WordPress Experts Share Maintenance Tips To Keep Your Site In Shape
Remember the feel of that new website? Everything loaded within seconds. The site felt cozy and welcoming. The user journey was smooth and funnels were properly set up.
Is your website losing that charm?
Do you know that just like a car or home maintenance, our websites also require regular maintenance so that they can perform at their level best? Unfortunately, not everyone is familiar with WordPress website maintenance and even if people are, they simply don’t have the time to maintain their websites.
In this article, we are going to discuss some proven WordPress tips that can help you keep your WordPress-based websites in great shape. And, when we say ‘proven’ we mean tips that are from WordPress experts themselves.
So, let’s get started and see how your website maintenance can go one level up.
WordPress Expert Tips for Website Maintenance
If you are into WordPress management, you may already know some of these tips. Now it is time to follow them to keep your website in tip-top shape.
Always Keep Your CMS Updated
Almost every WordPress expert is united on the point that you need to always keep your CMS updated.
WordPress releases 10 major updates every year. Make sure that you update them on your website to remove any loopholes or backdoors.
Here is a list of stable updates that WordPress has released in the first five months of 2021. Make sure that you update them on your website. You can add them to your WordPress website by clicking on the ‘Updates’ button on the WordPress dashboard.
Keep a Backup of All Files
Next, make sure that you back up all data that is available on your WordPress website.
Most WordPress experts are of the view that the data of any website is everything. If a website loses its data, not only will it lose its worth but also rankings on search engines.
Just consider this. What if your data is wiped off from your website? What will you do if you don’t have a backup available? That is why it is important that you have a backup plugin that automatically backups all the data on your website on a regular basis. The best plugin that you can use to backup website data is the UpdraftPlus plugin.
The UpdraftPlus plugin makes sure that all the data on your website is fully backed up. You can also set it up to automatically save the backup to Google Drive or Dropbox.
>>> Get WordPress Experts to Manage Your WordPress Website. Book a Call Today
Use User-Friendly Hosting Solution
One of the most obvious ways to keep your WordPress website maintained is to use a user-friendly hosting solution. Most users host their websites on shared hosting solutions that don’t offer any support or flexibility to the users. User-friendly cloud hosting solutions on the other hand is a little more costly but they will value your website data. The support team will be prompt and reply to all your queries and will even keep backups of your website without you asking them.
They will also make sure that your hosting solution is properly maintained, using the right cache services, and offering optimum performance levels for your website.
Only Install Legit Plugins
Do you know rogue plugins can steal your website bandwidth and turn it into a proxy server? There have been many instances where rogue or illegitimate plugins have compromised the security of WordPress-based businesses. Most people call this the Japanese keyword hack/attack.
These occur because businesses install plugins from illegal websites and these plugins are often filled with malware.
To ensure that your website is not a target of this malware, you need to make sure that you only download plugins from the WordPress.org website. Other directories that you can use to install plugins on your website include Envato, CodeCanyon, and other legit websites that offer their own plugins.
>>> Don’t Have Time to Maintain Your WordPress Website? Give Us a Call!
Optimize Your WordPress Database
Although WordPress databases are considered to be self-optimized, most WordPress experts advise optimizing them regularly for website maintenance.
If optimizing the WordPress database sounds too daunting, you can use a WordPress database plugin to optimize your website. Download database plugins from the WordPress plugin directory. WP-Optimize and SG Optimizer are two great plugins that you can use to optimize WordPress databases.
You can also do WordPress database optimization manually with the following commands.
Limiting WordPress post revisions:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 10 )
Optimize WordPress Tables
OPTIMIZE TABLE ‘wp_posts’
Automatically Repair WordPress Database
define( ‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true );
Change WordPress Autosave Time
define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 160 ); // Seconds
Remove Server Errors
WordPress websites have a very good site architecture so server errors on these websites are minimum. With that said, there are always vulnerabilities that can lead to server errors. Server errors can cause site ranking fluctuations and WordPress experts advise resolving them on a regular basis.
The best way to resolve server errors on your website is by using Screaming Frog software. Download it on your system and then do a complete site audit.
The software will tell you about server-level errors starting from 5XX. You can point them out and then fix them from the Google Search Console.
Remove Broken Links
While we are at it, you can use the Screaming frog software to remove broken links from your website as well. The broken links you have on your website can cause a higher bounce rate and therefore give users a bad experience.
The 404 errors can be removed by fixing the pages that lead to them or by redirecting those pages to a customized 404 page. Similarly, you can also create redirection of all these 404 errors to the home or the search page.
The intent behind 404 errors is that they are a roadblock for the users. You don’t want that to happen therefore guide the users to the homepage or the search page from where they can go to their desired page.
Follow Core Web Vital Instructions for Performance
This one is the most crucial aspect of your WordPress website. WordPress experts and even lead generation experts have emphasized on the use of proper core web vital optimization time and time again.
So what you need to do to maintain your website performance is to follow the instructions of Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is a set of parameters by Google that measure a website’s engagement and performance ratio.
You can test your site’s performance with Google Lighthouse, Google page speed insights, and GTMetrix.
Bonus: Hire Website Maintenance Experts
Finally, if you are not able to maintain your website on a regular basis due to any reason, then why not hire a website maintenance expert? That’s where you need to be investing if you want to get more revenue from your website in the future.
WordPress website maintenance experts can help you keep a track of your website, optimize your rankings, and then create proper lead funnels that your visitors can use to convert.
If you are looking for WordPress website experts that can help you maintain your website, then we can help you with that. Get in touch with us to discuss your case.
The post WordPress Experts Share Maintenance Tips To Keep Your Site In Shape appeared first on WP Creative.