How to Take Your WordPress Website Offline

You’ve built a gorgeous and powerful WordPress website with all the bells and whistles. Congrats! You’ve finally done it. You can now live the life you’ve always dreamed about. Congrats again!

But what happens when you want to travel the world and need the website to accompany you? You can’t always have the luxury of a fast broadband connection and a stable WiFi connection. Your website needs to go mobile. But…

… how do you take your website offline?

In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about taking your WordPress website offline and using tools like VPNs and Cloudflare to protect your content while you’re away.

Security Is One Of Your Top Tasks

You’ve been working hard to bring your creative vision to life through your website. You’ve poured a lot of time and money into it. You’ve carefully designed it and crafted every pixel to create a polished product. Now that it’s ready, it’s only natural that you want to protect it and make sure nobody destroys it while you’re gone.

Your first instinct may be to secure it with an SSL certificate and the best security plugins you can get. But that’s just the beginning. You also need to work on mobile security. People nowadays expect websites to work on all devices, so you need to make sure your website is as secure and functional on the go as it is behind your desk. This is where you need to focus your time and energy.

You need to make sure that your website is safe from hackers, safe to share, and fully backed up. The last thing you want is to lose all your work because of a malfunctioning WordPress website. So mobile security is where you should start.

What About Location?

Do you want to create a blog and share your travel stories with the world? Or do you want to keep a diary of your adventures? If you’re writing from your phone, it’s very unlikely that you’ll keep your travel blog up to date while you’re actually there. Mobile security would stop you from sharing too much information with untrusted people.

If you decide that the world is your oyster and you want to show it to everyone, you can’t just put up a website and call it a day. You need to think about hosting your website on a virtual private server (VPS) that’s dedicated to you. Even if you think you’ll only need the space for a modest blog, it’s still a good idea to have a VPS for that reason alone. It gives you a stable environment where you can install all the required software and plugins without worrying about performance or reliability.

When you’re choosing a location for your travel website or blog, you need to think about latency – how fast does the location server you’re connecting to respond? Another thing to keep in mind is cost. A VPN comes with a price, and lots of other companies want your business too. The price is usually a one-time fee plus data charges. You’re better off finding a cheap VPS option and connecting through that.

Bringing Your WordPress Website Offline Is As Easy As 1-2-3

Whether you’ve successfully brought your WordPress site offline or still need to figure out how to do it, take a deep breath and follow these three steps.

First, you need to create a new WordPress installation. You can do this by downloading the WordPress installer from wordpress.org/downloads and running it on your computer. You’ll need a desktop or laptop computer to do this. Remember: only install WordPress on a laptop or desktop and never on a mobile device. Installing WordPress on a mobile device can seriously damage your website’s performance.

Once you’ve installed WordPress on your computer, it’s time to bring it offline. Your next step is to connect to your server via SSH and login with the user name ‘wordpress’ and the password ‘password’. If you’ve installed the SSH software on your computer, you can connect with this command:

ssh root@localhost

Wherever you are right now, your next step is to go to your computer’s SSH menu and find the icon for ‘Remote Login’. You can do this by pressing the ‘F12’ key on your keyboard. Once you’ve found the icon, it’ll appear in the upper-right hand corner of your screen. Click it and enter your WordPress administrator password when prompted.

You’ll now have a WordPress installation on your computer that’s ready to go offline. Before you do that, you need to set a few options. First, change the name of your site to ‘my-blog’. Second, make sure that WordPress is installed in the ‘correct’ location. To do this, go to your computer’s website directory (where all your files are) and find the wp-content folder. Move it to your desktop. This is where WordPress will look for all its files when you install it.

Congratulations! Your WordPress site is now set to go offline. To do this, open your web browser and navigate to the my-blog URL you just created. You should now see the ‘welcome’ screen you were presented with when you first logged in to WordPress on your computer.

If you’re having trouble getting to the login page, try clearing your computer’s cache or cookies. It is possible that a cookie is blocking access to the login page. Clearing your cookies will remove this block and let you log in and continue to WordPress’s admin area as usual.

Bringing Your WordPress Website Offline Is Just The Start

Once you’ve successfully brought your WordPress website offline, it’s time to extend its functionality. There are essentially three ways to do this: plugins, themes, and gadgets. We’ll discuss each one in turn.

First, let’s talk about plugins because they’re what most people think of when they hear the word ‘plugins’. A plugin is a piece of software that extends the functionality of WordPress. For example, one plugin might allow you to import all your Facebook contacts into your WordPress database. Or it might provide you with a button that, when clicked, automatically creates a new category in your WordPress menus.

To find plugins, navigate to the WordPress dashboard. From here, you’ll see a large number of options presented to you. Simply find the ones that interest you and download them to your computer. Remember: only download plugins from reputable sources and keep your computer software updated so that you don’t run the risk of being infected by a malware.

Why VPNs?

A VPN is short for a virtual private network. A VPN creates a private network within a public network. This way, you can access private data on public networks like the internet. Essentially, you’re connecting to a remote server through a VPN to ensure that everything you do on public networks like the internet is secure and private.

VPNs are commonly used by students and bloggers to keep their work while traveling or blogging remotely accessible. Using a VPN to connect to your WordPress install is the simplest and most convenient way to keep your content updated while you’re away.

How About Cloudflare?

Another great way to extend the functionality of your WordPress website is to use a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN is a type of server that acts as a middleman between your browser and the web server that’s hosting the content on the other end. Your browser connects to the CDN, which then connects to the web server that hosts the content you’re looking for. This way, your computer never has to go through multiple hops (in other words, it stays within the ‘fast-lane’) to reach the server that hosts the content you want. This is the ideal scenario.

Cloudflare is the most popular CDN because it’s built on the open source WordPress engine and provides all the important features you need to grow your blog into a reputable site. It also has a 1-click install button that makes it easy to set up. Just navigate to the Cloudflare website, click the big red ‘Get Started’ button, and follow the onscreen instructions. You can try out their free plan, which is enough to see how useful a CDN can be. Once you’re set up, it takes just a few minutes to get started actively hosting content.

Use All The Available Tools

You’ve got a powerful machine in your hands now – what are you going to do with it? It’s time to make the most out of your new favorite tool – your computer! Once you’ve brought your WordPress site offline, it’s a good idea to use all the available tools to further extend its functionality.