WordPress website maintenance is a necessary part of owning a WordPress website.
It ensures your websites functionality, increases your sites security and has an overall positive effect on your website visitors experience.
But what is WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress Maintenance is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the actions you take to maintain the functionality of your website.
At a minimum, this includes:
- Keeping your website theme and plugins up to date
- Keeping your WordPress and PHP versions up to date.
- Keeping your hosting provider, domain and licenses registered and up to date.
We recommend it also include:
- Daily backups of your website and database
- Doing regular malware and security scans
- Monitoring site performance (like site speed)
- Visual Inspection of your website
- Checking that all forms and buttons are working correctly
- Monitoring broken links
- Monitoring uptime
Why is it important?
KEEPING YOUR THEME, PLUGINS, WORDPRESS AND PHP UP TO DATE:
As new features are released, and new security loopholes are discovered, WordPress, themes and plugins release updates to ensure compatibility and help with security. By keeping these things up to date, you are reducing your odds of having functionality or security issues.
And without your. hosting provider, domain and licenses being kept up to date and paid for, your site won’t run as it’s suppose to, or won’t work at all.
DAILY BACKUPS
We recommend daily backups of your website and database because if anything goes wrong, whether it be a plugin updates and a function on your site breaks, or you get hacked, you can easily revert back to a previous verson. This simple feature can save you weeks of stress and wasted time.
MALWARE AND SECURITY SCANS
If your site gets hacked, or malware is hosted on it, it will effect your site speed, could contain offensive content that might deter site visitors and could get you blacklisted (which you never, ever, ever want to happen to your site). The sooner you find out you’ve been compromised, the faster you can fix it and hopefully prevent issues (we recommend reverting back to a previous verson with one of those daily backups and then changing your passwords immediately!).
MONITORING SITE PERFORMANCE
Site performance has a huge effect on your site visitors experience, as well as site speed. Both of these also effect your search engine rankings. We recommend a monthly performance evaluation, so that you can fix any potential issues right away.
VISUAL INSPECTION OF YOUR WEBSITE
Sometimes when you perform an update, things break because of plugin compatibility or because a feature is no longer supported. Anytime you do maintenance, we highly recommend a visual inspection so that you can catch anything before your site visitors do.
CHECKING FORMS AND BUTTONS
We recommend doing this during. your visual inspection. Because nothing is worse than finding out your contact form hasn’t been working for three months. Check it monthly to ensure you’re getting your leads!
MONITORING BROKEN LINKS
Whenever you change a url, or someone links to a URL that doesn’t exist (it happens more often than you think), your site visitors will get your 404 page. This doesn’t envoke a ton of confident in your site. So, it’s important to monitor broken links and create redirects to ensure they have an ultimal website experience.
MONITOR UPTIME
Ever go to a website and it’s down? Most of the time the site owner doesn’t have a clue. Does your site ever go down? You’ll only know if someone tells you or you are monitoring. We once tried out a new hosting company, only to find out our site was down 10% of the time. 10%!!!! We quickly switched over to a better host that gives us 100% uptime, but had we not been monitoring, we wouldn’t have known how much business we were losing.
