Food blogger Marilyn Lesniak shares her site ownership experience from starting on Blogger to migrating to WordPress. She also shares a few unpleasant experiences with hosts and taking advice from non-techie groups that impeded her site performance. She offers great advice about how and why to properly vet the info you gather from research to make the best choices for your site. Marilyn also tells us about the positive results she gained immediately from her site audit and how easy the cleanup was.
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Time Stamp of Our Chat
00:30 Marilyn shares here background in the early days of AOL chat rooms and Telnet groups, which were the precursor to social media.
03:00 What prompted Marilyn to get an audit.
04:10 Why Marilyn switched hosts and hired a tech for maintenance, and what she wished she had known before doing that.
5:00 Plugins that left orphaned files behind after trying and then deleting and conflicts found in root files during the audit.
6:00 Why it was cheaper to switch to a new theme than fix problems with the current one.
7:00 The importance of an HTML5 compliant theme.
08:30 What the site cleanup process was like.
09:00 Bad advice on plugins from social media groups and “gurus”.
10:00 Plugins that are worth taking a performance hit on.
12:00 Plugins that are not worth taking a hit on.
13:00 What the host’s responsibility is to help you with finding overages and WordPress support. Post mentioned Stop Blaming Your Host for Overages
15:00 Marilyn shares her hosting experience with Bluehost and WPEngine and migrating from Blogger to WordPress.
17:00 Busting the myth that you can rely on the host’s backups.
20:00 Poor hosting customer service and hosts are not responsible for supporting WordPress, the site owner is.
22:30 Bad advice from non-techie groups. Post mentioned The Worst Website Advice You’ll Ever Get
25:00 Know what each of your plugins does to avoid conflicts.
27:00 Why not to use host 3rd party partner plans like SiteLock and CloudFlare.
30:00 Deciding if you want to do your own maintenance, get managed hosting, or outsource.
33:00 Positive results seen since the site audit.
35:00 The benefits of knowing what’s going on with your site and what’s on it.
36:15 Benefits of doing a plugin audit to find better ones.
38:00 Marilyn’s advice to site owners to help avoid expensive pitfalls and make their site better.
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