WordPress has become one of the most popular Contents Management System (CMS) for business owners all over the world. There are a variety of factors that makes this CMS the right choice. It’s more than a blogging website. It is an open-source platform that allows you to edit the coding as per your preference. With various choices for plugins, themes, page style, and much more, the platform provides businesses with a one-stop solution for all their needs. Here is a step-by-step guide on How to Maintain a WordPress Website.
Irrespective of your reach as a brand, maintaining WordPress sites can be a little tricky. Your enterprise may be a startup, small business, or an established entity. In order to maintain the site, you need to keep a few things in mind. We will focus on different tools for giving you a brief WordPress tutorial 2020 for maintaining your sites.
MAINTAIN WORDPRESS WEBSITE
There are a lot of different things which one has to bear in mind to maintain a wordpress website. Once you have built a WordPress website from scratch, you need to maintain it constantly. This is important to bring more customer engagement, build traffic, and increase conversion rates. Remember that your valuable company needs the right team for handling and maintaining WordPress sites. If you fail to properly maintain the site, there can be a reduction in user experience, low security, or inadequate visibility on search engine results. In order to avoid such circumstances, we are here with your ultimate guide for WordPress Website Maintenance.
INSTALL THE MOST RECENT VERSION
It is crucial that you always install the newest version of WordPress for your site. The new version will let you access the latest tools, features, plugins, and code updates. One of the biggest reasons behind getting a WordPress site hacked is not having the latest versions. Regularly check for updates and follow the WordPress news. You can also go to your dashboard> updates, where you will find if there is any new version being released.
CHECKING WEBSITE SECURITY
A daily WordPress Security check will ensure that you have no malware, virus, or any hacker trying to get access to your website. In order to prevent situations like downtime, you should check Uptime Monitoring or web hosting information over a period of time. Also, check how much space is your website occupying on the host server.
KEEP A CHECK ON THE WEBSITE SPEED
If you find any loading errors or any other issues that are slowing down the loading time of your page, fix it immediately. This is to ensure that users have a pleasant browsing experience and they do come back to your website. Imagine opening a website where you find antiquated links, broken images, or slow loading time. It’s a nightmare for both the users as well as the website owner. This is why it is necessary to Optimize Website Speed and fix any errors.
REGULAR BACKUPS
One of the most important steps is backing up your website regularly. Now, creating backups doesn’t mean you don’t have to follow other steps to maintain the site. It means that if something goes wrong, you can access the backup and shift to the earlier version. In the case of corporate sites, backups can be done weekly. Blogs can be backed up on a daily basis. You can also backup your whole site by taking help from your host provider.
OPTIMISING DATABASE
Everything is stored in the database. It contains your blogs, posts, videos, pictures, settings, and more. The more traffic your website gets, the larger becomes the database. This will lead to the slowing down of your site. Now, database optimization will do the trick. You can go for WP-Optimize, a plugin, where the database gets automatically optimized. It will also get rid of unwanted comments, spam messages, bot users, and such.
MONITOR YOUR ANALYTICS
The next step to maintain WordPress sites is monitoring your web analytics. If you keep a weekly check on the statistics, you will find out which content is more popular among your users, what trends are bringing traffic, and details on the site visitors. With the right details, you can form better marketing strategies and post content which is well-liked by your target audience. In addition, the analytics will let you know about the site’s health and find errors. You can take a look at the metrics on a regular basis to check the performance of your website.
REMOVE DEAD LINKS
The dead links referred to here are links on your website or links on other sites that bring users to your web-page. There may be times when the site URL has changed, the site has been closed or moved to another address permanently. You need to remove such links because these websites don’t exist anymore. If users go through dead links, they will not trust your brand. You can use different checkers for finding dead links. After finding a dead link, you can edit it or remove it from the site. This will ensure that your website provides a seamless browsing experience to the users.
CONCLUSION
WordPress Maintenance is an important task. In order to keep your site up and running, there are different aspects that have to be monitored regularly. It includes the site settings, content, plugins and themes, latest versions, and much more. It is important that your brand has a reliable and responsible team to handle WordPress tasks. At myWPguys, we believe in providing an experienced team to our valuable clients. We assign an individual team just for one website. This means that every brand has a different team to work with. We do not believe in giving all projects to a single team as this will just lower productivity.