo, if you’re not good at creating those yourself (and chances are you’re not), get one made at 99designs, for instance.

Once you’ve gotten yourself a good logo, make sure you have a favicon to match. It might not look that important, but that favicon is what your users will see next to their bookmarks, remember that!

You should also consider adding your logo to your feeds and to make it available for iPhone users, to do that, you’ll have to use a plugin of mine called blog icons.

Make money

Now, be honest, have you fixed all the above and all the stuff in my previous post? Yes? Time to make money. And, to start optimising. Keep looking at your site’s stats and see where you can improve things!

Many thanks to Joost for taking the time to put together these great blog posts. You can keep up to date with Joost at his blog, yoast.com where you’ll find many other plug-ins and more great stuff!