6 Tips to Keep Your WordPress Website Up-to-Date

As part of Miller Mosaic's interest in the effectiveness of WordPress websites, we check out many WordPress sites every day.

And there are a few basic issues that we see recurring over and over.



Here's a short list of these issues:

• Website missing metatags, including title, meta description and meta keywords

Regardless of whether you think these metatags are important for being found in search engine results, better to err on the site of having them.



• Copyright out of date

Thought there is a difference of opinion on this subject, a wise course of action would be to add the new year each January 1st to your site. Thus a site created in 2009 would carry that copyright the first year. The second year it would carry 2009-2010 and the third year 2009-2011. (If nothing else you would telegraph to your site visitors that you do keep up your site.)



• Photo that no longer looks like you

If you have dramatically changed the color and/or style of your hair, gotten very different glasses, or gained or lost many pounds, get a current photo. And then there's the question for men of photos with no facial hair or with facial hair when the real person doesn't "match" his photo.



• Newest WordPress version not on site

New versions of WordPress are developed in part to prevent hacking. You need to update your WordPress website each time there is a new version available.



• Newest theme version not on site



Ditto for new versions of themes in regard to hackers – plus there are usually cool new features on new versions.

• Newest updates of WordPress plugins not on site



Also ditto re hackers and cool new features.

Bonus tip: Website styles change – even for WordPress. Make sure that your WordPress website meets the expectation of site visitors. And no Flash to cause slow load times, especially on mobile devices.

And if you need help in pinpointing what can improve your site, see our website review service (for WordPress sites and non-WordPress sites) at www.millermosaicllc.com/website-review/

(c) 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic LLC.



Phyllis and company co-founder Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) have an upcoming social media 3-part webinar series this Tuesday (March 29) to help people become comfortable with the concepts of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Learn more now.