After reading about ScarletInk’s dissatisfaction with Ghost and migration to Substack and a former colleague’s dissatisfaction with Medium, I figured it was time for me to do another update on WordPress (.org, not .com) and how it’s going. To summarize, the ScarletInk newsletter moved to Substack to get search, support, group purchases, and gift subscriptions, and the Medium complaint was about spam and impersonator accounts in the comments.
My honest summary is I love WordPress and can’t imagine me changing to another platform. Ghost was the one platform I had some FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) about, but after reading the ScarletInk’s post, that FOMO has been replaced with JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out – thanks Danger Koob for teaching me about this great replacement acronym).
Compared to Medium, I haven’t had to deal with fake accounts as I haven’t allowed commenting on this site to date (for exactly this reason – it’s a lot of work to deal with spam). Substack offers comments as well, so I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth was and enable comments, which I have now done so, starting with this post (and retroactively enabled comments on all past posts as well). We’ll see if spam becomes a problem, but I have confidence I can overcome it – see 7. Comments (and Spam Protection) below to learn more about this.
As for the comparison to Ghost, I have had search on this website since its launch as part of the premium theme that I pay for. And since my site is free, I don’t have to deal with the payment issues (although given WordPress’ integration with WooCommerce, I don’t see this being an issue in the future should I need it). While Substack’s recommendation feature and native app is great to grow subscribers, I find the subscribe popup too annoying to want to adopt:
Yes, I could adopt such a popup on my blog, but if I do, I want to choose to do so, and I don’t want it to be as intrusive as Substack’s. And don’t even get me started on the 5 steps it takes to subscribe (instead of one). Honestly, I prefer control, and I don’t believe in proliferating awful experiences. I also believe that all of these centralized platforms require monetization which will eventually make them unattractive. This happened to Medium and I believe will happen to Substack eventually in the future as well; such is the way with for-profit companies. By remaining on WordPress, I remain independent, and that is something I value. Is it more work? Absolutely, but I’m the type of person who enjoys tinkering. Besides – I have some cool new features I’ve added I’d love to share!
So, as a follow-up to 
So, You Want to Start Blogging: How to Setup a WordPress Site), I want to add on a bunch of other things I have learned that keep me happy on WordPress. Should I ever need to create another blog, I’ll be following these steps on day one in addition to those in the first post!
1. Link Management
I like to make liberal use of references, both to myself via past posts and to others. One problem with linking to others is said links can disappear at anytime. In just a year of blogging, I found that I had a bunch of dead links across a bunch of posts – quite the pain to manage and keep up with! Insert Broken Link Checker, a WordPress plugin that regularly scans for this issue and notifies you when it occurs. And yes, the local version is free.
Additionally, I wanted to make references to my own past posts stand out a bit more, so I copied something clever I saw A Smart Bear does and included a small (23×23 px) inline image of my website favicon at the beginning of links to my own blog. Yes, you can include the image as part of the link to make it clickable!
As you grow your site, you may also make changes to some URLs (such as merging categories, as was my scenario). When you do this, you want to be sure that you handle redirects and 404 errors with grace for SEO purposes. I found Redirection to be a great free plugin to manage this scenario.
Last but not least, anyone that has worked with me knows that I love anchor links to link to particular sections of papers (or in this case, posts). The Add Anchor Links plugin is a great free way to automatically convert all of your headers to anchor links, just like Google Docs!
2. Performance
Site performance is critical, and I noticed my site was s.l.o.w. While it’s not blazing fast now, it is faster. And I have Google SiteKit to thank for that (which I switched to from MonsterInsights recently). SiteKit doesn’t just handle Google Analytics but performance as well, and this has led to me learning a lot about site performance. For example, I had to migrate all uploaded images to be .webp files (using this free online tool to do so). You can also leverage Jetback Boost or Hummingbird to further improve your site performance, but admittedly, the free versions of both don’t seem to do much (and likely conflict with one another).
3. Backup
I did add ~$60/yr cost to this blog by paying for Jetpack Backup. This is simply the easiest backup tool I found, and well worth the small annual cost for piece of mind.
4. Smart Tables
My Acronyms, Templates, and Reading Recommendations pages all needed a nicer, sortable table than the default WordPress table. Insert TablePress, a great free plugin to enable these use cases.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As much as I’d love to ignore it, SEO is an important part of any site. The reality is that search engine’s default summaries of pages is different than what you might expect unless you manually customize it. On top of that, it is helpful to have features like a headline analyzer to see if your headline will appear organically in search results. I admit, I ignore this more often than not, but it is useful to see as it often gets me to think about other, better ways to communicate what is intended.
Another useful feature is managing your meta description, which is what shows up in search results and when sharing articles on social mediums and is separate from your excerpt that shows up on your website. If you’re like me and you like large excerpts, this feature is especially important to leverage!
I use the free version of All in One SEO for now to achieve what I need in this area.
6. Estimated Read Time
I recognize that I am a long-form blogger, and my posts are usually not short! Thus, I wanted to mirror a feature that I love about my kindle: sharing status of how much time is left to complete the chapter. I found the free Worth the Read plugin which added a status bar to the top of the page that shows progress as you read. Additionally, it shares an estimated read time underneath each post title on the post page itself.
7. Comments (and Spam Protection)
Due to this post, I enabled comments on this site (including on all past posts). In order to do this and not open the floodgates to spam, I did two things: (re)installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin, and I required login to post. This limits comments to users with WordPress or Facebook accounts, which isn’t ideal, but is a starting point!
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