Strategic planning

After the initial euphoria about the new website, it is the website operator’s job to keep the website alive. What can you contribute yourself?

Perhaps the most important thing is to realize that not everything works “by itself.” Because it doesn’t, or only for a certain amount of time. It takes strategy and ongoing attention to keep a website up to date. Those who ignore this run the risk of losing their website.

Two things are important for a successful website:

1. On the one hand, it is about publishing new articles on a regular basis. These show the visitor that your business or website theme is active. The website can be compared to a shop window, which must be periodically adjusted.
2. On the other hand, it is also about the maintenance of the website. This post is specifically about maintaining your WordPress website and what it takes to do that. We offer this “maintenance as a service“, but anyone can do it themselves if they are willing to put in the time and learning effort. Here you will learn what you need to pay attention to.

Update of all components

Challenge: WordPress websites consist of many components and technologies. All these elements require care. One can think of further developments, adaptations to new operating systems, closing security gaps and the like. Question: How do I keep my website structure up-to-date?

Solution: Maintain regular updates. WordPress makes it especially easy to add updates and shows available updates directly. Because most websites work with a particularly large number of components (WordPress core, plug-ins, themes), you should check the website for new features and install them daily, or at least several times a week. Before each update, it is recommended to create a backup. An update can lead to incompatibilities between components in exceptional cases. It is important to remember that not every combination can be tested. So check your own website regularly.

Recommendation: Directly on the website itself or with a central solution like Updraft Central. The Easy Updates Manager plug-in is also helpful.

security

Challenge: The wide distribution of WordPress makes the platform attractive to hackers. Criminals try to gain access to websites. At the same time, the website itself is only a means to an end. People misuse the website to distribute malicious software, advertisements, or hijack the website so that it becomes part of a hacker network. Every website owner should be aware that websites are never 100% secure. Once the website is hacked, this can also indirectly harm one’s own company, for example by marking one’s own website out of “danger”. The following question should be asked: What are best practices to increase safety?

Solution: Installing and setting up a security plug-in. Regularly check settings and search for malicious software. Furthermore, regular backups are important.

Recommendation: iThemes Security.

Backups

Challenge: Websites are not unbreakable. It is a technical marvel, but that also makes it vulnerable. If one day a website stops working, one is glad to have a so-called “backup”, a copy of the website that may not be too old. Many hosting companies now have an automatic backup once a day. Additional security is provided by regular, approximately hourly backups to external servers.

Solution: Install and set up a backup solution. There are several plug-ins for WordPress that make this possible. Most of the time, they create a backup within the website. If you want to store this externally, it often requires paid solutions. It is worth investing in it, because such security is always cheaper than the long-term failure of the website.

Recommendation: Updraft Plus

Caching

Challenge: WordPress websites are built dynamically. In a web browser you always see HTML pages. This is the result of a complex process. Each page is built from different building blocks. This takes time, which slows down a website. The solution is called “caching”. The building blocks of each page are precalculated and already stored as HTML pages. When the website is accessed, these ready-made HTML pages are called, which is much faster.

Solution: Install and set up a caching solution. Some hosting companies have caching that can be turned on for websites. However, most websites require a plug-in. There are several ways to do this, which vary in how easy it is to set up, and not all of them are free.

Recommendation: WP Rocket

Image optimization

Challenge: Each image has a certain “weight” when a website is loaded. If you use large images, it makes a website slow. The question is: How can I get smaller files while maintaining the same image quality and size? There are, of course, various solutions for this. A minimum requirement is to set images to a standard dimension (like 1600px or 2000px on the longest side) even before uploading. This prevents you from uploading oversized images that have no place on the website. WordPress automatically creates different thumbnails and preview images from these original sizes after upload. In each case the best size is delivered automatically. However, if you want to optimize all these different image sizes, you can’t avoid a specialized solution.

Solution: There are several plug-ins that can optimize images.

Recommendation: ShortPixel