WordPress is the most used website platform for your CMS (Content Management System). It’s being used across all kinds of websites and is incredibly simple to understand and navigate. The many capabilities of WordPress and the thousands of plugins or maybe just hundreds that you have to use to properly handle your website can sometimes take a toll on its system.
Therefore, it is important that your WordPress website is properly maintained and constantly checked to prevent any catastrophic breakdown that would cause you thousands of dollars to fix plus the money that you have lost because the greatest tool in your business is currently out of service.
In this article, you will learn some of the tips and tricks and healthy maintenance habits to ensure that your WordPress website is always in its optimum performance.
How to Properly Maintain a WordPress website?
Maintaining a WordPress website is quite simple for the advanced tech but even a WordPress whiz needs to do preventative measures to keep your site from always breaking down and you have to suffer from the loss of income from it. Here are some things you can do to keep the money flowing and avoid a disastrous website failure.
Constantly Update WordPress, its Plugins and Themes
Updating WordPress is absolutely compulsory if you want to stay on top of the security measures that are being added or patched upon each version of WordPress. You would also be privy to some of the perks the WordPress developers may implement like additional functions and the latest user interface additions.
You would also need to update all the plugins that you have installed on your website to keep it working seamlessly and speed up your WordPress site. Additional plugins may also be needed as you update your website’s user experience. To save some bucks, make sure that you check on WordPress coupons being offered daily at https://couponninja.com/codes/updraftplus.com. Who doesn’t like free and discounted stuff? Plugin updates usually include bug fixes that you can certainly use to delete those glitches that can be annoying when running a website.
Regularly Backup Your Website
For most WordPress tech, this is a given maintenance task and must be done diligently. As you might know, there are a lot of things that could go wrong with your website in a day. Plus the daily traffic, added blogs, content, and website facelifts that you are doing each day. It would be a great loss if something big happens and all of these are lost or corrupted in some way or another. Backing up all the contents, databases, and files of your website would ensure that you still have something to use and keep your website running.
Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins and Themes
In the course of your website’s life, there are constant features that are being updated and it makes some plugins obsolete. You have to delete those to minimize the loading time of your website and to save some cash in the process too. Likewise, when you change the theme or its interface and you know you won’t be needing the old one, trash them or save them somewhere where you could access them again. This is why you should always make sure that every plug-in that you buy or use makes sense for your website so that your users would not have a very long waiting time which can be a motive for them to walk away.
Secure Your Website With an Iron-Clad Internet Security
This is mostly neglected because website owners don’t think that their website is exposed to the mercy of the world wide web. Everybody knows that there are hackers and a whole host of unscrupulous individuals out there who is just waiting to pounce on weakened security on any site. Malware and viruses are not just creations to wreak havoc on someone, it was meant to extort money one way or another to the owner of the site. That’s why you have to give attention to your website’s anti-virus and anti-malware detection system.
Moreover, when Google detects that your site has too many viruses and malware, it will flag your website as malicious. It would take months before your get that tag out. And when you are badly compromised, hackers could take down your website and render it useless. It would take months or even years before you can build on it again. So be careful and get the best internet security that you got.
Optimize Your Database
Deleting unnecessary plugins and themes are just one step in optimizing your database. An optimized website is that which loads easily and at lightning speed. The recommended loading time is less than 2 seconds. When you’re reaching that mark or over it, you would have to take measures to keep it down. If you are using SEO as your marketing tool, you know that Google also checks these for every website. And you might be doomed to be listed on its second page when this happens.
WordPress doesn’t have an inbuilt tool for optimizing databases. But you can install database optimization plugins to help you do this regularly for your website. Database optimization has to be done at least once a month so that it does not get clogged and load too long.
Ensure that your Website continues to Be User Friendly
Significantly long loading time and broken links are just some of the glitches that plugins nor WordPress could do for you. You have to make sure that all the gears and interfaces of your website are working perfectly to give your visitors the best user experience possible. This also includes keeping out viruses and malware that will plague your potential consumers’ devices. Another element of being a user-friendly website is it can be used even on mobile. You may have known that mobile devices are more or less the medium for people to search for anything on the internet. Having a website that can accommodate mobile devices would give you a chance to garner more visitors and hopefully additional revenue for you.
Maintaining your website takes diligence. Maybe a little bit of skill but diligence is more important in website maintenance tasks plus being thorough in checking everything.