Having a backup of your site is extremely important. Lots of web hosts run their own backups, but you don’t always want to rely on them. Here is a simple solution that costs absolutely nothing. The plugin requires you to have PHP 5.2 or higher and you have to have a Dropbox account.

The setup is completed in 5 easy steps!

• Step 1 – Sign up for a Dropbox account.
• Step 2 – Download the WordPress plugin. (latest version zip file)
• Step 3 – The plugin will ask you to authorize the plugin with Dropbox.
• Step 4 – A new window open where Dropbox will ask you to authenticate in order allow this plugin access to your Dropbox.
• Step 5 – Once you have granted access to the plugin click continue to setup your backup

I would set it up to run a backup every week. Daily might be too much, but then again if the data is really important to you … you might want to do daily backups. As much as I don’t want to rely on the web hosts backup files, I do to an extent. I figure weekly backups on my end are enough just incase the host lost the backups they have. Depending on how often you update your site, and other factors, increasing or decreasing that frequency could help.

The other great thing about this backup is the backup will be stored in multiple locations. Dropbox stores your files on the web, and it will also sync your files to any computer that you have the Dropbox app installed on. This ends up being perfect for me since I have Dropbox installed on all of my machines. No matter which machine I get on, I know I will have the latest backup of my site.

Backup WordPress to Dropbox is brought to you by Sevenpixels - Web Design in Auburn, AL and Albany, GA

Here is a list of the plugins that I use on Sevenpixels. A lot of time was spent going through plugins trying to find the ones that offered the functionality I was looking for, but didn’t effect performance greatly. Loading tons of plugins was out of the question, so I went with just a few core plugins to assist me. I’m still looking over everything that’s out there to see what up and coming plugins might add a neat feature to my site. But for now, this little bunch does a tremendous job.

• WordPress SEO  by Yoast
• W3 Total Cache
• Akismet
• Gravity Forms

WordPress Plugins Used on Sevenpixels is brought to you by Sevenpixels - Web Design in Auburn, AL and Albany, GA

Regardless of how much traffic your site gets, W3 Total Cache can help speed your WordPress site up. W3 Total Cache does this by caching pages, minifying JavaScript and CSS files, utilizing CDN’s, caching database objects and much more. W3 Total Cache offers different types of caching based upon the type of server access you have. Even if you are on a shared host you can use the enhanced disk caching. Just by using the disk caching you will be able to server pages quicker. And just in case your site gets insane amounts of traffic from Reddit, you server should be able to handle it without crashing and your host will probably thank you.

Try out different settings one at a time and see what kind of performance increases you see. Start off with the enhanced disk caching. You should see a notable decrease in page load time. Try minifying the HTML, JavaScript and CSS next. Don’t turn them all on at once. Try them individually and make sure your site still looks and functions properly. Just using the page caching and minifying should help your site load much quicker. Each setting has it’s own configuration so try different combinations and see what differences it will make. Zemalf has a good article that shows some configurations of each setting in W3 Total Cache. Remember that what works for one site may not be what is best for another. So use any settings you find as a starting point and play around with it.

The next step would be setting up a CDN. WPBeginner has a good article that shows you how to set up W3 Total Cache with MaxCDN. You can also configure your own CDN on a subdomain if you wish.

If you have any questions, you should check out the support forum or you might try getting some help on Twitter. Check out some of the benefits and features of W3 Total Cache below.

Benefits:

• At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
• “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
• Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
• Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
• Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
• Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

Features:

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
• Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
• Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
• Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
• Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
• Caching of database objects in memory
• Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
• Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
• Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
• Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
• JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
• Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
• Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

Speed Up WordPress with W3 Total Cache is brought to you by Sevenpixels - Web Design in Auburn, AL and Albany, GA