Wordpress Maintenance: Should You Take The Responsibility?

On many occasions, companies and startups reach a point where the need to digitize their company and create their website, usually to save costs they develop it in WordPress tools, without having much knowledge about web maintenance, and all that entails. As a matter of fact, you can launch a website with WordPress in just over five minutes!

After you have made a good investment in your WordPress free site, you need to have everything in order and keep a regular check of all files and security. This is where web maintenance is of great importance. Would you trust yourself as a client of a website that has security issues? Or would you trust a website that contains broken links or distorted images? As a company in addition to missing a visit, you may also lose a customer.

It is of little use to have a very elaborate and worked website. Considering if we have outdated data within it or we do not know anything about the behaviour of the users who visit it if we cannot implement new improvements, services and functionalities.

What Is Daily WordPress Maintenance?

Web maintenance requires some essential tasks, and we have prepared a list of tasks that we think are optimal for proper web maintenance:

• The first thing is security; we must eliminate any vulnerability on our website or at least activate filters that guarantee it.
• Assignment of permissions to the files hosted on your hosting with particular attention to the access file.
• Bug fixes and repairing broken links.
• Review of the correct functioning of all the functionalities of the website.
• Sitemap.xml and robots.txt review
• Optimization of loading speed. Time-consuming websites are a turn-off.
• Review of the proper functioning of forms and subscriptions.
• In the case of WordPress, updating themes and plugins as well as the CMS itself.
• Installation of the Google Analytics code Google Search console to be able to monitor all the data that users leave behind them when browsing your website.
• Review of metadata, the titles and descriptions that we provide to our URLs are essential for Google and users to interpret what they will find correctly; it can also increase your CTR and position you better.

All these tasks guarantee the correct functioning of a web page and allow the proper operation of all the strategies that are being carried out on it, lead capture, landing pages or web positioning.

Run Backups

41% of WordPress attacks occur due to inadequate site maintenance. The most important task that needs to be done once a day is the backup of the blog database. This will avoid losing your data (entries and configuration) in case of disaster. Unless you publish once a week, you should schedule this once a day. To do this, you can use the WordPress plugins BackupBuddy or WP Time Capsule for instance. Secondly, you must keep an eye on the alerts that the security plugin sends you daily.

Once the plugin is installed, configure the options to protect your blog as much as possible. In your email, you will receive the alerts corresponding to unauthorized access and attempted violations.

Update Plugins & Themes

Website updation is always essential. Plugins and themes are often updated very frequently. In principle, try to update them once a week, if versions of them have been released. Unless the new versions affect security, it will work with that weekly update.

As indicated before, to know which plugins and themes you have to update, go to «Desktop> Updates. From that page, select all plugins or themes; and click on “Update Plugins” or “Update Themes”.

Database Optimization

Another task that must be performed weekly is the optimization and cleaning of the database. The WP-OPTIMIZE plugin is an excellent way to automate that optimization. This plugin deletes, among other things, the revisions of publications in your database, so you can use Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions to optimize the database after removing items from it.

If you do not automate this work, you can do it manually by going to the “Database” tab and then, under the “Optimizations” tab, click on the “Run optimization” button in all those sections in which elements are indicated by optimized.

Error Handling In Search Console

Search Console is a tool that allows us to detect SEO errors. Daily you can receive notifications by mail if a problem occurs. Search Console also warns if your website is recognized to violate any of the Google search quality guidelines. Weekly WordPress maintenance includes a review of the status of the site in the Search Console.

Check out the status of Search Console, as it is the easiest way to check the status of your website quickly:

• Make sure that the errors on the website are not increasing
• Checking HTML errors with the option Search Aspect > HTML Improvements
• Monitor and correct crawl errors, indexing status and sitemap, in Google Search Console.

Indexing Status

This is one of the factors that you should pay special attention to. Ideally, the number of pages sent should be equal to the indexed pages. The objective is not to display a message in «Details» indicating that there are pages sent and not indexed. There may be indexes that have not been submitted on the sitemap. To analyze this data, go to the “Coverage” option of Search Console.
If you detect too many pages sent but not indexed, then there is a possible indexing problem on your website. Start, in that case, checking your robots.txt file and any errors that can be seen in the Search Console.

Google Analytics Analysis

Weekly, you should obtain reports about visits to your blog in case something needs to be corrected. With Google Analytics, you will be able to extract a lot of information. More than categorical data, what matters is to know the relationship between these values ​​and determinants of the health of your blog as the time that a visitor stays in it.

Create a basic dashboard in your Google Analytics account following the instructions you will find in the introduction to Google Analytics and its metrics.

Hosting Resource Consumption

And, finally, an essential point in the maintenance of WordPress is to monitor the consumption of CPUs and scripts executed throughout the week. For this, you can use the information and graphics provided in CPanel, in the left column.

How Can You Manage Everything On Your Own?

Many content creators and bloggers are occupied with full-time jobs, or that running their online ventures prevents them from dedicating enough time in site maintenance procedures. This is why website managed services and hosting is growing popular, as it allows the content creators to sit back, relax, and let the hosting provider manage everything using their expertise and resources with minimal website maintenance fees. In this regard, The WP Help is remarkably popular for offering full-fledged site management covering aspects of security, maintenance, and growth. The platform has helped a number of content creators to leverage their potential and channel their focus and resources in what they are good at.

Conclusion

Proper maintenance of WordPress site is mandatory now. A website under maintenance should also be carefully handled as in to not mess up anything in the backend. Failure to do so can result in complications and risks which are costly in effect. WordPress developers and experts urge bloggers and content creators to take it seriously and be wary of all affairs relating to their site.