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WordPress Maintenance – What is it and do you need it?

What is WordPress Maintenance? Why you need a Maintenance Plan?

Maintaining your WordPress website is one of the most important tasks that need to be undertaken. However, the amount of focus that is given on the development part, its maintenance is somewhat neglected. In most cases, website owners think about maintaining a website as a burden and not a necessity. This will have a negative impact on your website by increasing the potential of it being hacked, reduced load speeds and a decrease in search engine rankings. Most of the serious website owners hire companies like FixRunner to do their WP maintenance tasks, but if you don’t have the budget for that, you can learn, in this blog post, how to do some of the tasks on your own.

Below are some of the ways in which the maintenance of a WordPress website is done. This will make you aware of what actually is WordPress maintenance and the ways to implement it.

 

Regular Backing Up

Backing up your website at regular intervals is one of the foremost requirements for the maintenance of your WordPress website. Neglecting this aspect can cause serious troubles for you. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are implementing a crucial module on your website and suddenly due to some unforeseen reason you lose all your data. Backing up your data will make you deal with such an uncontrollable situation.

In recent times, automatic backups have eased off the entire process of taking manual backups. WordPress has very high-rated plugins that will automatically backup the data for you and simplify the whole process.

 

Updating WordPress 

WordPress is famous for releasing software updates at regular intervals. The updates are released for centrally for WordPress along with all the themes and plugins that have already been installed by you. In order to make your website function in the best possible manner, you will have to install the updates. Not updating, will cause a serious threat to the security of your website as it will lead to a potential of getting attacked by hackers.

 

Maintaining Database

Maintaining your database is really important especially if you are running a website that generates loads of traffic. The size of your database, frequency of changes made and the environment of your server also matter. A regular maintenance of your database will enable you to significantly increase the load time of your website and also decrease the occurrence of database errors.

WordPress has a wide range of plugins that will allow you to keep your database updated and clean. Most of the plugins will offer you the same functionality. However, you can choose any of them that suit your requirements. Some of the popular plugins are WP-Optimize, WP DBManager, WP Sweep, etc.

 

Stop Comment Spamming

Most of the times comments are posted for boosting SEO and generate the sales leads. These comments include links that have no relation to your post and will add no value to it. One of the best ways to get hold of this plague is to completely stop it before it hits your website. WordPress has a number of useful plugins that will help you to get a control of this situation.

However, one of the best solutions would be to disable comments. A plugin named ‘Disable Comments’ will completely disable comments on the site-wide basis.

 

WordPress Maintenance Benefits

Let’s take a look at the benefits of WordPress maintenance:

To Make It More Secure

WordPress as an open source platform provides a huge opportunity to developers for implementing new features and innovations. No other platform will give you such a freedom like WordPress. However, along with this comes the constant threat of getting attacked by hackers. In order to deal with such a situation, there are many developers that are constantly trying very hard to improve and maintain the security of WordPress. Regular updates are provided to the WordPress users in order to keep it safe.

Many of the WordPress users install a wide variety of themes and plugins that are available for them in free. However, these plugins and themes also need to be updated otherwise they would also come under the attack of malicious items. Having a proper maintenance plan in place will enable you to ensure the proper functioning of your website and also keep it bug-free.

Because Your Website Needs Updating

WordPress as a website building platform is scalable in nature. It will give you the opportunity to revamp your website according to your business. You cannot use a website with the same design and features for rest of your life. The same goes with your business. In order to make your business grow, you will have to widen its scope.

There will be something or the other that you would want to enhance your website. In order to perform this in a well-defined manner, you will have to implement a WordPress maintenance plan. The plan could be a monthly or a quarterly one.

To Make Website More Accessible

The main purpose your website is to make it accessible to your visitors. There is no point in having a website that shows error on the homepage itself. No user would want to visit such a website again. This could in return be very bad for your business.

Your website is not only made up of one or two components. There are many modules that make up a website. Depending on the functionalities of your website you will need to have a maintenance plan in place. Having a faulty website will make you lose your present and potential customers.

 

Conclusion

The above article gives a detailed description of WordPress maintenance and the need to have a maintenance plan. So, if you have a website that has been developed in WordPress, the above-mentioned points will be very useful for you. Following all the WordPress maintenance steps will enable you to keep your website functioning efficiently and smoothly for many years.