WordPress automation that’s helpful for bloggers

9 key WordPress automation tasks and tools for bloggers

1. ManageWP for ongoing maintenance.

2. Sumo for list building.

3. Various, for converting email lists.

4. Various, for onboarding.

5. Buffer for social media management.

6. Broken Link Checker for sleuthing broken links.

7. Google Analytics Reports for measuring success.

8. Edit Flow for multi-author blog.

9. WP Smush for image optimization.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these tasks and tools for WordPress automation.

1. ManageWP for ongoing maintenance

Do you really want to spend time worrying about backups, loading times and security? This is something that can be easily automated — and for much less than you’d expect.

Pro ManageWP allows you to fully manage and automate tasks like daily website backups, 24/7 uptime monitoring, security and performance scanning and much more.

For a few bucks a month, fully automating these tasks and knowing you have one-click restore capability in your back pocket is worth every penny.

You can always do WordPress maintenance yourself, but only if you’re willing to put in the time. If you’d rather spend that time creating remarkable blog content, use a WordPress automation tool like Pro ManageWP.

2. Sumo for email list building

The best way to get eyeballs back to your content is to build an email list. It’s how you grow an audience that loves your writing and wants to come back for more. And if you want your website to make money, you’ll want to collect email addresses to help you communicate directly with your audience.

Enter Sumo for WordPress automation for email list building.

With their tool, you can easily create pop-ups, scroll boxes, sticky smart bars and other strategic methods of collecting email addresses right on your site. Those emails are added right to your email list and you’re ready to email a growing audience with tons of free information before eventually asking for the sell.

3. Set process for converting that email list to customers

You just got a new email subscriber.

Then another.

Whoa! A third?

Do you want to manually email each of these potential customers separately? No way. That would take way too long and time is your biggest asset as a small business owner. An easier way for you to help new customers make this transition is to set up an email automation sequence.

Take WP Mastery for example.

My good friend Jan has a string of emails that automatically get sent to new subscribers. First, he introduces himself. What a friendly guy! Then, he gives me all sorts of free stuff. This is really important for the next part — you need to start building trust with potential customers if you want them to convert into paying customers.

Finally, he goes for the ask:

This is pretty much where you feed your sales funnel and try to get people to see the value in what you’re providing and pay you for your products or services.

But doing this manually for every prospective customer isn’t sustainable, or scalable. So put the time into building out an email automation process and continue making changes until it’s converting leads into customers.

Christopher S. Penn offers some marketing automation solutions for every budget, walks you through setting up a marketing automation system, and then fine-tuning it. Tom Rankin also provides a four-step guide to setting up a killer email autoresponder campaign.

4. Another automated process for customer onboarding

You just got a new customer.

Then another.

Wow! A third?

So use the tactic we just discussed to send users all the onboarding material they need.

New customers are always going to have a ton of questions. Instead of making sure your support desk is manned at all times, shoot off some automated emails to your new customers to let them know how your product or service works and to answer the most frequently asked questions you get.

Need an example? Zapier sends you a personalized introductory email to be nice — but it’s also to provide you with content that will help you answer your own questions.

Automating emails is a great tool for those of us who might be considered introverts in the WordPress space. You can be as friendly as you want in a single email, then send that to all your new customers without having to do a lot of personal emailing. It’s a WordPress automation win-win.

5. Buffer for posting on social media

Most people treat social media as a spur-of-the-moment part of their business. Something happens and they have to get on Twitter that moment to make sure what they have to say is out in the world.

This strategy takes up massive amounts of time, especially since you need to switch gears from whatever you’re doing to get on social media.

In addition to that transition time, simply posting every time you want to share something is a repetitive process that can be accomplished much more efficiently.

If you have a significant amount of content already on your blog, why not reshare that content multiple times? You don’t want to, say, share the same piece of content every hour for a week straight — your followers wouldn’t like that very much. But because Twitter’s analytics show that very few people see your tweets anyway, why not share the same content every month?

That means you can use a tool like Buffer (and these other nifty social media management tools) to sit down every month to schedule what’s being shared across your social platforms for the next 30 days. Buffer will automatically post to your social feeds when you schedule sharing and you only have to sit down occasionally to refresh your feeds for the future.

6. Broken Link Checker for sleuthing broken links

Broken links can really hurt when it comes to the user experience of your website, and even how Google ranks its authority in search engines.

To avoid broken links, simply add Broken Link Checker to your website. Once you activate this WordPress plugin, it will send you periodic emails when links are broken on your site so you can fix them as quickly as possible.

This kind of WordPress automation will save hours of searching for broken links. That’s a big win.

7. Google Analytics Reports to measure success

Analytics are going to be essential if you want to improve conversion on your website and turn your audience into customers. That’s why you’ll need to check your analytics regularly to measure your performance, find areas of improvement, make the necessary changes, and measure them again.

This is something else you can automate. Set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site so you receive regular reports on your website’s performance — which of course you can use to find opportunities to improve conversion.

You can customize these reports to give you the most important data you need to make decisions. Have these reports sent to you via email every week or month when you need to make the necessary changes.

8. Edit Flow for multi-author blog

If you run a multi-author WordPress site, you know how time-intensive it can be to email back-and-forth with writers until a post is ready to publish.

With the Edit Flow plugin, you can streamline and automate most of the content production process right in WordPress. You won’t need to email with writers when you can communicate via comments in individual posts and receive notifications when a post is ready for your review as an editor.

Automating the writing and content review process of a multi-author blog can save both writers and editors tons of time and will lead to move high-quality content on your blog.

9. WP Smush for image optimization

Overall, images make up 63 percent of the size of an average web page. Compressing images and making sure they’re the right size for the space on your website they’re fitting is imperative to fast page speeds.

But compressing every image individually would take too much time, especially if you have tens of thousands of images on your website.

That’s where WP Smush comes into play. Use this plugin to automatically compress all the old images on your website and every image you add to the site moving forward. This capability does require the paid pro version, but paying for plugins can be 100-percent worth it.

Wrapping up

Automating tasks on your blog is going to put way more time back on your plate. You can use that time however you want, but spending it wisely by making sure your blog is producing more high-quality content is going to help fuel your site’s growth.

Not only that, but by taking advantage these and other WordPress automation tools, you’ll be able to spend your time on the more fun aspects of WordPress instead of the monotonous repetitive tasks required of all website owners.

So go ahead and implement some of this automation and spend your time where it really counts!

(By Joe Howard)