Maintenance is a necessary part of everything around us. Whether it’s things like a car, a house, or even a website, they all need to be maintained somehow. Now, you may be wondering, “What is the point of maintenance on my WordPress site if it already works?”
Don’t fret; we’ll explain it all. We’ll show you why your website needs maintenance to continue functioning and how to do it.
The plugins that make up your WordPress site are constantly updated by their developers, whether for new features or optimization. Because of these updates, plugins can occasionally stop functioning or cause an error when it’s mixed with other plugins and WordPress.
With that being said, imagine if your WordPress website is running 15 or more plugins. If they are mostly outdated, your website can run into all sorts of problems and security vulnerabilities if left unchecked. These outdated plugins can result in website errors, text and image errors, and other potentially critical issues.
Performing routine maintenance on your website isn’t as difficult as you think! We’ll cover some good ways to get started.
The first thing you should always do is make a backup of your WordPress site. That way, all your current data and settings are saved before going into maintenance.
Updates can change your website and its functionality, meaning text and elements may get moved around or break entirely, or worse. Backing up your website is a critical step in case anything goes wrong.
The next thing you’ll need to do is begin updating the plugins on your website. After updating each plugin, check your site and see if anything has changed or broken before continuing to the next plugin. You should be checking for things such as a loss of data, images, and text being broken or a general slowdown of your site.
Let’s assume your WordPress website hasn’t been updated in a long time. It’s been abandoned, for lack of a better term.
While you’re performing updates, you may run into a myriad of changes due to how outdated your plugins have become.
These changes can affect the structure of your website, as we’ve covered before. Shifted text and images, images rendering at the wrong size, and sections being rearranged are all possible. Thankfully, these aesthetic issues tend to be easy to fix most of the time.
Another problem could be that some of these plugins affect different critical settings for your site’s operation. Plugins that affect site security should constantly be updated appropriately to ensure that a malicious attack does not compromise your website.
Data loss can also be an issue, but this is less predictable and difficult to resolve than the others. If something like this happens, you’ll need to use the backup of your website that you made earlier to recover the lost data.
WordPress is a powerful content creation tool that has taken the world by storm. The platform is used to power more than 50 million websites. But like all other content management tools, you’ll need plugins, themes, and other tools to make things look perfect and help your brand shine.
Unfortunately, these types of tools can slow things down regardless of your content management system (CMS).
To make sure your site’s content is being indexed and ranked by search engines, it’s a good idea to perform an occasional search of your site.
You can do this by entering site:yoursite.com in the search bar on Google, or you can use a more advanced tool such as Yoast SEO which will find broken links, and duplicate content. You can perform other tasks that are essential for ensuring that your website presents a good user experience and is compatible with search engines.
As we’ve seen, there are plenty of ways that could affect your WordPress website when performing maintenance. Some of these issues would be difficult to resolve for those who aren’t adequately trained or equipped to deal with them, so many companies prefer to offload this work to a third party, such as WordPress Gang. These services often take all the headaches of updating and resolving issues away from you, so you can focus on growing your business or online presence.
This brings some excellent benefits to your site, such as:
These benefits and more will help give you peace of mind and allow you to keep working on what’s really important: The growth of your company.
Remember that your website is one of your best tools in today’s world, and you have to take care of it so it can flourish. Don’t leave maintenance as an afterthought, as it can seriously impact your website and your business if left unattended.
WordPress Gang has you covered year-round if you need to hire a company to perform routine maintenance on your WordPress site or just don’t know how to do it.