Friday 20 January 2017
WordPress website maintenance checklist
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Website maintenance is necessary just like maintaining your car or a bike. Without website maintenance your online business will not run for a long time of period, as your website need fresh content to manage its ranking and popularity in popular search engines, . But, are you taking your website maintenance seriously?
In this article we will discuss important points on how to
maintain your WordPress Website. So you can increase your return on investment.
Here’s a website maintenance checklist to get you started.
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WordPress
Version Updates
After the creation of website on WordPress platform, updating
WordPress to the latest
and newest version is most important job. As soon as latest version of
WordPress is released, users of WordPress receive an update message via email
and as well as in your WordPress Admin Area. To update WordPress version, click
the link in this message like shown in the picture below:
WordPress Plugin Updates
You can see WordPress Plugin update on the Dashboard screen,
an alert on the Plugin's menu title, and on the Plugin page. Click on update
and Follow the instructions to update the Plugin.
In case, if updated WordPress Plugin is not compatible with
your version of WordPress contact the Plugin author and share complete error
details directly.
Check for
Broken Links
There is lots of tools on internet which can find 404 errors
(Broken Links), Xenu is one of them,
it can find all broken images, CSS and JS files and 404 pages, keeping 404
error pages on your website is a huge SEO risk, because broken links frustrate
users which cause them to leave your website and in a result your search engine
rankings goes down.
301
Redirect for broken links
You can also use 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file for your 404 broken
links, or you can also use Simple 301
Redirects (a WordPress plugin) to
easily redirect all 404 errors to some other related pages.
Setting up WordPress
security
Updating WordPress and its plugins is the part of WordPress
security, but this is not enough to secure your website from hackers around the
world. You should need to apply some more security features so that no one can
hack your website easily.
Website Loading
Time Optimization
Slow loading websites frustrates users and search engine as
well, which causes decline in search engine rankings. You can analyze your
website on GT Metrix and Google Speed Test and remove all
possible issues you can, this will improve your website loading speed.
Keep your website loading time less 3 seconds, and remove all
useless images, CSS and JS files from your website which causes high loading
time.
Optimizing
your database
Optimization and cleaning your WordPress website database
can also increase your website loading time. WP-Optimize is the best plugin for this job with 500,000+ active
installs, this plugin will clean up your database quickly and easily.
Create Website
Backups
If it is not possible for you to create a backup of your
website every 15 days then make it once in a month, creating backup is
necessary because sometimes in a rush you delete your website files or it also
possible that your website stop working due to WordPress update or any other unknown
reason or it is also possible that someone hack your website and delete all
files and mess around your website, in this case you can restore your website
using backup files and database.
Search
Engine Optimization
SEO is the basic part for running your business online, keep
some good title and meta tags, add some fresh content and images weekly or on monthly
basis regarding your services or products, and always keep an eye on your top
competitors.
If you are not a complete technical in maintaining your
website, do not worry. But at least took some basic knowledge of website
maintenance and basic SEO, so that no one can make you fool. Hire some good organization which gives you good
results.
Analytics
Always keep an eye on your website, create a GA (Google Analytics) account. It helps you
highlight the most important metrics for your website.
Also, signing up for Google Webmaster account gives you more details about your website,
like Search Analytics, Links to Your Site and Crawl Errors are the most important
features.
Final
Checkup
After trying all of the above website maintenance steps, take a look at your website functionality and design like filling out contact forms, HTML, CSS and jQuery styles and functionality.
Consider this website maintenance checklist as a starting point. You can surely dig deeper in any one of these areas for security and search engine rankings. For more free updates, questions and queries contact us at Digital Pixels.
This post was written by: Digital Pixels
Digital Pixels offers affordable responsive web design services and development solution using advanced techniques. Get a custom website starting from $650.
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1 Responses to “WordPress website maintenance checklist”
15 February 2017 at 01:14
Thanks for sharing your view on this, it is really very useful.
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