Should You Use WordPress for Your Chiropractic Blog?
If you're building your own chiropractic blog, WordPress can be a great place to start, but beware of some issues if you're running your own WordPress site:- Keep it updated. WordPress is a complicated piece of software and when something is complicated, there's always a chance of hacking vulnerabilities. Make sure that you keep your blog patched with the latest updates. With the WordPress blogs that we manage for clients, we literally have to update plugins daily, oftentimes, as new releases are published.
- Don't go crazy with plugins. As of March 2014, there were 29,863 free WordPress plugins and an unknown number of plugins you can purchase. Remember this, just because you can install 30,000 plugins doesn't mean that you should! In fact, some plugins are poorly programmed, and many of these won't play together nicely on the same theme. So: be judicious in your use of plugins and keep it to the bare minimum that you need.
- Lock down comments. Make sure that you require a login and approval before someone can comment. Out of the box, WordPress makes commenting easy, and that means that you'll be literally bombarded with spam. We've seen unprotected WordPress installations with over 30,000 spam comments.
- Adjust your permalinks. Permalinks are the URLs of your pages. For instance, on this page, the URL is: http://www.chirohosting.com/chiropractic-marketing/should-you-use-wordpress-for-your-chiropractic-blog/. The default URL that WordPress will provide is: http://www.chirohosting.com/chiropractic-marketing/?p=25. The first URL makes it easier for Google to index your site; the second URL tells Google absolutely nothing about your web page and makes Google work even harder to figure out what your page is about. You don't want to make Google work harder; you want to make life easy for the friendly Google bots!
- Make sure to add a good SEO plugin. The default installation of WordPress does a pretty lousy job of SEO. In the default installation, you can't adjust the meta description tags and you don't have any fine control over site-wide SEO. For our client blogs, we like to use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. It's powerful and the basic version is free.