There is a good chance your business has a website that is powered by WordPress, that’s probably why your here, but also since over 33% of websites on the internet are too.
Keeping your WordPress website maintained is important to:
- Keep it up to date and secure for malware/hackers – protecting your reputation.
- Make it super-fast – helping keep your visitors, improve bounce rate and search rankings.
- Stay optimised for search engines.
- Save you time & money, fixing issues early, before they potentially cause damage.
- Keep your website updated with new content and the latest trends.
But what does WordPress Maintenance really mean? Here are a few important things to do:
Frequent Software/Plugin Updates
Keeping your website up to date (including WordPress version and your plugins) can be extremely important to ensure your site performs at it’s best, and stays secure.
Occasionally a plugin (or WordPress) may release an important update which fixes a security bug that has been recently found. Once an important plugin or WordPress core update is released, which may fix a security bug, your site may become more vulnerable if it is not updated as soon as possible.
Not all plugin or WordPress updates are just fixing bugs & issues, they may also include improvements, performance updates, or brand new features.
WordPress Security
Keeping your website secure and protected against hackers is vital if you want to help protect your reputation and customer data.
Ontop of keeping plugins up to date, there are other things to keep in mind:
- You will want to implement some ways to prevent brute force login attacks on your website, for example limiting login attempts, or implementing a captcha on your login form.
- Make sure your account login usernames / passwords are unique and strong, this goes for any account you use online, whether it’s related to your business or not.
- Perform frequent security scans on your website to check for potential malware and hacks.
- Frequently monitor your website to make sure it has not been blacklisted as unsafe.
- Utilise intelligent IP blocking tools to block intruders before they even get to your site.
- Use secure website hosting.
- Use an SSL certificate.
- Monitor your website admin activity.
- Disallow file editing in admin.
- Frequently backup your website on a off-site location.
That’s just a few things to consider, there are still plenty of other small changes that can be made to help improve your security. Feel free to contact us for help with this.
Speed Optimisations
In most cases, an optimised website, is a fast website. Having a fast website is important to reduce your bounce rate, improve conversions, and also helps with SEO. If your website doesn’t load within 3 seconds, you could lose up to 53% of your visitors, before they even get to your site.
Frequently monitoring your website performance, and implementing optimisations such as GZIP Compression, Minification / Concatenation, Browser/Page Caching and Database Optimization are all important steps to take, if you want a superfast site!
Database Optimisations
Frequently optimising your WordPress website database clears out clutter, reduces your storage usage, and can help improve your site performance and response time.
Some simple database optimisations to start with could include clearing out data from old plugins, removing spam comments and deleting old post revisions.
Uptime Monitoring
Using an 24/7 uptime monitoring tool to constantly check your website, which alerts you if your website goes down, can be essential to make sure you know instantly if somethings gone wrong. You can then get it fixed as soon as possible.
After all, if your site goes down, that could mean lost visitors, leads or sales!
Fast & Reliable Hosting
Having fast, secure and reliable hosting, ideally Managed WordPress Hosting (not shared hosting), is one of the best decisions you can make for your website.
Although it may be slightly more expensive, managed WordPress hosting from the likes of Flywheel, Kinsta or WP Engine is far superior to the more basic shared hosting providers. (We use Flywheel to host our clients websites.)
Your website will be much faster & more reliable, with cloud based hosting, built in caching & dedicated resources (not shared), along with incredible enterprise grade security.
Managed WordPress Hosting is optionally available with all of our maintenance plans.
Automatic Cloud Backups
Automatic backups at-least daily, twice daily, or even hourly are absolutely essential to help protect your website and data, in-case of a bug, hack, or worst case accidental data loss or deletion.
Additionally, you should make sure your backups are stored on a secure off-site location. This means they are in no way connected to, or stored on your website hosting servers. This way, even if the worst happened to your hosting, you always have the backups saved elsewhere, ready to quickly restore & get your site back online!
Most website may never need to touch their backups, but it certainly gives you piece of mind knowing that if the worst ever happened, you’ve got yourself covered.
Weekly Checkups & Reports
Frequently reviewing and checking up on your overall website health, security and performance is definitely worth doing, even if it isn’t essential. This means you can spot any potential issues that may arise, and get them sorted much quicker.
For example, with our maintenance services, we will provide a weekly report of all the maintenance updates, backups, performance checks, security scans, and more which we have completed in the last week.
Keeping your content up to date
You may want to consider putting some time aside each week/month to work on potential changes or improvements for your site.
You should always keep your website content up to date as your business grows, your services change, or if you have made some recent announcements. This keeps your website looking fresh.
A good way to make your website feel more alive, is to setup a blog on your website, and post frequent news and updates about your business here. This can also help with your websites SEO – since you’ll have a greater chance at ranking for keywords related to your posts on search engines. You may also end up generating more backlinks from people linking to them, or receive increased traffic from social shares.
You could also consider hiring a copywriter to create unique content for your website, if this is something you need help with.
Optimise for Search Engines
Keeping your website well optimised for search engines, including your pages and new posts you publish, can be essential to help increase your search rankings, and gain new traffic & leads.
Installing and setting up an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Smartcrawl, and completing all suggested improvements these provide is a great place to start. Additionally running frequent SEO audits and rankings checkups on your site can be beneficial to help find potential SEO issues or improvements that could be made on an ongoing basis.
Let experts take care of your website…
Here at RelyWP, we take the stress & risk away from managing your website. We provide expert WordPress maintenance services with ongoing monthly plans, which are quick and easy to setup. Once you’ve selected and plan and signed up, we’ll take care of your WordPress website every day including ongoing support, changes, security, updates and much more.
Feel free to take a look at our WordPress Maintenance Plans for more information, or contact us today.