•How to Maintain a WordPress Website?

Maintain a WordPress Website: If you want to host a successful WordPress site, you need to maintain its core functionality, installed plugins/themes, and other aspects on a regular basis. No doubt, WordPress is a great platform, but maintenance is a key that will keep you going longer across the global market.

However, maintaining a WordPress site is one of the tedious tasks, but it will help you know your efficiency, keep you updated with the latest technologies and most importantly, it remains safe and secure. So make sure you follow the right maintenance tactics that will boost the security, performance, and functionality of your site to a great extent. So, let’s take a look:

• Backup your site regularly: This is the most vital thing that you need to do periodically. Although backing up doesn’t keep your website fresh and clean, it helps if something goes wrong as you can revert to a previous version immediately. Backup your WordPress site every month. You can also backup your blogs daily, while weekly backups are suitable for corporate websites. You can back-up your site via your hosting provider or by downloading a local copy of your site through FTP.

• Keep your site up-to-date: If you want to maintain your website, you should update your core WordPress, installed themes, and plugins to its latest version frequently. Fortunately, WordPress rolls out its latest version 4.6 often to offer their users more advanced features and security fixes.

All you need is to log in to your WordPress site every month and update the core WP, themes, and plugins.

• Delete Unused Plugins: WordPress plugins are a great way to extend the functionality of the site. But using too many plugins could affect the performance as well as the security of a website.

If you want a successful site, you need to remove all those plugins that you haven’t used till now. In short, get rid of the plugins that you don’t need. For that, you first need to deactivate the plugin and then delete it. But before this, take a look at every plugin you have installed to find out the unused plugins.

• Optimize your database: A database is a place where all your site content is stored. It includes your blog posts, pages, images, videos, setting, and much more. As your site grows, your database begins to get bloated, which in turn slows down the speed of your website.

If you want to improve the performance of your site, you need to optimize your database. With the help of WordPress plugin (such as WP-Optimize that will automatically optimize your database and clears records that are now not required), you can optimize the database of your site and enhance its speed.

• Focus on your site’s security: Most of the WordPress users overlook the safety of their website. But it is one of the crucial factors that need to be considered. If you want to secure your site from hackers and other security threats, you need to install a reliable security plugin. You can use the iThemes Security plugin that will protect your website from hackers within a few clicks. You should also use a Sucuri service to monitor your site.

• Keep an eye on your site’s speed: If you want to attract more visitors, you need to provide them fast loading pages. This means the rate of a site directly affects the ranking of your website on search engines. Google prefers fast-loading sites. So, you should know the loading speed of your site.

Luckily, there is Google’s PageSpeed Insights that offers a tool to grade your site’s load time, and then provides tips to improve it. You can install this tool and improve the performance of your website within a few clicks.

• Manage user accounts: The security of your site is also based on the aspect of how you manage your user accounts. Most of the website owners doll out their site’s password and leave it vulnerable. If you are a newbie user, you should avoid giving your login details to your multiple users. Each user should have their login and password details as it provides more security to the site.

Apart from this, make sure you don’t use the “admin” username for your WP account. Try to swap the default username with the new and unique one. You can also use the lengthy and difficult-to-break password. Plus, you can also change the URL of your login page if you want to protect your site from hackers and other security threats.

Conclusion:

Maintain a WordPress Website: WordPress is the undisputed champ of content management systems, which is why there’s never been a better time to learn how to use it. In just ten steps (and some careful research and planning), you can get your first WordPress website up and running! Good luck!