Your company’s site is one of its most valuable assets, and if it’s built on WordPress website, it should be simple to administer and update. With the Internet being as important as it is in our lives, the number of websites that are not properly maintained is astounding.
Too many individuals believe that creating a website is an easy “set it and forget it” activity, but it is not. Once your site is up for all to see, it’s critical to keep it secure and up-to-date daily.
What is WordPress?
WordPress refers to a widely used online content management system. It’s an open-source content management system, to be precise. What are the meanings of the terms “open-source” and “content management system” (CMS)?
You can alter any file in the WordPress package and use it whatever you want because it is open-source. A content management system (CMS) is software designed to make content management easier while requiring little technical skills.
We’re talking about a website’s content in this example, which includes web pages, tables, photos, animations, forms, and so on. A content management system (CMS) allows you to create and administer your website simultaneously.
Thanks to the platform called WordPress, due to which you will be able to:
- Build web pages.
- Add content to your website without writing or disturbing a single line of code.
Why do you need to manage your WordPress Website?
Daily maintenance of your WordPress website is required for various reasons, but they all boil down to the same “worst-case scenario”: it will go down and be inaccessible to anybody. When your site is down, you’re losing cash somehow, even if it’s only paying someone to bring it back online.
There are various ways you might lose money from a down website, whether it’s someone within a mile of your store looking for a similar business or missing out on sales from your eCommerce site.
A bad web host is one reason for website downtime, but it’s not the only one. Plugins, website settings, bad code, spammers, and other causes may cause a website to go down. Because of the large range of potential causes, it’s clear that you’ll need to set aside time every day to ensure your site doesn’t crash.
How to Do It:
We hope the information above shocked you a little (in a good way) and inspired you to manage your WordPress website properly. The top three techniques to maintain your website alive and well are as follows:
Choose a good host:
Hosts have a significant impact on the performance and uptime of your site, but they can also provide a safe platform for making changes to your site before it goes public (also known as a staging site). If you have a WordPress site, go with managed WordPress hosting rather than hosting that does a little bit of everything because many businesses lack WordPress knowledge.
Flywheel and WPEngine are our WordPress hosting recommendations, but if you want more information on choosing the appropriate host for you, check out this page.
Backup Your Website Daily:
It’s foolish to assume that nothing will go wrong during the life of your website, which is why backups are so important. Without daily backups, data could be lost, hackers could gain access, and you could be locked out of your site. While most website hosts retain backups of their sites on their servers, we strongly advise backing up yours off-site, so you don’t have to rely on a backup from the same data centre as your live site. This is something we’ll discuss later.
Keep your plugins, WordPress Core, and themes updated:
The components that make your WordPress website work are updated regularly to fix problems, improve security, and add new features. Make sure you update these as often as possible to keep your site working smoothly.
A theme or plugin update, on the other hand, could harm your site. Therefore test it after each change. This is why backups are vital since you can restore your site using an older/working version of the plugin or theme.
Tools to Help You Manage:
You’re not alone if keeping track of all of those moving bits seems daunting. There are numerous tools available to help you manage your WordPress website more efficiently. Here is a little of our personal favourites of book writing:
ManageWP:
We adore ManageWP because it allows you to update your themes, plugins, and WordPress core all from one dashboard. It uses Amazon Web Services to back up your website every day, check your uptime, and provide various other tools to make website administration easier.
While this service is not free and is best suited for businesses that handle several WordPress websites, we believe it is one of the best WordPress solutions available.
BlogVault:
We utilize ManageWP to back up and update our clients’ sites. However, BlogVault is another alternative to consider for the same functions. For our clients’ websites, we use BlogVault as a supplementary backup method.
Imagify:
Imagify is an image optimization tool or a plugin that helps you compresses your photos’ size. Likewise, it helps speed up your website and save you time. This plugin will fully optimize your site photos, so you won’t have to waste time doing it yourself.
Akismet:
Commenting and completing the form Spam can inundate your posts, making them difficult to manage. This useful plugin will relieve your tension and handle the heavy lifting for you. Akismet will check your comments and form submissions for malicious content and prevent your site from publishing it.
WP Rocket:
A caching plugin should be installed on every WordPress site, and we recommend WP Rocket. By generating static cached versions of your web content, a caching plugin will make your web pages load much faster. Faster loading times help with SEO, conversion rates, and a variety of other factors.
MalCare:
MalCare, a multi-dimensional, automatic scanner designed by the same team as BlogVault, can protect against even the most intricate hacks. If a problem is found, you’ll get an immediate alert with this plugin. Your site will be malware-free and clean with only one click.
Conclusion:
You can’t avoid properly managing your WordPress website, but it doesn’t have to be difficult, as you can see. If all else fails, you can hire professionals that know how to keep your website up to date and maintain it..
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