 I work at a small digital marketing agency right outside of Philadelphia, Contra Hocken actually and we're always trying to find new ways to constantly evolve and update our processes, processes like a checklist. So if I could get a show of hands, how many of you in here use a checklist when you're launching a WordPress website? Great. And the point of this talk isn't meant to be a comprehensive list of everything that there is out there to do, but I'm basically just going to throw a whole bunch of information at you within 10 minutes and my hope is that by the end of the talk you'll be able to take something away that I discuss that you can implement or incorporate into your own process or your own checklist. So I've broken it down into test, optimize and maintain, test I'll be going over the functionality and the environment, then in optimize I'll be covering search engine optimization, performance, the files and the database, and then in maintain I'll be discussing backups, security and tracking. So for functionality, when you're launching and getting your website off the development server and getting it up into production, chances are the links and the paths on your website are going to change and so you're going to need to update them. Search Rejects is a really cool plugin that basically it acts as a search and replace across your entire website. So you can search for a specific pattern, find all instances of that pattern and then update them all at once. So it's great for again updating your links and paths on your website but you also want to make sure there's no broken links on your website. So another really cool plugin is Broken Link Checker that looks through all the links on your website and then if it finds any that are broken it'll tell you where and when exactly in the code they're broken. It also has the cool feature to run on a schedule so that way in the future if something breaks you'll be notified through email and then that way you can go back and fix it. Particularly useful if you're linking to a lot of other websites because you're not in control of whether those pages go down or not but you can be notified and then you can go in and make sure there's no 404s. As far as environment goes, making sure your website looks beautiful whether or not it's being accessed on a cell phone or a tablet or even a desktop. I personally use Firefox developer tools and emulate all those different environments but you also want to try and test your website on the physical devices themselves because you never know what inconsistencies are going to arise. You also want to make sure it looks good in different browsers because they all try and load your website a different way so make sure you're accounting for those different environments and you can use tools like BrowserStack which will basically generate a whole bunch of screenshots that way you can find any bugs and make sure you fix those issues. Then moving on to Optimize, as far as search engine optimization goes, installing and activating a plugin like for SEO like Yoast will do wonders alone for your website's SEO. One of Yoast's coolest features is the ability to generate site maps but those site maps aren't generated as soon as you activate Yoast. You actually have to go in and generate them. You can do that two ways. The first way is by resaving your permalinks or you can go to the site map setting of Yoast and re-save those settings. That'll get your site map up and running and you want to make sure the site map's there because site maps make it a lot easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to crawl and index your website. Schema are basically micro data tags that you can wrap or label certain pieces of content on your website, things like people, products, locations, and by wrapping that you can tell search engines exactly what that content is so again they have an easier job of crawling your website. So the tool there, the link there is a plugin called RavenTool Schema Creator. It adds a button where you basically fill out what that data is and then it'll generate those schema micro data tags for you. At the bottom of your blogs you also want to link to relevant posts or related content so that way people are staying engaged and active on your website. You want to lower your bounce rate by giving them more things to jump around to and so the plugin there is yet another related post plugin and you'll notice I give a lot of examples at the bottom of my slides to plugins I've used before and from my experience they've worked really well but you should also know that there's a lot of other solutions out there so do your research because maybe there's one that works best for your specific situation. As far as social sharing goes, say you or your client writes a really important or valuable article and someone reads that, give them the ability to share it with their followers and their networks so that way you can bring in more traffic to your website and most of the social sharing plugins are super easy to set up and do a majority of the work for you. And then speed up your website so someone lands on the home page and they don't have to wait five or six seconds just for content to load. There's tools out there where you can see how fast or how slow your website is. One of them is tools.pingdom.com. There's a link there that'll give you a report of basically what's going on so that way you can go in and fix it and then if you're looking for plugin solutions, W3 Total Cache has a plethora of customization options, WCP Supercache is another simple intuitive plugin and then WP Rocket if you're looking for a premium plugin is a pretty trustworthy solution as far as speeding up your website goes. For the files in the database, WP Optimize cleans up your database, gets rid of all that fluff and unwanted content, things like old post revisions, maybe you have a lot of spam comments on there, it basically tidies up everything and again it can run on a schedule so that way it'll maintain it from the future and you don't have to keep going in and optimizing that part of your site. And then manually deleting things like placeholder content, dummy attacks, maybe you have Laura Mipsum on there or other dummy images, make sure that's not on the final product and make sure Google's not trying to index that content. Moving on to maintain, create a backup or a restore point of your website in the unfortunate event that something goes wrong, maybe your website gets hacked or maybe you or a client messes something up, make sure you have something to fall back to. Backup buddy is really cool, it's also great for migrating websites. It has a number of features, a free version is backup WordPress and they both get the job done really well. As far as security, now that WordPress powers over 25% of the web, there's never a shortage of hackers out there trying to take advantage of and compromise the WordPress platform. So installing a plugin such as WordFence that has over millions of back of users, the team at security, great number of professionals over there, they have a plugin that's really reliable and will lock down your website and then Automatic Jetpack along with locking down your website, they have other features that can supercharge and power up your website. And then finally, tracking, I recommend using Google Analytics by Yoast to add your tracking code and the reason I recommend a plugin is because you want to keep that synchronization with Google outside of the themes folder in the unforeseeable event in the future that you or a client has to change the theme, you will lose that synchronization with Google and you don't want that. So keep it safe, keep it in a plugin. So this here is just an example of my company's checklist that we're always updating, optimizing, and basically, maybe not everything applied to you today, maybe you used a managed WordPress hosting that will handle backups or security for you. But the point is finding what's relevant and then just adapting your own processes from there. So for those of you who don't have a solid foundation or maybe you're just looking for a reference of some of the things I discussed since I basically just rambled off for the last seven minutes, if you go to that link there, ryanrudolph.com slash wcus15, and I'll tweet that out later. That's just a simple printable PDF that just outlines some of the things I went over. And if anyone has any questions, please contact me on Twitter or wandering the madhouse of the convention center for the rest of the weekend. And thank you all so much for listening.