quick tips

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a geek, and I enjoy the design and coding of a website as much as — if not more than — the writing and content.

Whether you do all of your own design and coding or just tinker with it here and there, here’s a quick tip that’s sure to save you time and frustration:

When uploading an image that’s part of the overall design of your site — things like profile photos, social media buttons and even promotional images for special series — upload them via FTP rather than through the media library on your dashboard.

Note: This tip does not apply to the photos you use in posts since it would take so much longer to upload those via FTP and you won’t likely be updating those on a regular basis.

Here’s the thing — most WordPress sites have a very specific file structure for the media library. For example, the location of the image at the top of this post is http://work.yourway.net/files/2011/10/ftp.jpg, which includes both the year and month.

That’s fine for post photos, but at some point you will likely redo the design of your site, update a button or get a new profile picture taken. And if you use those images in multiple places on your site, uploading and replacing them can be a bit of a pain if you’re doing it from your dashboard.

On the other hand, if you create a “design” folder in the public_html of your site via FTP, you will be able to replace all of your images at once, clear your cache and — voila! — everything will be updated in one step rather than updating the image sources in a dozen different locations.

If your site has been professionally designed, the main infrastructure of your site is probably already set up this way, but think about other images that you use and update on a semi-regular basis. Would any of those benefit from this kind of set up as well?

I used WinSCP for secure FTP, but if your website has a CPanel, you’ll find this ability under the File Manager option as well.

Do you manage your images with a file manager or FTP, or have you always just used the Media Library?

	Mandi Ehman is the founder and publisher behind Life Your Way as well as a wife and homeschooling mom to four beautiful girls. She lives with her family on a little slice of heaven in wild, wonderful West Virginia and loves coffee, chocolate, easy meals, beautiful things and minimalist spaces.

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