WordPress provides you with an easy and flexible environment to have a fully customizable professional website. However, you need to maintain your WordPress site from time to time. What is meant by WordPress site maintenance? Why do you need it and what are the tips to help you?
What is meant by WordPress site maintenance?
It is the process through which problems within the WordPress site that occur permanently or suddenly are resolved to ensure that the site works and provides it with the expected user experience.
Without initiating this, the site may not display the content in the optimal way or contain some errors that affect the user experience and its ranking in search engines.
For example, internal link problems reduce the site's ranking in search engines at the same time when looking at content quality, download speed, and other aspects of the task and contributing to raising the quality of the WordPress site.
As the process of maintaining the WordPress site may require specific skills such as knowledge of programming languages, use of e-marketing tools, management and building of websites.
Why is it important to maintain a WordPress site?
The maintenance of the WordPress site must be permanent and continuous, and without taking this matter into account, it will negatively affect the website, and in the following lines we will learn about a group of reasons why the maintenance of the WordPress site is very important:
To improve the performance of the site
The first and important reason is that when the WordPress site is maintained periodically, this will reflect positively on improving the performance and speed of the site. If your WordPress site needs a longer loading time, then in this case you are losing visitors frequently, which negatively affects your site, and this also means that you will lose repeat sales.
- Improve site security
Your website is not secure unless you do the necessary updates and fixes for gaps and problems in time, and WordPress usually provides a set of updates that can reach 5 updates per year. Therefore, not paying attention to it will expose your site to the risk of hacking by cybercriminals, and all WordPress sites need security updates frequently.
- Improve user experience
User experience is an important aspect, and if the site provides a good user experience, then in this case it means that visits and sales will be higher. And the site's ranking in search engines will be improved. Here, attention should be paid to the problems of links, button locations, and the content visible to the user.
- Increase brand reputation
A brand is a representation of your business and a website is the channel through which that brand is reflected to users. Therefore, if the site design is bad, it will affect the reliability of the brand or even it cannot be communicated to the audience in the appropriate way. Poorly maintained websites usually contain many errors, broken links, dead pages, outdated content that presents an unprofessional image and can leave a bad impression on users.
Double revenue
If you sell products or services on your WordPress site, then in this case it is necessary to take care and maintain various aspects in order to double sales and revenues. And if you do not maintain your WordPress site, make sure that you will lose visits and sales, and thus reduce the amount of revenue that you would have earned.
Overcoming competitors
At the same time that you do not care about maintaining the website, your competitors are starting to improve their sites and solve the problems they suffer from. You should always think about the intensity of the competition between the website, and if you do not care about that, make sure that your competitors will outperform you.
Minimizing financial losses
Not only does your WordPress site not working mean that your brand is not perfect or that you do not provide the right quality of service, but it also means that you are incurring significant financial costs. And the longer the period of interruption from work, this negatively affected the site, and it incurred large financial losses.
WordPress website maintenance tips
WordPress site maintenance is a crucial factor for the site’s ranking on the results page, visits, sales, and profits. Therefore, it is necessary to take care of it to enhance your brand’s presence on the Internet and reach more audiences. Here are the most important WordPress site maintenance tips that you should keep in mind:
1- Update everything
The first tip we have to give you regarding WordPress site maintenance is that you should update your WordPress, themes, plugins, and other aspects to get a trouble-free and professional WordPress site. Many website owners and developers are afraid of these updates because they may change some of the website's functions, but you can remedy this by creating a sub-template.
In general, updates are the ideal way to get a WordPress site that is free from technical problems, and is able to protect itself from attacks and hackers and preserve its users' data. But by not paying attention to this part, you will leave the door open for hackers to tamper with your site.
Also, you should take care of taking a backup of your website every two weeks or monthly, and this will ensure that you do not lose much in the event that your site is hacked. Backup is very important as the hacker can delete or change anything on the site or add some malicious code, but by restoring the backup you will solve this type of problem and get your site back as it was.
