Honestly, this is very complicated. WordPress is a very strong and effective platform for online marketing, however with strength can come complicated maintenance. If you own a Ferrari, are you going to try to maintain it yourself or hire someone that knows what they are doing? It’s not easy, which is why we offer the most affordable monthly plans in WordPress management so that you do not have to lift a finger. However, here is how to do it yourself. As you know, you have to update the following to avoid issues:
- WordPress Version
- Theme
- Plug-in’s
Why?
- Security
- SEO
- Quick-loading
- Functionality
However, before you do this make sure to always back up your database and files. WordPress has a plugin for this you can get. Even without constant updates, you should be backing up your site regularly. If you’ve made a lot of progress and one day you get hacked or something breaks for no apparent reason, it can affect weeks or months of progress – or worst of all – your website hasn’t been backed up at all or properly and you’ll need to start from scratch (it does happen).
Constantly Check for Performance Issues and Errors
At least once a week check your website for performance issues. Aside from this make sure to ensure you have no broken links or 404 errors. You can temporarily use plugins to help you find and fix broken links and disable them afterwards (as these plugins can slow down your site), though make sure to redirect any 404 errors (pages that no longer exist) too. For broken links you can either correct broken URLs or 301 them.
- Other Maintenance Tasks Include:
- Deleting spam comments
- Double checking contact forms work
- Regularly changing your passwords (including your admin and FTP passwords)
- Optimizing your database
- Deleting unused themes and plugins
- Removing media files you aren’t using
- Reviewing your meta data performance and adjusting as necessary
- Deleting unused drafts and post revisions
- Double checking performance statistics after installing new plugins
- Managing Plugins
What makes WordPress so special are the myriad of plugins that serve countless purposes. This can include caching and lazy image loading plugins to improve speed, security plugins to prevent breaches, SEO plugins to help you keep your website fully optimized, and much more. Many themes also have their own plugins to ensure the website works properly. However, they will all require regular updating and it just takes one plugin to interfere with the rest to bring your website crashing down. Often this will even prevent you from being able to login to find the problem. In this case, you’ll need to login to your host and disable the plugins manually (i.e. by temporarily renaming the plugin folders one by one) to see which one is causing the issue. Learn more about our WordPress Web Design in Los Angeles.
This guide is a very basic overview on what you need to keep an eye on. However, there are many other aspects regarding WordPress maintenance that only time and experience will teach you – there’s nothing like having your website down for a couple of days (or weeks) while you search for that snippet of code that got altered in one of the hundreds of core files. If you have a successful business, it’s usually recommended to have a professional offer a management service if it’s affordable. This way they can also assist with improving your website’s performance by adjusting your hosts memory limit, running malware scans and more; not to mention the peace of mind of staying online for your clients and customers.
Unfortunately, this is not easy, and 95% of successful business owners have this done professionally so that they can focus on company growth. If you don’t choose us to maintain your website, then please choose a professional as we are sure you will run into issues trying to do this yourself.
