7 ways to keep your WordPress website working

by | May 17, 2021 | Marketing

WordPress is, without doubt, a great platform on which to build your business website, but maintenance is key to ensuring it continues performing at its best.

Whether you have spent a lot of money on a web designer or a lot of time building it yourself, your business website is a major investment.

And like all other major investments, it is important that you give it the care and attention it deserves to ensure it continues to pay dividends rather than become a liability.

Without checking in regularly you are not only wasting the potential that regular front-end updates mean for marketing your business, but you could be leaving your website open to security threats and other performance issues.

The end result could be a disaster for your business.

Here are Red Shoes’ essential maintenance tips to keep your WordPress website safe and in working order:

Backup your site regularly

This is vital. It means that if something goes wrong you have a “clean” version of your website that you can revert to.

It is highly recommended that you ensure your entire website is backed up at least once a month.

However, this means that you run the risk of losing a month’s worth of content if something does go wrong, so if you are adding new blogs or images regularly it is worth backing those up weekly or even daily.

You can back up your site via your hosting provider or by downloading a copy via ftp.

WordPress also offers a stunning array of plugins that will automatically back up and restore our site.

Keep your site up-to-date

It is important to ensure that your core WordPress installation, as well as all plugins and themes are kept up to date and that the newest versions are installed.

WordPress rolls out a new version regularly to offer users more advanced features and security fixes.

By failing to keep your site up to date you could potentially be leaving it open to a malware attack, which could be disastrous for your website and have a negative impact on your business.

It’s very easy to ensure your site’s up to date by logging in to your WordPress dashboard.

Delete unused plugins

WordPress plugins bring all kinds of useful and exciting functionality to WordPress websites, but using too many – or ones that just don’t play nicely together – could affect the performance and security of your site.  

It’s always a good idea to sift through your plugins and remove those you do not use and get rid of the ones you don’t need.

Optimize your database

A database is a place where all your site content is stored. It includes your blog posts, pages, images, videos, setting and much more. As your site grows, your database can begin to get a bit bloated and slow down your site.

Again there are plugins available which can help you optimise your database and get rid of records that are no longer needed. These can also remove things like spam comment and unwanted draft posts.

Keep an eye on your site’s speed

You need speed! If you want to attract more visitors, fast loading pages are a crucial element of ensuring they stick around rather than looking for the info they need elsewhere. 

Speed is a key factor in the algorithm Google uses to determine search engine rankings, so it’s worth looking at the loading speed of your site.

You can find out yours and get tips to improve it by using Google’s Page Speed tool, which you can install in just a few clicks.

Manage user accounts

The security of your site could be compromised from within if you are a bit too free and easy with administrator access to your site. Many website owners do not seem to worry about dishing out their login details to all and sundry – leaving themselves open to all sorts of problems.

Each user should have their own login and password details as it gives more security to the site.

You should also make sure you don’t use “admin” username for your WP account. Try to swap the default username with the new and unique one. You can also use the lengthy and difficult-to-break password. Plus, you can also change the URL of your login page if you want to protect your site from hackers and other security threats.

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