A blog is a complex beast, running on thousands of lines of programming code with hundreds of different configuration options and a seemingly infinite number of ways to customize them with plugins and themes and other tips and tricks.
So with all of that complexity it is no surprise that sometimes things break. It happens to all of us at some point, which means you want to be sure you spot it quickly so you can fix it.
Blog Design
Blog designs are something I’ve struggled with in the past. I used to code my own from scratch, cobbling together bits and pieces from tutorials I found all over the web. What I discovered in those early days was that the code rarely behaved the same in all web browsers, and would display my blog in very inconsistent ways.
One of the ways I fixed this was by ditching my hand coded themes and starting over with Thesis as my theme framework. But a framework doesn’t save you from adding bad code when you customize it. For that you need to rely on browser testing. You can either install each of the major browsers on your computer, or use an online tool that will take a screenshot of your blog as seen through various browsers.
One of the tools out there for this task is Browser Shots. Just submit your URL and choose which browsers to test in and do its thing. Depending on how many browsers you choose and how busy the site is the report can take a little while to run, so try to cut it down to just the major browsers if possible.
Mobile Experience
Mobile web usage is growing fast and isn’t likely to stop growing any time soon. Even though mobile connection speeds are improving it is important to optimise your site as much as possible for mobile visitors.
Check out my recent post on the WP Touch plugin for WordPress users, which makes your blog display in a mobile friendly theme for iPhones and other devices.
Subscription Options
Have you ever had a reader ask you why you haven’t posted lately, only to discover that your RSS feeds are broken? Its happened to me and other bloggers that I know.
These days I sign myself up to every subscription option that I publicize on my blogs. I add my RSS feed to Google Reader, subscribe to the Feedburner email list (no longer promoted here but still active for existing subscribers), and all of my mailing lists for newsletters and free downloads. I even follow each of my Twitter accounts with the other to make sure posts are being automatically tweeted, and fan my own Facebook pages too.
By doing this you always know that within a certain time after publishing a post you should see it appear in your various promotion channels.
Contact Forms
Most bloggers will use a contact form instead of publishing their email address. The forms are easily created using one of the many WordPress plugins available for the task.
But like all plugins these are prone to error and misconfiguration. You should test your contact form regularly, say once every week or two, to make sure it is still set up correctly and working. If you’re fortunate enough to be getting contacted daily via your form then you probably don’t need to worry about this one.
Social Media Buttons
This one is very important, because most readers are lazy. If you want your posts promoted on social networks like Twitter then you have to make it as easy as possible for people, preferably just one or two clicks.
I was visiting one of the CNet blogs recently and when I clicked their retweet button I got this:
The pre-configured tweet didn’t even show the title of the blog post I was trying to promote, perhaps due to some excessive tweaking of post titles for SEO purposes. Faced with a bit of effort to craft a proper tweet to send most users will just forget about it and move on to the next blog post they want to read.
Backups
There are two types of people who lose everything in a disaster – those who never backed up, and those who backed up but never tested to make sure their backups were working.
At the very least you want to be sure you are backing up your WordPress blog, but from time to time you should also test your backups to make sure they can be used for a restore. You could install a second blog in a subfolder of your web hosting account for this, or use a local install of WordPress.
Over to You
So what tests do you regularly perform on your blog? Do you have any other ones that you would like to share here with us?
Image Credit: Flickr
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m looking for some social media icons for my header area. Any recommendations?
A lot of graphic design blogs release free social media icon packs. A Google search for “free social media icons” will show up quite a few. Double check the usage terms though, some require that you credit the designer when using them on your site. Also double check that they are in fact free and not someone ripping off commercial icon packs from elsewhere.
Paul,
Thanks for the reminder to back-up. I still need to find out how to extract a blog post from WPAU backup files.
Aris/
Haven’t considered how to extract just one blog post. Interested problem. If I happen to come up with something I’ll post it here.
You know, one of the most important lessons you can learn from this article is this: don’t take anything for granted. Just because it worked, doesn’t mean it is working.
A few years back, one of my blogs stopped getting reader e-mails. This was odd because I would average between 10-20 e-mails a day. A few weeks later I decided to check out my contact page and sure enough, the contact form was missing. I disabled my contact form plugin for a Wordpress upgrade and forgot to activate it again. Whoops!