Do you hear that exciting sound? Yes? No? As for me, I am hearing it very clearly and loudly – the sound of holiday coming towards us!
Just a friendly reminder for you: we are in June, which means it is about to be summertime!!! When it’s finally summer, I am sure that many people will go on vacations, right? If you are thinking that your WordPress life is too hectic to enjoy holidays, then, you are wrong! Just because WordPress people are busier with a lot more on our hands compared to normal people, that does not mean we cannot have some rest. On the contrary, that is exactly why we should spend time on vacations in order to refresh and renew our mind and body!
While leaving your WordPress website untouched for one or two weeks is not really a big deal, however, it is not something I recommend either. There is this saying:
“Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst!”
Thus, it is always advisable that you be prepared for any likely situation while you are away! For example, what if someone tried to use the occasion to hack into your website? Or, what if you miss a business chance by neglecting the messages box? That is not yet to mention other consequences like a decrease in traffic or audience engagement, etc. Hm, not quite what you expect to see after a holiday, right?
If you are nodding your head, then, we welcome you to the article of “How to Prepare Your WordPress Website for Your Vacation”! This article aims at giving you some advice to make your site run smoothly even without you for a while!
To Be Specific, Here Are What We Should Do:
- Make Yourself a Clone
- Make Plans for Posts and Schedule Them in Advance
- Make Sure to Keep Your Social Presence
- Autoshare Content
- Build Your Arsenals
- Backup Your Website
- Make Use of Guest Posts
- Clean it Up
- Add WordPress to Your Mobile Phone
Now let’s go see in details what should we do for each step, OK?
Make Yourself a Clone
I know what you are confusing about. Since cloning yourself is generally not allowed in WordPress or anywhere else, what I mean by clone here is, in fact, a brain dump. What is a brain dump?
Well, the whatis.techtarget.com defines a brain dump as “a complete transfer of accessible knowledge about a particular subject from your brain to some other storage medium, such as paper or your computer’s hard drive”.
Now, apply this definition to your case: I assume that as a website owner, you must have had a rather big information base, right? Before leaving for vacation. I suggest you create a WordPress reference guide to store all of those precious pieces of information. They could be a great help to your clients, co-workers, or employees when you’re away.
Regarding this task, I recommend the Ultimate Branding Plugin. It can help you customize your WordPress admin dashboard and add Help content together with tutorials, so whoever taking care of your site will be relieved!
Make Plans for Posts and Schedule Them in Advance
A very important thing to take notice of is that you should never halt your regular posting schedule! Why? For the sake of readers’ engagement and high search engines ranking results, of course!
That is why you should prepare for your content a long time before the trip. Spare some time to sit down and prepare for some excellent articles that can be posted during the time you’re not there. If you do not even have time for writing posts in advance, guest posts can be a great source of assistance, but I will come to that later. After having content, it is highly advised that you plan ahead and schedule everything before you leave. If you already excel at planning, then the only thing left to do is to schedule, which can be done easily with this built-in feature of WordPress:
Simply click Edit, choose the time and date you would like your post to be published, click OK and then finish it by hitting the Schedule button!
In case you struggle with the planning phase, maybe you should take a look at the Editorial Calendar Plugin. It will help you design and organize a detailed structure of your website content. Even if you want to move or edit posts, do it right on the calendar by the drag-and-drop feature. Amazing, isn’t it?!
Make Sure to Keep Your Social Presence
Though many WordPress website owners make it possible for the posts to be updated on their social accounts once they’re published on the site. I still feel the strong need to remind you again. Stay social is a vital thing. Since you may lose a lot of fans and followers if you stay idle for just a short time! It is quite terrible to visualize what may happen to the number of followers you have on Twitter, for example, if there is nothing posted there for two weeks long. Thus, remember to keep a stable and constant flow of content promotion on all your social accounts, and make it seem like you never leave!
