3 CMS Tips for WordPress Website Owners

Three more tips from Neogain for self-hosted WordPress website owners.

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Each week this blog is updated with website tips covering CMS, Design and SEO.

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Turn off blog comments!

Controversial, but not all WordPress blog users require their blog comments to be enabled.

Many website owners use the blog as a means as to supply news, not to encourage or even welcome debate.

There are many blogs where the comments enrich the main content, adding to the richness of the blog post.

However this isn’t the same for all websites, both personal and business sites alike.

Instead many people become frustrated with having to moderate comments, even with the help of services such as akismet.

How to turn off WordPress blog comments:

1. Log into your WordPress dashboard as an administration.

2. From the ‘Settings’ menu, select ‘Discussion’.

3. Unselect ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’.

4. Select ‘Save Changes’.

Subscribe to Comments

How many times have you left a comment, but not been presented with a method to be informed of a reply, unless you check back at a later date?

If you are keen to encourage replies, then you should make sure your self-hosted WordPress website is configured to facilitate the conversation.

The free plugin ‘Subscribe to Comments’ enables those who leave comments, to be updated with replies and later comments.

How to install ‘Subscribe to Comments’:

1. Visit http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/subscribe-to-comments/ and download the plugin.

2. Extract the plugin, then upload the folder and it’s contents to your wp-content/plugin/ directory.

3. Log into your WordPress dashboard as an administrator, select ‘Plugins’.

4. From the ‘inactive’ list, enable the plugin.

You can also configure the plugin from selecting ‘Subscribe to Comments’, from your ‘Settings’ menu,

from within the WordPress dashboard.

How to add Google Analytics to your self-hosted WordPress website.

Google Analytics is one of the best and most widely used website statistic services, which is easy to place into your WordPress site.

These instructions show you how to install it into your WordPress site, without a plugin:

1. Create a profile for your website within Google Analytics and then copy the code the service provides.

2. If Google informed you to paste code above the </head> area then you need to make the header.php file writable in your /wp-contents/themes/yourtheme/ directory. Using a FTP client is easiest and changing the file to chmod 777.

3. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.

4. Now select header.php from the right hand list.

5. Now paste your Google Analytics code above the </head> div layer.

6. Update your header.php file.

7. Now via FTP make the header.php read-only again. i.e. chmod 644

If you need a WordPress developer, please consider Neogain.