2- Check broken links
Broken or broken links sabotage the user experience within the site, and prevent users or visitors from accessing the content they want to explore? It is also harmful to cause users to stop using the website. Also, it increases the bounce rate within the website because it causes users to leave immediately.
3- Redirect 404 stopped pages
Like broken links, dead pages have a negative impact on the site. Here, it must be redirected to other pages that contain similar content, and you can use an add-on such as Rank Math or Yost SEO. Another solution is to start customizing the parked page and exploiting it to market your brand. Or add some buttons to return the visitor to the home page, contact us page, or services page.
You should also add some personality. Use a different color scheme and add pictures. These help parked (404) pages look interesting and captivating. This will ensure that the user does not exit directly from the site to go to one of the pages attached to the stopping page.
4- Check and improve your site speed
When maintaining a WordPress site, the loading speed must be taken into account. Because it is one of the most important and influential elements of the user experience. To find sites with high speeds, they are ranked on the first pages of the search engine, compared to other sites whose speed is low.
The first piece of information you should have in mind in this case is that if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, then users will start honking and then exit the website immediately.
Rather, this matter will affect the site’s ranking in search engines, because Google prefers fast sites over slow ones, and to improve the speed of your WordPress site, here are these quick tips:
Enabling caching : Caching is a technology that keeps website pages on the user's device, which enables content to be viewed quickly, without the need to send requests to the server and wait for the page to load, at the same time reducing the number of requests and congestion on the server. Here you can use the WP Rocket web plugin .
Improving images : Images are among the necessary elements of the website that greatly improve the user experience, but at the same time they have a negative impact on the website, especially if they are not optimized in an appropriate manner. Image optimization is a way to reduce the file size of your images while maintaining their quality. Plugins like WP Smush and Optimole are tools for optimizing your WordPress site's visuals.
Benefit from lazy loading : Lazy loading technology improves website speed. When a visitor loads one of your pages, the site will pause downloading images and videos until the user passes over them. That, to reduce resources and pressure on the server.
5- Improving the security of the site
Just like any other content management system, WordPress site maintenance must include improving the site's security, because if the site is hacked, this means that the user experience will be bad and negatively affect the site's ranking in search engines. Even user data will be at risk of loss or theft, and here are a set of tips that must be followed to improve the security of the site:
Use a security plugin : The first thing you should do in order to maintain your WordPress site from a security point of view, is to install a plugin like WordFence to protect your site from malware.
Use a strong password : WordPress, the hosting account, and the domain name all need passwords to create an account and access it. At this point, you must pay attention to specifying a strong password, especially for WordPress. Any passwords such as “123456” are not ideal and will expose your site to the risk of being hacked.
Enable Two-Factor Authentication : To add an additional layer of protection on the WordPress site, in this case it is necessary to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to ensure that you log in to your website using your password and other means. Other means could be a text message, phone call, or a one-time password (OTP).
6- Monitor user activity
If you use WordPress with multiple users or sites, then in this case it is necessary to monitor the activity of each user separately, so when some users make a mistake within the site, in this case you will be able to detect it proactively before the matter escalates.
To know when the error occurred and the IP address from where the change originated. All of this information is crucial when trying to troubleshoot the problem before it's too late. WP Activity Log is a good plugin that is useful for this. Not only does it track user activity, but it also helps detect suspicious behavior and prevent hacking of your WordPress site.
The extension also supports a set of important aspects such as file changes and keeping a history of changes made on the site so that you are aware of them.
7- Troubleshoot site errors
While initiating the maintenance of the WordPress site, you must pay attention to measuring the performance of the website, and identifying errors within the site, whether in links, codes, speed, and other aspects. Here, you can use a range of plugins to troubleshoot your website.
8- Backup the WordPress site
Periodic backup of the WordPress site is an important aspect of ensuring its correct and continuous operation. Through it, you can retrieve the form and data of the site as it was, even if it was modified by hackers or vandals. To ensure that your site is always in front of users.
