Keeping your WordPress Site maintained and updated
is critical. According to the survey carried out in October 2015, it was found that around 59% users did not use the latest version of WordPress available. Not only is this staggering figure alarming, but it is also disturbing as using old forms make WordPress a hassle. So why bother with updating and maintaining your WordPress?
For starters, WordPress updates nearly always bring great new themes, improved appearances and a more fluid, professional outlook. This makes your blog look better and more professional in contrast to using the old versions. If you are into content marketing, online marketing, appearances play a great role in making an impression on clients. The first thing clients will see is your WordPress page and to see it in an updated state would play a negative role in your career as it shows that you do not stay updated on things.
Secondly, the newer versions have better security so it keeps your site protected. Not only this, but if your page is threatened, or compromised, then search engines rank, such websites lower resulting in less visitors which again will cause business disruption. Some people form the habit of compiling updates and then update months later. It is time-consuming and also easier.
Keeping your WordPress Site maintained and updated
The risk of getting attacked by hackers is high during a large update process. So doing it in a timely manner helps much more. Be smart in selecting the plugins that you actually want and that are made by reputable people and companies. For instance, you may find countless plugin updates, but you do not need to download them all. Consider them only if someone credible created the plugins, if here are no issues reported with it and if your version of WordPress supports it.
WordPress Site Maintenance is more than Cosmetic
Remember that many of the updates to WordPress are more than cosmetic. The behind the scenes changes to the WordPress codec can be vast and though invisible to the naked eye (on the front end) they are important. However the bad guys think that those changes are also important. When a new version of WordPress is released the bad guy hackers are tearing the code apart and looking for a way to break into your version of WordPress. This is why keeping your WordPress Site maintained and updated is crucial to the security of your website.
The themes are very important in improving the general outlook of your website, thus helping in your content marketing so do download the new themes. However, we would advise that you always make a backup before updating to the new theme. In fact Smack smog encourages you to backup your website on a very regular basis. We like to use Backup Buddy for our backups. The name is a little goofy but it works like a charm. How often you should backup your site is up to you. If you blog and get comments on a regular basis we suggest that you do daily backups of your database and perhaps a full backup weekly. However only you can determine how often your site should be backed up.
BiWeekly Updates
We recommend doing bi-weekly updates as this is more effective and easier.
Updating your website also helps in the maintenance of it, however, this is also something you should take care of at an individual level. First and foremost, make a backup of your entire website, of your files and database. This will automatically keep track of every single user, comment your blog has ever had. If your site gets hacked or your database erased, this backup will help you a great deal. You will not have to begin from the scratch losing all your customers and making your online marketing greatly suffer. If you fear losing out on your data because of updating, then you may test the updates on your test site before you try it on your live website. You may also set up a test site through your WordPress hosting provider.
How often does it happen to us that we open a website and if it takes too long to load or keeps giving errors of ‘Page Unavailable’, we close it in exasperation? Quite often most probably. The reason is that no one wants to visit a site or a blog that is slow, heavy on the bandwidth and then has multiple broken links. As a blogger or a website owner on WordPress, you should monitor your website’s performance on a regular basis. There are several tools available online that can help you out with this. For instance GTMetrix scans your website and determines the average time taken to open a page. It then gives you a feedback report on what changes you can make and what tweaks you should do to make your website faster and more responsive. Another useful tool is WP-optimised. As you keep adding to your website, it grows in size and may become slow. So this tool optimizes your database, removing content you do not need. Unnecessary plug-ins also slow down your website a great deal so remove the ones you do not need.
Broken Links…
Broken links are something Google and other search engines greatly hate. This brings your site down on the search engine results; something that could greatly affect your content marketing statistics. To overcome this, you may do a regular crawl of the website and find out which links do it work and then remove them.
Check your-on-page-SEOs and keep them precise whenever you publish a post. We like to suggest that our clients use Yoast SEO as a guide to creating solid content for the readers. Do not neglect this for a few articles as it may lead to a load of work gathering that needs revision. Follow the guidelines to make your posts SEO enhanced correctly as it helps in landing you better we search engine results ranking that often determine the online marketing status for you.
A great way to keep your website maintenance up to its best form is to use a monitoring service like Pingdom. It constantly checks if your website is online or not and alerts you via email, text or Twitter to elf you know if it has gone offline. This allows you to immediately spot the issue that has arisen and fix it accordingly. You do not suffer from much marketing time loss this way too.
Monitor your Website
Lastly, monitor your website for any security errors or shortcomings daily. This helps you to detect the smallest of glitches or security issues at the earliest possible time. Not only will this help you take effective measures immediately, but also prevent any harmful effects this could have had on your Serval engine rankings, website functionality and overall performance. Downloading a security plugin also helps greatly in this regard, such as ‘All in One WP Security and Firewall‘. You may also put in your URL in Sucuri which scans for malware, checks blacklist status and makes sure your WordPress version is updated too.
Therefore, to continue to lead the way for your online marketing you need to make sure that your website is optimized in every way possible. While this can only be achieved by constant maintenance and updating your website, it requires a certain amount of vigilance from you too. The end results are so rewarding that this minor effort from your side feels like nothing. So keep your market game on top by taking care of WordPress website through and through!
