Maintaining your WordPress website is essential if you want to attract web visitors.
There are actually a couple of reasons why you need to maintain your WordPress website. They include;
- It helps to improve the functionality of your website
- It helps to keep your readers hooked to your website.
- Also, WordPress website maintenance is important if you want your users to have an exciting user experience.
1. Check Your Loading Speed
The loading speed of your website has been described by most experts as the primary measure of the functionality level of your site.
According to one of the many studies carried out on website visitor behaviour, it was discovered that about 52% of web users will immediately close a page if it loads too slow.
What does that tell you? Imagine if you were to lose 52% of your visitors because your website is too slow.
According to experts, it should not take your website over 3 minutes to load.
You may be thinking of ways you can check the speed of your site, not to worry, we will tell you.
Actually, there are a couple of ways to find out if your site is slow. You could have your visitors give feedback on their user experience or you could use another device to access your WordPress site.
To improve your loading speed, GTmetrix is one of the most modern and automatic ways to improve and check the speed level of your website.
Also, you will find it interesting to know that there are a couple of plugins you can integrate into your site to increase the loading speed.
2. Follow Best SEO Practices
As a website owner, you should be familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) if you want to reach out to your visitors and add value to their life through your content.
To determine if your SEO practices are working, it is best you that you carry out regular SEO audits. There are actually a couple of reasons for SEO auditing and they include;
- It helps to analyze your competition
- It gives you an idea of your website ranking
- SEO auditing helps to identify a couple of errors on your website
- It helps to fix broken links on your site
- It also helps to test the speed of loading your website
There are currently platforms that can help you audit your SEO to ensure that you are following the best practices. Some of the things to do to help you out include;
- Creating content with the right keywords.
- Being consistent
- If you’re keen on offering value to your visitors, you could delegate the content creation duty of your site to SEO experts.
Ubersuggest.com is an amazing platform to make use of.
3. Optimise Your Website Design For Mobile Devices
You are wondering how this affects WordPress care plan based in Christchurch. You will find it interesting to know that according to WARC, over 2 billion users access the internet via their mobile device.
This estimate proves that over 52% of internet users access it through their smartphones.
This is especially one of the reasons why you should have your website optimized for mobile devices.
Optimizing your website for mobile devices will enable your users to access your site, in the process increasing the number of site visitors you have.
Optimizing your site will also give your visitors an exciting browsing experience and may encourage them to visit next time they have a need.
You can make use of Google Mobile-Friendly Test to test your site.
4. Update Your WordPress Theme And Plugins
Your friends who own websites may have told you that there’s no need to update your plugin and theme.
If you want to maintain your WordPress site, then there’s every need for you to have your theme and plugin updated as often as possible.
Also to keeping your theme and plugins updated, you also need to update your blog content, landing pages, newsletters, images, as well as legal information.
One of the main reasons for updating your theme and plugins is to ensure that your users get the most out of your site.
Updated plugins will have more features that may further encourage your visitors to come back often.
For your blog content, updating and uploading new content and follow up images is important if you want to keep your visitors.
Your readers would want to see fresh content and images each time they log in to your site. Give them that!
5. Take Daily Backup
As a WordPress website owner, it is important that you take a daily backup so as not to overload your data.
Taking daily backups will help to free up the database and this is essential if you run a news website.
Daily backups back up the files that have been changed the day it was performed. One of the main features of daily backups is that it helps to save your data.
While there has been a misconception that daily backups will affect the user-friendliness of your website, it is a myth.
To keep your site accessible to your readers, it is of great importance that you do daily backups using UpdraftPlus WordPress Plugin
To make use of this, you have to download the Keep Backup Installation package. Extract the file from your computer then add to the WordPress site.
6. Protect Your WordPress Site
Ensuring that you take adequate security measures to protect your WordPress site is vital.
You must ensure that you change your default password from Admin/Admin to something stronger.
Ensure that this password is only known to you and don’t leave it written down lying around somewhere someone could stumble upon it.
Make sure you also use SSL security for further protection and check out some other high reputation tools to keep your site safe.
WordFence is a WordPress Plugin that has been identified to provide better security than cloud alternatives.
Over the years, cloud firewalls have been bypassed by hackers and have also suffered from many data leaks.
With over 3.5 billion attacks blocked by WordFence in the last month alone, it is the best security tool for your WordPress site.
7. Create Content That Solves The Problem Of Your Site Visitors
It has been revealed that for you to rank higher on Google search, you need to offer value to your readers.
Aside from the fact that you rank higher, providing your readers with helpful content will ensure that they come back.
Irrespective of the niche you find yourself, it is of utmost importance that you create helpful content that is capable of solving at least one of the many problems your readers have to deal with.
Depending on your niche, there are a couple of online websites that give you an idea of what your visitors want to know more about. Google Webmaster gets this job done.
The problem to solve must not be a global one, it could be a minor issue. Endeavour to give them valuable content.
Conclusion
We have discussed 7 steps you need to take to maintain your WordPress website.
These steps have been outlined for your own good, endeavour to make use of them if you want to continue offering value to your readers.
