3 Ways Business Can Maintain Their WordPress Website
Staying on top of your WordPress website is important for many reasons. It keeps your website functional, minimizes the risks of hacks, improves your site’s load speed, and improves your search engine ranking. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to maintain their WordPress site because it feels more like an unnecessary task rather than something that is required for a business.
Not only does routine maintenance reduce the number of site vulnerabilities but it improves the users’ experience. For this reason, we’re going to show you 3 ways you can maintain your WordPress Website today.
1. Stay Up-to-Date on WordPress Plugins and Theme Updates
Many business owners find updating themes and plugins to be tedious work. However, keeping these things updated poses more benefits for your website than you might realize. For starters, keeping your WordPress theme updated ensures that your website is always compatible with releases.
When sites aren’t compatible with new releases, certain issues arise such as plugins that are no longer maintained by developers, leading to poor performance. Additionally, this can cause an issue for business owners who want to edit pages that were previously published.
Aside from this, updating your WordPress theme keeps your website safe. An outdated website leads to vulnerabilities and makes it easier for hackers to infect the servers. Additionally, an updated site will remain compatible with the latest browser updates and mobile devices, ensuring that the user experience is always optimal.
Businesses also need to keep their WordPress Plugins updated. Just like the website, plugins are vulnerable to hackers too. Along with this, plugins aren’t always compatible and will eventually begin to negatively impact your entire site.
Updating your WordPress Theme and Plugins
The good news is, updating your WordPress website is rather simple. The first thing that site owners should do is back up their website. A backup will store all of your information so that if something goes wrong with the update your information is secure. For sites that are using WordPress 3.7+, automatic updates for minor and security updates occur.
Site owners can also conduct One-click updates. You simply update by going to the Dashboard > Update Screen. When you go to the “Update WordPress” page, click update now.
If these options aren’t available, site owners have the option to conduct a manual update. Manual updating takes a little more time. However, WordPress has provided a comprehensive walkthrough to help site owners navigate their manual updates.
2. Use Security Plugins
Another method for maintaining your WordPress website is by utilizing security plugins. Security plugins not only keep you safe as a business but secures your customers’ information as well. For instance, many WordPress sites have Login Pages. These pages are also one of the most tempting targets for hackers.
Taking advantage of a security plugin helps strengthen the core of your site’s security. Many security plugins take specific measures to block hackers from accessing important data about you and your site users.
Some business owners feel that securing their site themselves is sufficient. It is true that taking certain precautions will keep your site relatively safe such as keeping your theme and plugins updated, using strong passwords, limiting user access, and installing an SSL certificate. However, nothing beats having a plugin that is dedicated to reducing your site vulnerabilities and scanning for potential risks.
Choosing a Security Plugin
WordFence Security is a plugin powered by WordPress that helps businesses secure their website at all ends. This plugin offers things such as two-factor verification, login page CAPTCHA that prevents bots from logging in, and blocking logins for administrators using known compromised passwords.
Additionally, WordFence allows site owners to assess the security status of all of their websites in one seamless view, highly configured alerts, and track important security events pertaining to your website. Even more, Wordfence uses source code verification to help individuals recover from any hacks they were vulnerable to. The plugin will tell you what changed in WordPress core, theme, and plugins file and then help to repair them.
3. Use a Backup Plugin
Another key to maintaining your WordPress website is through backup plugins. Backing up your website is important because it allows you to restore your website to a point in which you weren’t experiencing issues. What this means is that it not only helps you deal with issues such as security threats but other technical issues such as hardware failure.
Backing up gives you the chance to store important files and prevent data loss, maintain client relationships by storing their information, and simply offering you peace of mind from vulnerabilities that can compromise sensitive information. So what information should you backup?
- WordPress Core Files: This makes up the appearance and functionality of the WordPress platform.
- Database: Website data is stored here.
- Wp-content Folder: This contains important files such as your themes, plugins, and uploads.
Choosing a Backup Plugin
There are many backup plugins available through WordPress. One plugin that works really well for site owners is Updraft Plus. This powerful plugin works to backup, restore, and clone.
With Updraft Plus, users can perform complete manual or scheduled backups of all of your databases, plugins, themes, and WordPress files. This plugin also offers convenient plugin schedules with every 4, 8, or 12 hours updates every day, week, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Alongside this, site owners can encrypt sensitive information such as their customer’s information. Additionally, users can receive fast, personal support to help manage the plugin.
Next Steps
Maintaining your WordPress website is very important for your business. Conducting regular updates and maintenance ensures that your site is always running at full capacity. This not only makes running your business go a lot more smoothly but it improves the user experience, which increases your brand’s reputation.
We understand that work sometimes gets in the way. If you would like help from Campfire in maintaining your WordPress site, visit us to check out our Pilot Light Monthly Maintenance Package. In addition, feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns regarding your website maintenance.