If you find it hard to remain active on the social accounts while traveling, then you may seek help from CoSchedule Plugin! It does the job of creating and scheduling messages in bulk for all of your social networks. So it will seem like you are always on the networks, while the truth is you are on the road!
Autoshare Content
I know I did mention a bit about it in tip #3 up there, yet I feel obligated to go into more details since it is very important to circulate your WordPress posts on social accounts! Reaching your readers frequently will not only help maintain your fame and engagement flow, it will also attract a new audience. Simply put, the more people who see your contents there are, the more shares your content will get. Therefore, in order to make the best out of auto-sharing content. I firmly think you should get professional help from high-ranking plugins.
Several A-list items may include Hootsuite (which my company is using), Buffer, Jetpack’s Publicize and again, CoSchedule.
Build Your Arsenals
Guys, you should have heard this one thousand times but I will still repeat: Defense is of the utmost importance when it comes to WordPress websites or any other website! So, although you may have several working security systems for your website from your hosting provider and CDN. It won’t be redundant at all to install one more security layer! Just think, if hackers know you are not there to protect the website, chances are that they will planning attacks! In such situation, the more protecting layers you have, the safer your website gets.
To help you in this respect, may I introduce the Defender Security Plugin. It proactively monitors your websites and will alert you if it finds any security holes or other issues occurring to your precious WordPress baby!
Backup Your Website
Backing up your WordPress website is what you definitely should do on a regular basis since something bad might just happen out of nowhere. However, before you take a vacation. It is one thousand times more important to copy all your files and store them! Why is backing up your WordPress website so vital, especially in this case? Easily explained, there are two reasons:
- Your beloved WordPress child is much more vulnerable to security holes when you are away since theme or plugin updates may occur.
- It will absolutely help in case your less professional user mess up with your website and you are not there to rescue.
So, guys, before packing your bags, back up your WordPress website first!
Make Use of Guest Posts
After the planning phase and you now already have the editorial calendar, it is time to write posts! As I mentioned before if you are too busy preparing for the trip and cannot get down to work. Maybe guest posts are just what you need? Having said that, I also need to remind you that although guest posts are a great source of help and time-saver, they could also lead to trouble if you do not use them wisely. For example, asking help from too many writers of different levels could result in inconsistency in the quality of posts. In such case. You may end up wasting much more time than previously planned due to the editing process for under-qualified posts.
Therefore, when thinking of guest posts, remember to:
- Ask for help from true authorities or writers with a good reputation or those you have worked with for some time.
- Check everything before posting! Having many posts on your site but not with good quality may, in fact, damage your engagement and traffic rather than strengthening them.
Clean it Up
Cleaning up the comment section is another regular job. As well as another must-do job to carry out before your short escape. Regarding what comment to clean up, well, that is spam comment of course! In this light, make sure to leave only true comments below your posts and get rid of those that provoke your visitors to visit a random link. These links are not only a waste of time but may also pose a risk to your audience! What would happen if your audience gets into a trouble stemming from your website? They may develop uneasy feelings for your website and hesitate to come back!
Thus, your task is to delete all those irritating comments so that they won’t pile up when you are on vacation! In case your website is a little too large for you to handle, you can always get help from the Askimet Plugin!
Add WordPress to Your Mobile Phone
Last but not least! If you have carried out all the steps above yet do not feel safe and sound. The only thing left to do is to install WordPress to your mobile phone. As a matter of fact, it could be a little annoying with all the notifications springing up during a vacation. But it certainly helps when you need to access your website in an emergency. What is more, with WordPress on your mobile, there will be no need of taking the laptop everywhere with you. Anyway, I must repeat that if you wish for a free-from-work vacation, this may not be a wise decision! So, make sure you know what you want!
In Conclusion
Above are the 9 should-do steps to take before you leave your WordPress website at home and fly to some exotic place. We hope you can take great advantage of all the steps we have presented in our article – How to Prepare Your WordPress Website for Your Vacation before you kickstart your vacation. If you have any more cool ideas, please feel free to share! Lastly, have yourself great vacations ahead guys!