The Importance of WordPress Maintenance

How do you keep yourself healthy? You probably eat well, exercise, maintain good hygiene, and take the time to regularly visit your doctor to monitor your health. You can think of your WordPress website the same way. To keep it healthy, you need to feed it new content, maintain the platform and the plugins it runs on, and monitor it often.

There’s a common misconception that once you launch a new WordPress site, all the work is done. For many reasons, WordPress maintenance is crucial for a stable and properly functioning website. Regular WordPress maintenance ensures your site visitors have the best user experience while learning more about your business. Your website is one of the most important components of your digital marketing efforts. Consistent WordPress maintenance allows you to preserve, protect, and improve upon this invaluable marketing asset.

WordPress Updates

WordPress releases an update every two months, on average. These upgrades fix bugs, improve functionality, and address security issues. Overlooking these updates impact how your audience interacts with your site. By regularly updating your site, you greatly reduce the chances of a visitor experiencing issues when they are browsing your company’s website.  

WordPress plugins are updated by the individual developers who created each one. Updates for these individual plugins happen on their own schedule. Not every plugin plays nice after you install a new version of the WordPress platform. You will want to monitor your plugins carefully and always do a backup of your site before updating a plugin in case there is a conflict.  

Site Security

Nothing scares away site traffic like a malware warning. Hackers are finding new vulnerabilities daily so it’s necessary to monitor your site’s security with daily WordPress maintenance. Every day, you’ll want to perform a security check as well as set systems in place to be alerted when a possible incident has occurred.

Backup Data

As much as you intend to regularly backup your site, this task falls by the wayside when immediate client needs and other business demands occur. This is another reason why regular WordPress maintenance is so important. Whether your site has been compromised or an update has gone south, being able to restore your site from a backup is key to minimizing downtime. As a best practice, you’ll want to backup your site at least once a week.

Usage Insights

Web analytics enable you to discover a wealth of knowledge about your potential customers. It also gives you the ability to measure and improve your site performance. At least once a month, you should be reviewing your site analytics to learn about site traffic, SEO rankings, social media reach, site performance and more.

Site Performance

Another component of website maintenance is testing your site performance. If your site is slow to load or lacks an expected feature, your users will navigate away quick and in a hurry. Site testing allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your site performance and is a key element in maintaining your WordPress site.

SEO

Outdated content, broken links, and non-working forms decrease trust with potential customers and hurt your search engine ranking and your site conversions. As you perform WordPress maintenance, you’ll want to be vigilant about identifying these issues, and make fixes as soon as possible so as not to disrupt your user experience or SEO ranking.

You only trust a medical expert with your health. The same idea applies to your WordPress maintenance. Work with experienced, trusted WordPress professionals to regularly maintain your site. Contact Proactive WP today to discuss WordPress maintenance for your organization’s website.