Keeping Your WordPress Website Optimal
5 things to maintain on your WordPress website
WordPress is great. It’s what we use 99% of the time for our clients, it’s what we use ourselves. There are a number of reasons we love WordPress so much: it’s easy to use, easy to maintain, highly customizable, and gives our clients more value for the dollar. But the first two, easy to use and maintain, are the real selling points because WordPress allows website owners to be in control of their own website.
There isn’t a steep learning curve when it comes to understanding how to add content, new pages, photos, and more to the website. You can find out more about all the benefits of using WordPress here. But with that flexibility does come an element of responsibility, since it means you are now in charge of the details of your site, like making sure it stays up-to-date and you have backups. Here are 5 things you can do to maintain your WordPress website:
- Update Consistently. WordPress routinely releases system upgrades. Any plugins installed on your site will also come with updates working out bugs and keeping everything working smoothly. Installing these is a cinch – you just go to the “Plugins” tab and click the “Update Available” link. Then, you check each box, select “Update,” and click “Apply.” It’s that easy!
- Backup Regularly. Just like backing up your computer hard drive to prevent data loss, you should also backup your website. WordPress gives users the ability to backup within WordPress. This article gives great step-by-step instructions for how to do that. There are a variety of backup plugins available for WordPress; one you can look into is BackupBuddy. Apart from backing up your website in the content management system you use, you can also create backups from your cPanel.
- Install Password Protection. Keeping your site running smoothly means keeping it protected from hackers. You should have a strong password to login to your site (a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols), but you should also install additional protection like adding a limited login attempts feature.
- Have Anti-Spam Filters. This is a big one! You want it to be easy for website visitors to contact you, but what you DON’T want is a bunch of spam email and comments suddenly flooding your inbox. SpamFree WordPress is a great plugin that will help monitor this and keep your site from getting bogged down with unwanted spam.
- Review SEO often. Other articles we’ve written about what SEO is and how SEO works cover this topic pretty well, but it’s important to include here. Keeping your WordPress website optimized definitely includes regularly reviewing your SEO and making sure the keywords and phrases you install on your site are working hard to drive your traffic.
These details are important to keeping your WordPress website running the way it was meant to. The good news is that WordPress makes these tasks easy. If you, like many business owners, have too much on your plate to try and stay on top of maintaining your website, finding a reliable managed hosting option is a good idea. Utilizing a managed service means allowing a WordPress guru to take care of the backend of your website, taking care of all the routine maintenance and providing you with support for issues that may arise.
Our favorite managed hosting is Mission: Communicate. We highly recommend their services: the first-class customer service and support you get are well worth the investment. Mission: Communciate’s WP Forte is the complete managed hosting package we love. They take all the guesswork out of managing your website. Your site is not only maintained, but you get the support of a full how-to library and access to Mission: Communicate’s WordPress guru to answer your questions. This article gives great details about what you get with their services!
