WordPress Support Services: 8 Tasks for successful WordPress Upkeep
To continue our WordPress Support Services theme we are going to go over 8 tasks for successful upkeep. We went over 4 key WordPress support focus areas, click here, that covered 4 areas you should focus to properly maintain your website. As part of any WordPress maintenance plan for your business you should include the following tasks that should be done on a regular basis:
8 WordPress Support Tasks
Update the WordPress Core
Update the Theme
Update Plugins
Make Off-site Backups
Security and Protection
Fix Broken and Dead Links
Eliminate Unused Plugins and Themes
Eliminate Spammy Comments
Continue reading below to learn more about these 8 tasks for successful WordPress support that should be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Task 1: Update the WordPress Core
Since WordPress is upgraded consistently, you can take advantage of new features, security fixes and speed updates. If you don’t upgrade the core, your website may suffer the loss of its security and stability. Accordingly, it won’t give you the necessary degree of performance and can negatively affect your search engine rankings.
Updating your WordPress Core seems like a simple task but may cause compatibility issues with your plugins and theme. When upgrading your WordPress core we recommend hiring and expert or performing all your upgrades on a staging site to prevent loss of service and decrease the chance of giving users a bad user experience.
Task 2: Update the Theme
The theme is what gives a specific look to your website and design options. Just like the core of WordPress, the themes are updated and improved regularly for better performance and security. If you use an outdated theme, it could reduce the functionality and security of your site. Similarly you should upgrade your theme first on a development site prior to upgrading your them on your live website.
There are times where a plugin and your upgraded theme will be incompatible and could cause loss of the plugins functionality or a complete crash of your website. For these reasons prior to any upgrade we recommend performing an off server backup right before you upgrade your website as a fail safe. This backup can be used to restore your site in a matter of minutes and prevent you from needing to pay an expensive hourly development fee to fix the issue.
Task 3: Update Plugins
Plugins are small bits of additional software that you can introduce on your WordPress site. They offer more features, improve the functionality of your website pages and help you manage your website. You can select from a thousands of WP plugins to do various tasks, for example, making structures, adding visual effects and even creating an ecommerce store.
Like the WordPress core updates and theme updates, plugins are enhanced and fixed on a regular basis. Depending on how many plugins you have installed you may find yourself updating plugin’s on a daily basis. Updating plugins as quickly as possible will assist you with forestalling security issues and malfunctions.
To continue updating your WordPress Core, Themes and Plugins is essential to your websites stability. A wrong move, bad upgrade or forgetting to upgrade puts your site at risk and can cause you to lose business. We see this occur time and time again when Website Owners forget these key tasks.
Task 4: Make Off-site Backups
WordPress is a steady platform; however, that doesn’t mean it is invincible, especially when managed by someone who is not an expert. A backup is like a redo button that can be pressed if you accidently brought down your website, or if you accidently break a feature. It is also a good hack recovery tool. For example, If a someone hacks your site and destroys essential information, you can use your off-site backups to reestablish the contents. A Off-site WordPress backup will spare you from disappointment as you won’t need to begin from scratch. You make off-site backups regularly, whether that be on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Contact us to learn more about Our Off-site backup options.
Task 5: Security and Protection
WordPress makes security a priority and spend many hours to provide a very secure product. Notwithstanding, hackers still find the latest ways to hack sites and introduce malware. Accordingly, you should monitor your site and ensure it’s protected and free of malware on a daily basis. The awful news is that major search engines will avoid sites that are infected with malware and your site might lose its appearance in search engines.
To these extent, you should make sure that your site is protected and secured by performing a daily security check on your website. Contact us to learn more about our automated and daily security checks.
Task 6: Fix Broken and Dead Links
If you have too many dead or broken links on your site, it might repel and frustrate your visitors. Frankly, broken links give a terrible impression of your site to its visitors, and they will believe you do not manage your site well and that it is not up to date. In this manner, you might need to examine your site and fix broken connections consistently. There are many ways to monitor your broken links on a regular basis. Branching Software’s support services can do this for you so you can focus on much more important things. Fixing these broken links will help keep your visitors from bouncing and keep them coming back for more.
Besides this, dead links can badly affect your search rankings. Having too many broken connections implies your site is stale and has destructive quality content. Google search console wants you to create a good customer experience and broken links do the opposite. Monitor your links constantly and fix any broken links as they appear.
Task 7: Eliminate Unused Plugins
Unused plugins can be a security risk and take up space that you don’t need on your site. The reason being is that these plugins can cause clashes and may negatively affect the functionality and the speed of your site. In this way, you should check all your plugins and dispose of the ones you don’t need. This situation will keep your site stable, and you shouldn’t have any concerns with performance and speed. Plus it will reduce the amount of plugins you will need to update saving you time each week.
Task 8: Eliminate Spammy Comments
If your WordPress website has a blog, you can create a lot of traffic, and build up your brand image. Besides this, your blogs remarks can offer some value and additional data for your visitors.
The issue is that unrelated or spammy comments negatively affect the reputation of your blog and can take people from your website. There are many bots or scammers that attempt to imbed links into their comments to try and get visitors to click. We recommend that you review your comments regularly and mark them as spam. One option is to use the review comments before posting feature built into the WordPress Core.
So, these are some WordPress support tasks that you need to follow if you have a WordPress site or blog to oversee. It can be overwhelming to consider performing all these tasks, for additional help, you can check out Branching Software’s WordPress support service or WordPress Maintenance Services. Our Utah webmasters can help save you time by performing all these task for you and give your site the expert attention it requires.