If you are having a WordPress website or looking to create a new one, you have to take care of its maintenance to keep the things smooth and run the site in a good condition.
Despite your purpose of using it, WordPress makes it easier to get things online without any knowledge of coding. While your main focus is on creating the content, design, and promotion activities, you also need to keep in focus the maintenance as well.
If you don’t pay heed to WordPress maintenance, it can negatively impact your site, such as slow loading of site and pages, poor security, poor user experience, decline in search engine rankings, etc.
Hence, the maintenance of your WordPress site is essential. In this article, we have mentioned how you can perform the maintenance and run your site smoother always.
1. Use the latest version of WordPress, ALWAYS
You should keep your WordPress website always up to date. This is because of several reasons and benefits. The latest version provides you access to all the new features and functionalities in WordPress, as well as bug fixes and other patches that can impact your website security. Not having the latest version can make your site vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Whenever a new version of WordPress becomes available, you get a notification in the header, from where you can take further steps and install it.
2. Keep the plugins and themes updated
When it comes to keeping things updated on WordPress site, the things mentioned in above point are also applicable to the plugins and themes you are using on your site.
Use of outdated themes and plugins works as a primary gateway for attackers to hack your site and use it for malicious purposes. In order to fix the vulnerabilities and bugs in the plugins and themes, the creators of those plugins keep on releasing regular updates. These updates should be taken seriously for stronger security and maintenance of your site.
Also, you should take care that you use plugins and themes from reliable and trustworthy sources and authors. Since there are thousands of such assets available in the WordPress repository, it doesn’t mean all of them are safe and secure to use.
3. Check comments and reply them
Blog posts on your site bring you a lot of traffic and genuine readers who might have queries or want to appreciate your work. For that, they comment on your blog posts. You should keep a track on all the comments on a regular basis to know if users are having any questions. Answer their queries in a polite manner and interact with them. If they have appreciated your work, thank and recognize them. This helps in driving engagement on your site and gaining more users.
It is highly recommended that you check the new comments every day so that users don’t have to wait for your reply for so long. When you reply them on time, they feel that you are taking things seriously. You can set a time for checking emails, social media interactions, along with comments on site to make processes smoother.
4. Regular backups
For any website or blog setup, you need to have the backups of your database on a regular basis. This is one of the most important and crucial part of WordPress maintenance because if your site faces any cyberattack, gets hacked, or anything goes wrong accidently, everything will be lost.
If you have backed up everything, you don’t have to worry about anything. Even if someone hacks your site and deletes everything on it, you can restore the site and roll out the backup in no time.
One thing you should always look for in your web hosting provider is whether they are providing you backup service or not. It would be really great if your hosting provider is taking care of your backups. If you are not getting backup service from them, then do it on your own. What you can do is turn on automatic backups of your site and then store the backed-up data to cloud or any other remote locations. You can also choose WordPress backup plugins like UpDraftPlus, VaultPress, BackupBuddy, Duplicator, etc.
5. Keep a track on Google Analytics
It is crucial to study and analyze your website through Google Analytics for better results. Google Analytics helps you understand what is working for you, which blog post or webpage is performing well, what is driving engagement, navigation, and more. Using these stats and data, you can modify your strategy, content, and other efforts to drive more traffic, and see more success.
Another positive side of Google Analytics for WordPress site maintenance is that it notifies you about the health of your website, errors on webpages, and other such things that negatively impact your site in the long run, as Google can penalize your site and affect SEO. That’s why you should check Google Analytics and analyze your site at least once a week.
6. Scan website for cyberthreats
You should scan your entire website weekly or monthly to detect malware or any other cyberthreats. Despite the implementation of best practices, no website is 100% secure. Thus, performing a scan can help you find threats, fix things, and avoid hacking attempts.
You can use security plugins like Sucuri, WordFence, Quttera for stronger security.
7. Fix broken links
If there are links on your site whose destination no longer exists because of removal of any post, images, webpages, or change in URL, then you have to fix this. Users visiting the broken links will see a 404 error, impacting user experience and SEO. You should check for broken links once a month to fix such errors.
Wrapping up:
Using the tips and methods mentioned above, you can maintain your WordPress site on your own. If you want to ensure improved user experience without hurting the SEO, and run the site smoothly, these methods are to be implemented on priority.
About The Author:
Mark Coleman is working as an Editor at MarkupTrend. He is a passionate writer and loves to share his knowledge with marketing community.
Introduction of WordPress
In the year of 2005, WordPress officially launched its Blog, it can be installed on web server either on the internal or network as well as with any remote server as well, one of the best part of its kind is to offering network setup which helps and meet so many requirements that most of the developers and bloggers can be satisfied.
Its considering not only Bloggers but also any stand alone websites and recently it has been declared that more than 60 million websites are using WordPress as heir native development. There are many developers you can easily find one of the most experienced and serious developers we refer is “BizzGang.com” and “VeravalOnline Incl” .
Infrastructure of WordPress
From the hosting prospects, WordPress doesn’t need any special plugins to your server and its very easy to maintain with any shared to dedicated servers, It is only devided in 4 main directories which are, wp-admin, wp-include, and wp-content, and rest of the files are on the home page, you can download from wordpress.org. When you see each of the directory have its own purpose, wp-admin helps to open the backend for users and admins, wp-include is the directory where all the wordpress core files are located and its something that helps WordPress to communicate while the wp-content is having all the themes and plugins that is necessary to stands up your website as WordPress sites,
Themes for the WordPress
As We know there are more than 60 millions websites are hosted with WordPress so themes are also popular as their numbers. You can find many free themes that is already into your Dashboard [Wp-admin] but we strongly recommend to buy or custom themes from Approved WordPress Premium theme sellers like, themforest.net, solostream.com and bizzgang.com. They have tremendous package and always offers package to suites your every requirements.
Plugins for WordPress
WordPress plugins are its addons that can be either download from your dashboard or again you can buy or custom them with many of the developers and companies. The best part of the plugins for WordPress is , they are very easily available and many of the resources and tested plugins are in the market that is always keep updating by their developers.
WordPress Updates
As you know technology and time they are competing each other and considering that, the WordPress developers and themes are always keep updating to make sure to suits the most compatibility and for security purpose. Mainly WordPress have three major things that is always updating, themes, plugins and WordPress framework by itself.
WordPress Security and Maintenance
Yes its famous and highly usable to many bloggers and website developers, due to that, there are always people to try new tricks and play with their own idea to break or twist the code which we call it “Hacking”, to maintain that protection WordPress is always keep updating and finding any new threats which come across and that is the main reason to keep having most updated version in any themes, plugins or framework.