If you have created a website that means you have done your half job. The other half job will be done if you have included site maintenance on your WordPress website.
Remember that if you have done with WordPress website creation that means you have only worked on 1st phase because a WordPress website needs maintenance for a long life.
Website maintenance is just like a building structure that needs maintenance from time to time and it can be done by cleaning, sprucing, and other small renovation works.
In the same way, the website needs to be maintained and it can be done by enhancing security, taking back up of data, removing unwanted plugins and features, etc.
If you ignore or fail to do maintenance of your website then there are high chances of being your website hacked which will result in poor SEO ranking and lower speed.
The only solution to this serious problem is maintaining your website regularly. Scroll down to know why the WordPress websites needs maintenance.
Table of Contents
1. Security
Security is the most important aspect of a WordPress website therefore it is necessary to keep your website secure and updated. Currently, more than 30% of websites are based on the WordPress platform.
WordPress has huge competition in the web world. Because most of the large-scale-based and small-scale-based companies prefer the WordPress platforms to show their online presence.
This is the reason why WordPress is the easiest target for hackers and spammers. They can easily hack your credential information, add malicious code, thieves data, and more.
Because WordPress is an open-source platform therefore any type of user can easily check the source code and can know how it works. Plus with WordPress hacking data becomes easy because hackers can find a way to hack data without any prior permission.
To give a solution to this major problem, the WordPress communities are working continuously. Plus they are trying to enhance the security level so that no outside user can hack your website.
They extend the security level of WordPress in the form of new WordPress updates. Therefore WordPress website needs maintenance.
Some website owners like to create a website from scratch whereas some like to create a website with a WordPress theme and enhance functionality with plugins.
Many of the themes and plugins are accessible free of cost. So these two factors can lead to website hacking therefore you should make sure that you are using updated themes and plugins to improve security and prevent the website from being hacked.
Maintain the plan by keeping your themes, plugins, and website updated while freeing you from security problems.
2. Speed
No user likes to spend time on such a website that takes much time to get their content loaded nor will a user wait for a second on such a website.
Speed is not just needed to engage more users but also good speed and performance are needed to increase the ranking on search engines.
Even one single plugin or theme can result in lower website speed and low SEO ranking. An outdated plugin or a slow-speed website can be responsible for unresponsive design results.
WordPress and developer communities are trying hard to make some advancements that can make your website speed faster. Hence they have developed some plugins that will help you to optimize multimedia content including images and videos.
With these plugins, you can improve your website speed and performance. This is the main reason why the WordPress website needs maintenance.
3. Good search engine ranking
Deciding keywords related to your industries is the only half portion of the work you have done to get rank on search engines.
This is a fact that most website owners are not aware that the WordPress website needs maintenance to get higher rankings on search engines. This is the most common mistake that they make. High rankings not only depend on searching high-quality keywords but also on demand on the website speed, website design, maintenance, and speed.
Quality content is the most important aspect of the Google algorithm. Therefore you should include good content to your website to make it updated and maintained.
You can secure high rankings on search engines if you have added high-quality videos, pictures, blog, and articles. This strategy will help you to enhance more user traffic and improve conversion rates.
Maintenance in the form of content means you have to regularly check on updating and managing content, pictures, text, videos, etc.
4. Greater the brand identity
Suppose you have been using WordPress version 4 for a long time now you decided to update the WordPress version to the latest one i.e. 5.4.
The idea of updating the website to 5.4 is not bad but remember you will miss the updates that were done in between WordPress versions 4 and 5.4. Therefore never be too late to update your website because it can lead you to major problems.
The number of times you maintain your website will generate good results. Do not ignore the major fact that your website is the main mirror of your brand identity.
You will face lower in page ranking if your search engine encounters broken links, technical errors, outdated content, unwanted pages, and unresponsive design that can also lead to a bad user experience. To improve brand identity, consider these factors.
5. Long term money saving
Not updating and maintaining the website regularly can lead to a higher risk by which you can’t get the expected revenue. There is a huge competition in the web world so you can’t neglect even a single factor that can badly risk business growth.
Maintaining your business at an early stage means you are minimizing the risk factor which will also save you lots of money and valuable time. You would not need to hire any expert developer or designer to safeguard your website from hackers.
Steps to follow for website maintenance
If you don’t have the required amount to hire an expert developer to protect your website from attackers then you should follow these simple steps.
Step 1: Backup your website data
The main step to maintaining your WordPress website is to first take a backup of your data. Suppose something wrong is happening on your website which means your website is messed up, gone forever, or had some broken further repairs.
If this type of problem occurs, then website backup will help you to restore all your previous data.
WordPress platform will give you an abundance of options to backup data in a proper way. Free and paid options are available to get it done.
Free plugins will allow you to backup data manually whereas some will automatically update the data. But the plugins which offer automatic data backups and restore cost much more than normal plugins.
But here is also one solution. You can store data on the hosting server. These processes will make your data fetch easier and quicker.
Step 2: Update your WordPress themes, core, and plugins regularly
WordPress community and third-party developers constantly keep updating WordPress hence they make new advancements in plugins and themes which increase security and remove bugs from your website.
New advancement in the previous version means new code is added to the WordPress hence you need to apply changes on your website. When a new update is release then also make sure to update all plugins and themes.
You can follow this process to make your updating effective
* First, update the plugins
* Then update themes
* And then update the core or large components
But if you are updating all these multiple components then also there is a risk to get your website cash. While updating multiple components sometimes plugins also get destroyed which can harm your website data badly.
For this, you should first backup your website data. In case if your website gets crash you will have a backup option to restore all your previous data.
Step 3: Improve your WordPress database
All know that WordPress is a database-driven platform. that means all the data is stored in the database including text content, blog, post, pages, etc. At certain points, the database becomes overflowing with a large number of files and lots of information.
Some files that can be a problem for your server are deleted pages and posts, unused tags and categories, spam comments unapproved messages, etc.
The more time you take to delete those files can harm your server badly which can result in poor performance therefore the WordPress website needs maintenance.
Hence you need to optimize your WordPress database
* You can optimize the website database with WP-Sweep
This plugin will remove or delete such unwanted posts and pages from your WordPress database
6. Run speed test
If you want to check your website speed and performance then you can make use of some tools. With such tools, you can check which files are getting into the problem and where you can improve the speed.
Some changes are nontechnical based which means you can resolve them on your own if it seems tough then contact the developer or hire an SEO specialist they will help you out.
The tools that will test the speed are
* Pingdom, YSlow, Google PageSpeed Insights.
Conclusion:
Maintaining a website regularly is not an easy task but it is doable by anyone. No user needs to be an expert for website maintenance.
By updating tools, plugins, and themes you can prevent your WordPress website from being hacked but you can’t compete with your competitors in the search engines to make it possible you need to hire an expert to perform SEO.
