No? Do you know what you actually need to be doing to keep your website - your most important digital asset - running smoothly and available to your users and customers?
For many businesses, thinking about maintenance and care of their website isn't something they worry about until they have a serious problem. What many don't realise is the fact that there's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into running a successful website.
This post will hopefully help you to understand why you need to be carrying out this work, and more importantly, what you should be doing on a regular basis to keep your WordPress website running smoothly.
Reasons why you need to take care of your WordPress Website
In today's world your presence on the internet is as important as your physical presence. Having a fully functional, secure website is vital to giving your visitors and customers the best introduction to your company and services.
Better Security
WordPress is open source, which is one of its greatest features; there are always new features and functionality being developed by the WordPress community. That said, this also leaves the platform open to the threat of being attacked by hackers.
Thankfully, the WordPress community is constantly working to counter the threat of hacking, offering regular updates to ensure the security of your website. It's really important to keep everything up-to-date to avoid putting not just your site at risk but also customer details and other sensitive information you may have on your website.
Speed and performance
A slow loading website is one of the biggest reasons visitors leave. There are many tools and plugins available for WordPress websites, which means you can optimise your website's performance.
As well as security improvements, software updates are constantly released to improve your website's speed and efficiency. Speed can be a major factor in search engine ranking so implementing these updates will help your website's search engine ranking position, as well as making a more efficient experience for your customers.
Compatibility
Nearly all WordPress websites use plugins to add additional functionality. These are produced and maintained by third party vendors and depending on how vigilant the plugin developer is with their updates, compatibility issues can arise with each new WordPress update. You need to keep both the WordPress core updated along with any plugins, and you need to perform quality testing with each update to ensure that nothing breaks and that performance does not suffer in a way that will impact users.
Also, you have no control over which browser or device is used when someone visits your website. When you launch your website it will work on all current major browsers and devices, but these too are regularly updated. Where the appearance and functionality of your website may have been perfect when you looked weeks or months ago, now your website layout may be broken.
Keeping your website up-to-date will mean that it will keep up with browser updates and continue to work as it was originally intended.
Less downtime
If you don't properly look after your website there is a very high chance that it will experience more downtime, meaning it won't be available to customers.
Any period of time your site isn't available is time where it's losing you money. The smallest thing can bring down an entire website, and if you're not constantly monitoring it these things can easily go unnoticed.
This is even more important if you're running an e-commerce website as nobody will be able to buy anything from you
How to take care of a WordPress website
Taking care of your WordPress website can either be done by you personally, or you can hire someone else to do all of the tasks that need to be done to ensure your website runs smoothly.
Hiring someone to take care of your website
WordPress Care Plans come in all shapes and sizes and, more importantly, cost. Expensive doesn't always mean good, and cheap doesn't always mean bad. When considering hiring someone to look after your website you need to look at the features on offer, how frequently tasks are carried out, and weigh them up against your own personal needs.
A quality WordPress care plan should - as a minimum - fulfil the following tasks:
- Managed WordPress core updates
- Managed theme updates
- Managed plugin updates
- Automated backups (at least daily)
- 24/7 uptime monitoring
- WordPress security
- Malware & virus scanning
- Broken link checking
- Performance monitoring
- Form testing
- Detailed reporting
Manually taking care of your website
Looking after all of the tasks required to ensure your website is running smoothly and trouble-free can be tedious, taking a large amount of your time, time that could be better spent looking after your business.
That said, if this is the approach you want to take the details below should help you keep on top of what you need to be doing.
1. WordPress core updates
Updates to WordPress are released on a regular basis, add both new functionality, bug fixes and security updates. These need to be tested and installed as soon as possible, especially if security issues have been addressed in the update, making this an indispensable part of your website care routine.
Installing updates without ensuring they're not going to break your website's functionality can be very time consuming, potentially requiring you to restore your website from your latest backup if things go very badly wrong.
2. Theme and plugin updates
Much like WordPress itself, developers release updates for their themes and plugins regularly too. These should be approached in exactly the same way as WordPress updates, testing them to ensure they don't break anything on your website before making them live on your site.
3. Regular backups
Most website hosting companies take backups of your files and database for you. Great, job done right? Well, no, not really. You shouldn't be relying on their backups as these aren't guaranteed to work or even to be retained that long. What would you do if something went wrong and they'd moved you to a new server, losing all of your previous backups? What if your hosting company suspended your account and deleted your site data?
Having an additional off-site backup is highly recommended as it protects you from relying on one single point of failure where you could lose everything.
There are many WordPress backup solutions out there - some free, some not - so you would need to look into their features (e.g. one-click restores, Dropbox/Google Drive integration, etc.) to see which fits best with your requirements. Once decided, this would need to be properly configured to ensure the integrity of your data in case you need to rely on it at some point.
Here at WordPress Administer we use WP Time Capsule for all of our backup needs as it offers an incremental backup solution, making the backup and recovery process quicker as it only needs to look at what's changed since the last backup.
