WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14: More Tools for Professional Sites

As you already know, WordPress began its life as a nifty tool for building a blog. In the two decades since, it's exploded into an all-purpose way to make almost any type of site.

This transformation is exciting, but it also means that life with WordPress can quickly get complicated. Once you've wrapped your mind around the core WordPress features, you need to add the right plugins, set up the right backup and security practices, fine-tune your site's performance, and consider buying a professional theme. This adds up to a lot of extra details that you need to master.

In this book, you've already started to branch out beyond the standard WordPress tools. As you've travelled through the past 13 chapters, you've dipped into plenty of popular third-party plugins. In this chapter, you'll look at some more. You'll set up regular backups so your site won't disappear if your web host crashes. You'll use caching to perk up sluggish sites. And you'll learn how to give your site ecommerce shopping powers.

Disaster Proofing with Backups

You probably don't spend much time worrying about the safety of the files on your website. After all, even small web hosting companies take reliability seriously. They use systems that have a high level of redundancy—web servers with multiple hard drives, for example, and groups of computers that work together so that a hardware failure in one won't sideline an entire website. They often use backups to put the ...