Hi, WordPress lovers and users! Welcome to the More In Media blog.
Can I ask you something?
What are your blog editing habits? Did you know writing and editing your blog posts directly in WordPress can be hazardous to the health of your website?
Don’t worry if you didn’t know – I only found out about 6 months into my blogging journey - and there are a few simple steps you can take to fix it! There are some right ways and some wrong ways to get your blog posts published. So let’s get to it.
I give you 4 reasons not to write and edit your blog posts in WordPress.
Back Up – writing your blog posts in a word doc gives you an instant back up copy of your original content! Wouldn’t you want that, just in case (God forbid!) something happens to your website and your site back up wasn’t as good as you thought it was? Also, if you are not too familiar yet with WordPress my friend Alisa Meredith of Scalable Social Media has this advice to offer: “Every time I hire a new writer, I can count on getting an "Argh! I just spent an hour on that post and lost it!" message because they wrote it in WordPress, weren't familiar with saving it often and restoring old revisions, etc. and somehow managed to lose all their work. So, for newer writers, it can save some frustration to write in Word first. Of course then, they'd better copy and past to and from Notepad to avoid formatting uglies...”
Review Post and Guest Blogging – If you write for other publications, you often are asked to submit the content in a Word doc so the editor can format, upload and add images. It’s also great to have a record as to what content you’ve produced and where it was published.
Repurpose Content – how about this; having a copy in a word doc gives you instant access to repurpose the content you have already created. Whether you are thinking about writing an eBook, creating a whitepaper, turning the post into a PowerPoint or SlideShare, taking quotes and creating pinnable images or something else, having it saved as a word doc saves you from logging in and copying and pasting each time you need it!
Website Speed and Functionality – hitting the update button each time you edit something and doing that over and over is not a good idea. My colleague MaAnna Stephenson at BlogAid tells me “Why not to edit in WP? It can leave orphaned code snippets. The purpose of the test editor is to write clean. Ode for a browser to read. You can check your code in the Text view mode.” and “there was a time that unfinished drafts (sitting on your site) might get indexed. That hasn't been true for a while, though. But, they do clog up your database, which could make it run slower and is a performance hit. That all depends on how big your database is; it has to be pretty big, like approaching 1000 posts and pages, to really notice the difference. But, if speed is money, then you'll notice!”
There you have it! The experts weigh in and tell us to write our drafts outside of WordPress.
Now I have a question for you; what has been your writing habit?
Do you write in Word, or Evernote, or Google Drive or in WordPress (or somewhere else – if you do you need to share it with us!) I’d love to know… Dorien