Tips to Run Your WordPress Site Automatically

Holidays are just around the corner. This means that it is time to think about how your website will be updated during your holiday. Of course, no one will force you to be constantly be present in the web and to communicate with your target audience on Christmas Eve. However, constantly reminding about yourself is the thing you can perform even without your personal intervention.

In this article, we will discuss the most basic and vital techniques to maintain the most important features of a WordPress site during your vacation. Tools for automatic maintenance of a WordPress site activity are provided by the modern plugins and some basic features of the WordPress platform.

Our advice will be useful for WordPress administrators that promote their sites on their own or are planning to arrange a holiday for all the staff involved in the development of the site. Some of these tips will be useful not only during the holidays. After all, you do not devote your WordPress website or blog 24 hours a day. Consequently, the automatic monitoring tools will be useful in everyday life.

Now let us consistently analyze what plugins and capabilities will allow you to set up automatic operation of your WordPress site.

Set Alerts

Properly configured notifications will let you to get rid of the need to constantly check the set of parameters of your WordPress website or blog stability.

We recommend you to use the free WordPress plugin Jetpack. Jetpack has two useful features for configuring notifications. The first feature is called Jetpack Monitor. It automatically checks the performance of your site every 5 minutes. This check is carried out for a variety of settings and allows you to identify vulnerabilities or threats of violations of site performance in advance.

The second feature is called Jetpack Notifications. It aims to inform you about important events in the life of the site. For example, you can be notified when a new comment appears or a social activity with any peace of your site`s content is held by the site users (likes, shares, reposts and so on). You can customize the list of events for which you will notified by this module of the Jetpack plugin. Alternatively, you can install the app on your smartphone to receive notification in the mobile mode.

Another useful plugin for automatic protection of a site is iThemes Security. This plugin also allows you to fine-tune a notification about occurring events on your website.

But the more important feature of iThemes Security is an automatic protection against brute force attacks to your WordPress website or blog. You can deny access to certain files or folders on the server to be sure of your site contents` safety. Tracking activity of the moderators and administrators by using this plugin will give you additional control over the development of the site. This feature is only available in the paid version of the plugin and can be useful for large projects.

Do Not Forget about Backups

Reliable backup plugin is a vital necessity for every WordPress site. You do not want to lose all the content that you have created over the years of hard work at once, do you? One of the plugins in this category is VaultPress by WordPress development team.

VaultPress stores all data on your site every day and keeps a history of backups for 30 days. So you can be sure that even after a long holiday you can restore data of your site, which for some reason was hacked a month ago. In combination with a correctly-configured notifications, you will not suffer any loss of your content on the site.

Schedule the Content

There is nothing better then a thought-out plan. It is primarily concerned with the content of your site. Before you go on vacation, you can take care of the creation of several posts that will remind readers about the activity on your site.

You can use the built-in WordPress scheduling posts at a certain date. In this case, you will only need to put the date of publication in the future date. In this case the post button will be replaced with the inscription of Schedule. WordPress admin panel will save your post and publish it in the specified time automatically.

If you need advanced features of scheduling the publications, it is not superfluous to use Auto Post Scheduler plugin. This plugin allows you to set a specific time period between the publication of prepared posts, or post them on the site in a random time.

An interesting opportunity to use the old content once more is provided by the Revive Old Post plugin. This plugin allows you to use previously written posts for sharing them in social media. So you can wisely use the available resources of content on your website or blog.

Use Content Auto-sharing

Use Buffer plugin or its analogs to automatically share content of your website in all available social networks. Plugins in this group allow you to automate a large reservoir of work with WordPress website or blog. You can set up automatic sharing of every new post in the social networks you use. Of course, this does not negate the need to create new content on the site. But in combination with the feature of scheduling the blog content, auto-sharing can create the effect of full presence of the site administrator during his vacation.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and other accounts in social networks will be constantly updated and bring new traffic to your site, if you take the time for easy installation and quick set-up of the corresponding plugin just once.

Open an Automatic Social Stream

One of the best ways to create a page with constantly updated content is to build a social stream. Social stream is your unique feed, which gathers the activity of all the social media you want to show on one page. To implement this unique opportunity you will need the Flow-Flow Social Stream plugin.

Flow-Flow allows you to create unique social walls with your activity while you are on vacation. For example, you can post pictures from a vacation in Instagram and share impressions in Facebook, and Flow-Flow will automatically pull them to your social stream.

In addition, Flow-Flow allows you to create social walls, which do not require your participation at all. You will need to find a community or active accounts in social networks to stream their content. So you get an up to date, topical and interesting feed, which your readers will be happy to observe every day.

With the help of Flow-Flow Social Stream plugin, you can connect almost any social media to your feed: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Foursquare, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn and much more.

Final Words

Full autonomy and good protection of a WordPress site while you are away is not a fantasy, but a reality! You should take the advantage of all listed hints in this article at the complex to get really self-contained website or blog.

Over time, you will be able to discover other techniques for automatic content updates. But you should start with these basic tips. Appling them is simple enough for beginners in the field of administration of the sites on the WordPress platform.

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