You can copy your site manually or by using an add-on or relying on the backup provided by hosting companies such as Bluehost and others.
In general, copying the WordPress site will make you permanently on the safe side while keeping your site working permanently without any downtime or downtime, and it also helps developers to easily fix errors and address outstanding problems within the site.
9- Delete unnecessary files
It is common in all WordPress sites to find a set of redundant or unwanted files, and therefore some problems may occur through the accumulation of these files in the site's databases to reduce its speed and decrease its expected performance. If these files are left untreated, it will negatively affect its performance or may stop it from working completely.
Hence, it is necessary to search and remove these files by going to the site files via the cpanel control panel and removing them periodically, and this process will facilitate many aspects for you. In the beginning, you will be following the sources of these files and the places where they are stored periodically.
In addition to software and plugin files, visual media files can also fill up the storage space allocated to a website. Therefore, for the periodic maintenance of the WordPress site, all unused and stored images and videos must be removed. Because it consumes server resources and reduces the performance of the site and with the passage of time may cause it to stop working completely.
It is also important to remove unused plugins and templates that are stored in the website bases, as they consume server resources and thus reduce the speed and performance of the site and are a heavy load when backing up the site and affect the security of the site because they may be used as a channel or port to hack the site.
10- Update the content
Although the technical maintenance of the WordPress site is very important, at the same time it is necessary to pay attention to the maintenance of the site in terms of the marketing aspect, and here the content is one of the most important elements that must be taken into account permanently. Therefore, it is necessary to update it from time to time. Here, you should ask a set of questions, as follows:
- Is the homepage still complete?
- What about misspellings in the site's content?
- Is the information within the blog updated and accurate?
- Are all the dates listed on your website still current?
- What about users' interaction with and suggestions on the content?
- How often should a WordPress site be maintained?
WordPress site maintenance will ensure that you get a professional and problem-free website, in addition to that, it is necessary that the website maintenance process be permanent and therefore you must have a clear plan for maintaining your site, and if you are wondering what you should do, here is a mini plan:
- Weekly tasks
- Verify that your pages are loading without errors.
- Log in to WP Admin to check for available updates and other alerts.
- Update WordPress, plugins, and themes.
- Check that backups are created regularly.
- Monthly tasks
- Check the results of your security and malware scan.
- Check site performance.
- Quarterly assignments
- Examine the results of the security and malware scan.
- Uptime checking and performance monitoring data.
- Monitor performance, uptime, and virus protection data.
- Annual assignments
- Review any paid subscriptions, such as hosting accounts and tools.
- Renew the domain names associated with your site.
- Review your site's design and decide if you want to update it.
WordPress site maintenance
site maintenance
WordPress site maintenance errors
Many website owners and developers make many mistakes that negatively affect the impact of WordPress, and in the following lines we will explore the most important of these errors and how you can remedy them:
Indifference to backup : When designing and launching a WordPress site, the common mistake is not taking a backup copy of the site, and thus this matter will expose the site to danger, and the site cannot be restored in the event of an error or change in some aspects. Backups are very important to keep the site working normally.
Lack of interest in site security : When maintaining a WordPress site, attention is focused only on the appearance of the site, building and repairing links, and other aspects, while neglecting the security of the site, which is an important aspect. Because you do not want to lose your website or participate in the theft of site users' data, which puts you at risk of legal action.
Neglecting WordPress updates : Updates are an important aspect when considering the maintenance of the WordPress site, as it includes many security improvements and solving problems and vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers to access the site illegally.
Install a lot of plugins : Plugins make your website unique and easy to use while adding the features you want, but using them too much will negatively affect the speed and security of the site at the same time. What necessitates that you choose them carefully and remove redundant additions.
Using bad hosting : Choosing a bad hosting will negatively affect the site and increase errors, so the website will slow down and stop working at times, and make sure that your hosting provides daily backups and good customer service.