4. Uptime monitoring
There are many solutions out there to keep an eye on your website, letting you know when it's no longer available to your visitors and customers. Again there are both free and paid for solutions so you would need to review them and pick one that meets your needs, e.g. checks your website every minute if you have a high availability requirement for your website, or text message alerts when something's wrong.
These are pretty easy to set up and use, but the real work happens when you get an alert that your website is no longer available. You would then have to spend the time investigating whether it was a bad update, hosting server issue, or something else causing the website to be offline.
When it comes to keeping on top of monitoring our clients' websites, we use UptimeRobot. Not only does it allow us to check your website's status every minute of every single day, it also checks the SSL status of the websites we take care of, meaning we'll immediately know if something goes wrong with the SSL certificates, which is a critical element in providing trust to your customers.
5. WordPress security
The security of your website should be your number 1 priority. Even the smallest hint of malware can seriously affect your website's reputation, and in turn the reputation of your business. Once lost this can be very difficult to get back again.
The best way to secure your website is to use a security plugin and a firewall. These need to be configured correctly to ensure the website functions correctly and visitors can do what they need to do on your website without problems, all the while protecting your files and database from malicious activities.
At WordPress Administer we take the security of your website extremely seriously, and as well as using a server-based WAF (Web Application Firewall) we also use various other security plugins to ensure the very best security at all times. We use ShieldPro on all of the websites we take care of for our clients as it provides excellent proactive tools to stop hackers and bad bots before they can do any harm.
Another part of website security is monitoring your website's user accounts. Hackers can gain access to your website through user accounts so you need to keep track on all of your user accounts, ensuring they are safe and secure. This can include the following:
- Enforcing strong passwords on all accounts
- Limit the number of admin accounts; set user account privileges appropriately when assigning user roles
- Delete old or inactive users
- Enable 2-factor authentication
6. Malware scanning
Nobody wants their website hacked, and no matter how many security measures you put in place nobody can 100% say that this will not happen at some point in time. So with that in mind you need to be checking your website for malware and viruses on a regular basis, daily is definitely the best.
Just finding malware is the easy bit. What do you do if the scan shows there's something bad on your website? Would you know how to remove it and clean up anything it's done? This can be very time consuming causing serious down time for your website.
7. Fix broken links
Broken links may not seem like the most important thing to be keeping on top of, but if there are broken links to your internal pages then these can affect the crawling and indexing of your website's content, and therefore affect your search rankings.
You need to be checking your entire website for broken links (both internal and external) and fixing any you find.
8. Performance monitoring
As we've previously said, a slow website will turn away potential customers and/or affect your search rankings, which is not what you want from your website. You need to be checking the performance of your website on a regular basis using tools like PageSpeed Insights.
Once you've run a test you then need to review the results and determine what - if anything - needs to be done to fix any issues that have been reported, implement the fixes and then re-test to make sure you see the expected improvements.
9. Testing all forms
The forms on your website are the way in which your customers interact with you, sending you messages, placing orders, asking for quotes, etc. If your forms aren't working properly then you could potentially lose customers and/or sales which is something you definitely don't want.
Manually test every form on your website to make sure that it functions properly, you get the expected success behaviour and more importantly, you receive the submission from the form. If something isn't working properly or you don't receive the message then you'll need to diagnose the problem and fix it.
10. Identify and delete spam
Spam can be a serious problem on a website, especially for high traction sites. If you allow comments on your site there's a good chance you've noticed that a lot of them are spam. Some are just random posts trying to promote something, but there are others with links that can be malicious and trick your visitors into giving away their information.
Having bad comments on your website can affect your credibility and potentially cause customers to lose trust in you. In order to get rid of all this spam, you need to delete these comments, but you should really be making sure that the comments are never allowed in the first place.
On the websites we look after we do a number of things to stop spam being added to the websites, one of which is to use CleanTalk which stops spam and bots without the use of annoying CAPTCHA tests, questions and answers, and other intrusive spam protection measures.
11. Delete inactive themes and plugins
Having inactive themes and plugins on your website may not seem like a big problem, but because these aren't actually being used they're probably never updated, and this can mean potential vulnerabilities are never fixed. These can then be exploited by hackers to gain access to your website, something you definitely don't want.
The best way to protect yourself from these vulnerabilities is to delete any themes or plugins that you are not using.
A word of warning around themes though. If you're using a child theme on your website you MUST NOT delete the main theme used by the child theme. This will show as being inactive but the active child theme utilises the main theme's files.
12. Optimise the database
The WordPress database is where all of your website's content is stored. Every page, post, comment and image on your website is stored in the database. Over time the database can end up storing a lot of redundant data in its tables and can start to slow down your website. That's why it's important to optimise your website's database regularly.
Your website is an investment
Websites can cost a lot of money, so it's understandable that you may not want to pay extra on top, but you really do need to treat your website like the investment it is. Like any other investment, your website needs to be looked after, even if this means additional ongoing costs.
Without looking after your website that big initial investment could essentially go to waste as your website becomes less usable over time due to malware, data bloat, unused plugins and themes, spam, and broken links. Because of this, you should be performing WordPress maintenance tasks regularly. Fixing issues as they appear can stop you facing even bigger problems down the line.
Get in touch
