Integrating WordPress with Website - Mission Accomplished!

We just completed integrating WordPress with our PlaneViz website and I am very pleased with how it works and looks. A blog can be a great way to add content to a small business product or service website, drive traffic to the site, and connect with people.

I had three goals that defined success with this WordPress Integration

• A seamless integration that retained PlaneViz branding and UI everywhere.
• A single sign-in that, once done, enabled the user to work in the main website and WordPress (to reply to posts).
• The ability to disconnect WordPress in the future without breaking the main website should I want to open another classifieds site without a blog.

PlaneViz is an aircraft classifieds site that already had full functionality, including user profile management. As a small business with limited resources we did this integration in two phases. Phase one was to enable blogging to build content and attract search engine traffic and phase two was to connect the back ends of the main site and WordPress so that we have only one database in play.

I should mention here that we have a development website where all the trial and error takes place before making its way to the production website. You do not want to be subjecting real users to your learning curve. 

In phase one my developer installed WP and modified the header and footer so that it looked like the main website. This enabled me to begin building blog content to get the search engines coming by more often. At this point, however, blog comments were disable because we did not want to be operating two user databases: one for the main site and one for the blog. That would have made a seriously unseamless user experience and meant more work later on when marrying the back ends.

The blog had a pretty immediate and definitely positive affect of our search rankings. Next up was completing the integration. 

The plan was to 

1. Have WordPress authenticate users from an external database to enable single sign-in, i.e., use the main website MySQL database for user authentication and registration.
2. Hide the WP control panel and admin bar from users, since profile management takes place through the main website UI.
3. Keep control panel access for the admin to make posts and administer the blog

These three things were accomplished with off-the-shelf, free plug-ins. To authenticate users from the main website database we used a plug called External DB authentication. Hiding the control panel and the admin bar from users while keeping for the admin was easily accomplished with Global Hide/Remove Admin Bar Plugin and WP Hide Dashboard.

The final tweaks were to redirect the comment sign-in/register link to the main site sign-in (or registration) page and to turn on the comments for current and old posts.

Mission accomplished. We now have a powerful blogging and CMS system that achieves all three project objectives of a single sign-on, a seamless user experience, and the ability to disengage the blog without crippling the main site.

If you would like to see our WordPress integration in action then head over to PlaneViz and click on blog in the nav menu on top. 

Website Administration - Site Performance Improvement with NGINX

Our PlaneViz site is hosted as a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at Rackspace. It runs on the CentOS flavor of Linux, which comes with the ubiquitous Apache web server.

Apache and WordPress (in lean environments)
Even with minimal VPS resources the site was performing well ...until I decided to add a WordPress blog to it. Load times went from 2 seconds to sometimes 10+ seconds as Apache quickly gobbled up memory to allocate resources and then started writing to the swap file. My LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) admin tweaked Apache to limit the threads it spawned on page loading but it did not help much.

Site load time is important for a good user experience and good SEO; Google uses site speed as a component of its search algorithm. Few people (including me) wait even 5 seconds for a page to load so we had two choices: upgrade the VPS to more memory at a higher monthly cost or optimize the site with something that performed better with a light VPS.

Apache is a proven web server used by a huge number of sites. I have had WordPress blogs on shared hosting in the past and never had an issue with it. However, in this situation, with tight system memory, Apache was not the right answer.  

NGINX To The Rescue
We switched to NGINX (pron. Engine-X), which is an alternative web server. Load times went from 10 seconds to about 1.5 seconds. Problem solved. If you are interested more details, head over to ARS Technica and WikiVS where you will find more "Apache vs NGNIX" information, written in lay terms.

Google Plus for Business Review from a Small Business

Eric Ward, a well known link builder, wrote a great piece about the futility of standard SEO (and by extension, social media) for small businesses. I strongly recommend reading Link for People Not Search Engines if you are struggling with search engine visibility. Getting to page one could be far easier and cheaper than you think!

Despite Ward's advice and having no clear strategy for it, we took the plunge and created a Google+ for business page for PlaneViz (our aircraft classifieds site). After exploring Google+ for a few weeks my impression is that people are not using it. I find it hard to locate relevant people to follow both personally and for PlaneViz. Many people seem to have signed up in 2011 then abandoned their accounts. Now that Google requires new gmail users to create a Google+ profile, what message will it send about the service when more and more profiles have zero posts?

It's too bad Google didn't launch Plus a few years ago before Facebook solidified it's position as the dominant social media platform . Plus has some nice features such as circles, a great timeline, and ease of use.

In my opinion, the biggest drawback of Google Plus for Business is that it does not work with a smartphone. Let's say you attend a business event and want to snap a photo from your iPhone to post to your Google Business Page stream. Better hang onto that photo because your Google+ app only accesses your personal profile; there is no access to your business page. Really? In this age of smartphones and social media going hand-in-hand you must go to a computer to update your business page stream? It makes no sense to me.

I do like Google Plus and think it has great potential to be a useful business tool once Google lets it work the way people do.

Circling back to my lead-in article, I agree with Ward that the most beneficial small business SEO (and social media) strategy is to leverage real world business relationships to generate buzz and links.

Save your pennies and pick up the phone!