Not maintaining the site regularly : The big mistake that some people make is that they do not set out to develop a plan for maintaining their WordPress site; What negatively affects the site, especially in the event of a sudden problem, in which case it cannot be resolved for some long time, which requires you to follow up on errors and fix them up-to-date to get an error-free WordPress site.
The best WordPress website maintenance plugins
Because the maintenance of the WordPress site is very important, it has developed a set of plugins to help you maintain the website, and in the following lines we will learn about the most important of them:
Add Under Construction Page
A custom plugin to create a maintenance mode on the WordPress site and hide it from users for some time while it is being repaired or changing codes. It is one of the best WordPress site maintenance plugins supported by the WordPress community. It is very fast and has an easy and smooth user interface to enable each user to set up their own maintenance page as they see fit.
The plugin also comes with a set of powerful features that include an automated email response via MailChimp, so you can easily collect emails and communicate with the public regarding site maintenance. With the display of the date and time of the site's return from work, with a set of ready-made templates for a professional maintenance page. And for search engine optimization, it allows you to add a title and description to the page, while enabling tracking via Google Analytics.
Sucuri add
I prefer a free plugin for securing and maintaining a WordPress site, one of the popular plugins among developers and owners of WordPress sites because it provides an easy user interface. At the same time, it offers you a paid version to get more features. To get started:
- Clean up your WordPress site from redundant files.
- Protect the site with a firewall from brute force attacks.
- File integrity monitoring and malware scanning (and of course malware removal).
- Track everything that happens on your site, including file changes, recent logins, and failed login attempts.
- It increases the loading speed of the site and improves its performance.
- Serves static content from their CDN servers.
- Add WPScan Security
One of the popular WordPress site maintenance plugins is that it uses a large database to protect the website from suspicious visitors and vulnerabilities, while updating and scanning the site periodically to search for more than 21,000 security vulnerabilities. It is also possible to schedule the daily examination process and receive notifications by mail for all reports and statistics collected.
The extension comes with a free plan but you can get the paid version to experience more features and enjoy higher website security.
Add UpdraftPlus
When talking about the maintenance of the WordPress site, in this case it is necessary to refer to the backup of the site, and this is what UpdraftPlus offers you. As it backs up the site to obtain a strong line of defense for all risks to which it is exposed, for example, stopping the site, conflicting additions, or errors occurring when updates and other aspects.
It offers you a range of options from manual to automatic transcription and for free. At the same time, you have the opportunity to get the paid version to get more features and functions to enhance the security of the site. The extension also stores the backup in a range of backup systems such as Dropbox, Microsoft Azure, and UpdraftPlus Vault.
Helping you maintain WordPress
Maintenance assistance
Let us help you maintain your WordPress site
Some may think that after opening a new site only on it, it may only publish content or some details. Unfortunately, here comes the biggest mistake, because the truth and correct thing is that the process of maintaining a WordPress site that you own is much more important than that you stuff the site with content, the benefit of which will be zero in the event that there are errors here or there . So let us help you if you need any help with that, and together we will do what can be done for your site. You can write to us immediately through any of the social media available on the site here, which can be found at the bottom or next to the page here. Or you can send a message now through our page from here, and we will be happy to respond to you as soon as possible.
Conclusion
WordPress site maintenance is an important aspect that you should start with on a regular basis. As it contributes to obtaining a problem-free and fast site to improve user experience and increase its ranking in search engines to reap more visits and conversions.
Is it possible to activate WordPress maintenance mode?
Yes, you can do that by adding the Under Construction Page to provide a good user experience and the necessary information for your audience about your site and collecting emails.
When should I maintain my WordPress site?
The maintenance process must be periodic on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis, to ensure that the site works permanently because any downtime affects the commercial activity.
Do I start maintaining the WordPress site myself, or do I hire a developer?
This matter depends on the extent of your experience and skill in maintaining the WordPress site. If you have good experience, then in this case you can evaluate it yourself, but if it is the other way around, you must hire a developer.
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