From the mid 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s, websites were an epitome of ‘set-and-forget’ propensity. They were built with HTML and CSS languages, put in some content and you were good-to-go. Websites were simple and loading speed wasn’t an issue at all because they were just used as a way to communicate your presence as a business online.
But now, websites are more complex, which means you can’ get away from the loading speed because the attention span of people has shrunk shorter than that of a goldfish (goldfish’s attention span is marked at 9 seconds). Plus, websites are not just brochures now as they were in the past. They build fortunes for business across the search engines not just in one region but across the globe.
Creating such extravagant and lucrative websites today is not an issue – maintaining is. Most websites today are powered by WordPress platform – an open source software that is free, and easy to use. When a WordPress website is not maintained properly, it causes it to slow down. Besides, it raises many technical glitches that can cause the performance of the WordPress website to become below par. Such experience can make you lose a potential customer on your website.
Therefore, we’ve come up with a list of five WordPress website maintenance services to optimize your site’s performance and stability. Now these services can be undertaken by you, your team, or you can even hire a team of professionals to perform them as they need to be taken care of on a continuous basis. These services are as follows:
1. Back your Website Up
Backups are usually taken as a precaution in any situation in case that situation goes wrong or needs to have a restore point. The same goes for websites. Having a periodic backup makes sure that if something goes wrong with your WordPress website such as speed issues, malware attack, virus attack, etc. where your website can crash, you will have a restore point. Restoring a website from a backup takes a shorter time for your website to be up and running again.
On the other hand, if you fail to keep a backup of your website, you will have to face major consequences. This can involve finding the problem, and fixing to create a whole website from scratch. The biggest problem in this will be that your visitors will be landing on a blank page of your company which means business loss for you.
Many hosting providers offer the services of taking periodic backups for your website but it depends on how good your hosting provider is. If not, then you can always consider WP-Bridge’s cloud backup on a daily-basis to reduce chances of your data going misused or missing.
Easy Peasy isn’t it!!!
2. Update Themes, Plugins and WordPress Core
The biggest problem with the majority of website owners is that they tend to stick to a set-and-forget attitude once their WordPress site is ready. You can’t do better for your website with this mindset. WordPress as a platform keeps updating itself on a regular basis. If you do not update your website in relation to its WordPress core, themes and plugins from time-to-time, your website will become outdated and its performance will falter.
By updating your WordPress Core, themes and plugins, new features are added, bugs are fixed and security holes are filled to make your website even stronger, responsive and visitors-friendly.
Important Thing to Keep in Mind: Don’t be too hasty while updating themes, plugins and WordPress core because this might lead you to a technical disaster. In some cases, plugins start to conflict with each other and break your website thoroughly. Likewise, even expert developers leave loopholes during updating that turn out to be an easy entry for bugs to infiltrate into your website.
It is always important to have a backup for your website before you make updates because if something goes bad, you won’t have to be worried at all as you can use backup to diagnose clearly about what actually happened during the update.
3. Optimize your Database
Every website regardless of the size has a database and no website owner can overlook its importance. Since WordPress is a complete website content management system where data i.e., pages, blogs posts, and pages are stored in a database, it tends to gather junk information as well that is not needed after a while. What this does is, is it makes your websites speed slower because the database takes longer to load the pages and information. That’s why your database (if not taken care of) will become bloated. Following are the examples:
- If you press ‘Save Draft’, ‘Update’ and ‘Publish’ iteratively, then this adds up more irrelevant and redundant files in your database which becomes a headache later.
- Spam Comments
- Unused tags
Therefore, it is imperative that you should keep cleaning junk databases from your website to keep it healthy and fast.
The mantra is simple – a fast website = a clean database
4. Safeguard your Website with Malware Scan and Infection Removal Service
Safeguarding your website is like protecting your online reputation and business. If you can’t shield your website against threats, there is a possibility that hackers and malware could harm your site.
Although every WordPress hosting plan comes as a complete package, most of these packages fail to meet the security requirements. Therefore, the majority of WordPress users turn to plugins and tools to enhance the security of websites which don’t deliver required results as expected by the users.
Using firewalls and extra layers of authentication helps in keeping the hackers and malware at bay. But even with that, these security measures need to be upgraded and maintained from time to time. Moreover, sometimes, such security measures fail to detect malicious malware which is where you need proper monitoring of the website to keep it in check.
Many companies offer malware and infection removal services where they scan and monitor WordPress websites, and remove such elements that can destroy a website. So you can consider hiring one for your own benefit.
5. Keep your Website Speed Good
Speed has become one of the most crucial ranking factors across search engines. If you want your website to rank in search engines, you should run your website through speed tests to check whether it’s running fast or not. Though, speed test programs work to tell you which parts of your website should be improved for better performance, there are lots of improvements that can only be made with the help of technical assistance. Therefore, we’re offering a complete WordPress speed optimization service in which our team of experts use high-end technology to make your website load faster for top-notch performance. We use professionally-developed WordPress speed optimization performance analysis to help your site work flawlessly and speedily.
So, no matter how many images, plugins, and contents you have added into your website, you’ll not have to face any speed issue because we help WordPress sites become bigger, better and faster.
Concluding the Article - What are the Five Important WordPress Website Maintenance Services?
Website maintenance is a time-taking, energy-draining, and money-consuming task. Especially when it comes to WordPress site maintenance, you would have to be a tech genius to do it (although, there’re lots of plugins to help you maintain a website) but zero technical-know can turn into a blunder.
The five WordPress website maintenance services in this blog discussed are the most basic you can do to keep yourself ahead of the game of WordPress maintenance. These five WordPress website maintenance services will make your site fully updated, relevant and responsive to turn your leads into customers.
If you want more information on how you can maintain your WordPress website, reach out to us.