6 Time-Saving Tips For Busy WordPress Bloggers

Do you find that actually writing a blog post is often the last thing on your to-do list?

Before starting your blog, you may have thought being a successful blogger was all about – well, blogging.

But it turns out that managing administrative tasks takes up much more of your time. Before you ever hit “publish,” you have to format the text, find the right image, and come up with the perfect clickable headline, not to mention moderating comments, updating themes and plugins, and other tasks.

What if there was a way to spend less time on those time-consuming tasks, so you could spend more time actually blogging instead?

How to save time on WordPress tasks

1. More automatic updates

Just like you can configure WordPress to disable automatic security updates, you can also tell it to automatically update core update, plugins, and themes as well.

By default for security reasons, WordPress automatically updates only minor core releases and translation files.

But if you’d like, you can also set it to update major core releases automatically, as well as themes and plugins.

(Just keep in mind that this could potentially cause errors on your website if there are any new bugs or conflicts with the updates. You’ll only want to try this if you’ll be keeping an eye on your website regularly to make sure everything’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if the potential errors or downtime won’t be catastrophic to your site or business before you’re able to fix it.)

You can do this with either a plugin, or manually by adding some code to your functions.php file. Here’s how:

With a plugin

1. Install the free plugin Update Control to your WordPress site
2. Navigate to Settings > General from your dashboard
3. Scroll down to the new Automatic Updates section
4. Choose your update options and click Save Changes:
   

Manually via functions.php

1. Before making any changes to your functions.php file, it’s important to always backup your site.
2. It’s also a good idea to create a child theme to modify instead of making changes directly to your theme’s functions.php, since any modifications to the main theme will be overwritten by updates.
3. Open your functions.php file, either through your WordPress dashboard or through your web hosting cPanel dashboard (it’s located in your theme’s file directory in wp-content/themes/)
4. At the end of functions.php, add the following code:

/* Enable automatic major core updates */
add_filter( ‘allow_major_auto_core_updates’, ‘__return_true’ );

/* Enable automatic plugin updates */
add_filter( ‘auto_update_plugin’, ‘__return_true’ );

/* Enable automatic theme updates */
add_filter( ‘auto_update_theme’, ‘__return_true’ );

2. Formatting shortcuts

Formatting your posts can take nearly as much time as writing them, if you don’t have the right tools.

The WordPress 4.3 update did help out a bit with some built-in auto formatting features:

• ## converts the following text to a H2 heading
• ### converts the following text to a H3 heading (and so on up to H6)
• * or – creates a list
• 1. or 1) creates a numbered list
• > creates a blockquote

But writing directly in the WordPress dashboard isn’t ideal. It’s easy to lose the draft you’re working on if your browser crashes or you accidentally navigate away. Plus, writing them elsewhere first creates an automatic backup – and the more backups you have, the better.

Keeping your posts elsewhere can also make it easier to access your content and work on your blog when you’re offline.

For those reasons and others, I usually write my blog posts as Google Docs and then transfer them to WordPress.

But if you write your blog posts in another software program and copy and paste them into WordPress, you’ve probably noticed that it can create a lot of formatting issues. Either they formatting doesn’t show up correctly, or you can end up with a lot of extra junk HTML tags, like dozens of <span> tags that do nothing.

To prevent this, and save a ton of time in the process, you can use a plugin to automatically publish your content right from Google Drive to WordPress. Just check out this linked post for the complete tutorial.

3. Faster blog post images

You know that blog posts with images get more engagement, but hunting down the right image for each blog post can be incredibly time-consuming.

To save time on finding images, try these tips:

• Try using a plugin like ImageInject, Pixabay Images, or Editorial Assistant by Zemanta to add images right from your WordPress dashboard
• Use a site with photos that don’t require attribution, like Pixabay or MorgueFile, since it takes more time to write up the correct attribution.
• Instead of a photo, quickly create a simple graphic of your blog post title using Canva templates.
• If you use a lot of images, consider purchasing a membership from a stock photo site like Fotolia, Dreamstime, or iStockphoto, since they tend to have a much larger selection. That way you won’t have to search several free sites for the right photo, and will save time by staying on one website.

4. Headline templates

Do you spend way too long staring at your blog post titles, tweaking a work here or there in hopes of a slightly higher click through rate?

If headlines are your weakness, there are time-saving shortcuts for you, too:

• Use a fill-in-the-blank headline template from Buffer or Copyblogger
• Try a generator like Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator or ImpactBnD’s Blog Title Generator
• Use an A/B testing tool like Optimizely or Nelio AB Testing to figure out the best headline for you, without spending time agonizing over choosing the right one.

5. Automatic blog post promotion

Sharing each blog post on social media manually adds a nice personal touch, but you don’t always have the time.

If you’d rather be writing your next post than crafting the perfect Tweet about your last post, it’s time to consider automating your updates:

• Consider using Jetpack’s Publicize module to automatically notify your networks when new posts are published
• Use a plugin like Revive Old Post to keep social media traffic coming to your older posts
• Try Better Click To Tweet or Social Warfare (read our review here) to recruit your readers to share your content for you
• Use IFTTT to set up your own automatic sharing to Buffer, Hootsuite, and other integrated tools.

6. Quick comment moderation settings

If you find yourself spending a lot of time moderating your blog post comments, consider these tips:

• Post a clear comment policy so readers know what’s acceptable – and what’s not. This could cut down on the amount of inappropriate comments you receive.
• Double-check your settings. For example, do you really need to approve each comment manually?
• Lessen the clutter by disabling pingbacks under Settings > Discussion.
• Consider closing comments on older blog posts.
• Don’t moderate comments as they come in – instead, tackle them once a week. Batching tasks saves time, in the long run, since you’re not switching back and forth between tasks so often.
• Ask yourself: Are comments adding value to your blog, or just wasting your time? Consider removing them, like CopyBlogger, and focusing on other communication platforms like social media.

What are your time-saving tips?

What WordPress tasks use up all your time? Have you found the perfect tip, trick, or plugin to cope? Share your favorites below!

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