Think of your website as your business engine.
Just like a car engine or a machine, your website requires on-and-on maintenance and fine-tuning to ensure it performs smoothly so your business will run faster to its destination.
On the contrary, if you neglect your website, you’ll encounter countless problems that can break down your operations and stop your business from running entirely.
Of course, nobody wants that – not even us!
As a WordPress website development agency, many of our clients come to us and ask, “how can I maintain my website?”
And just like other business owners, you’re here to find the answer.
What Is WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress maintenance is the process of maintaining your web performance and ensuring it remains functional.
As a WordPress admin, a business owner, or a developer, you’ll probably understand that there are plenty of threats to your website.
Some examples are feature bugs, hacking attempts, and slow loading time.
Each of these problems, if left alone, can hugely impact your business—from financial loss to ceased operations.
Why Do You Need WordPress Maintenance?
Perhaps we’ve given a general idea of the harm to your website if it’s not maintained.
Still, we can’t stress enough how important doing web maintenance is, so let’s get deeper into the topic.
First, you need to know that 89% of customers will shop from competitors after a poor website experience, and they are all less likely to return.
But what is “poor website experience”? To put it in a more objective light, it is a website that either has:
- Slow loading time
- Confusing user’s experience (UX)
- Unfunctional user interface (UI)
- Recurrent downtime
- Error pages
- And more
All these issues can be tackled with constant maintenance, which includes tasks such as WordPress website customization, performance optimization, UI/UX improvements, and more.
Let’s find out the step-by-step instructions in the next section.
What Does WordPress Web Maintenance Include?
The maintenance process is just as important as building a WordPress website, so here’s a guideline on what you should do:
1. Security Updates
A data breach can cost your business as much as 4.45 million USD.
Therefore, minimize your website’s security vulnerabilities.
These include any outdated aspect of your website – be it your legacy software, plugins, or themes.
Specific platforms such as WordPress release security patches every now and then.
Immediately install these patches to your website to keep it safe from malware, ransomware, DDoS, or other types of cyberattacks.
If you don’t have a specified task force to guard your website, count us in.
From monitoring to troubleshooting, Intelivita can be your dedicated web security team.
2. Content Updates
If you have a website, you are probably familiar with search engine optimization (SEO).
Having lots of content that you don’t keep up-to-date is just the same as having little content.
Both of them will rank your website in a low position, decreasing your business visibility in the market.
So, as a business owner, make sure to refresh and audit any blog post that is outdated.
Promote your new services or products with a landing page that follows the latest trends.
Of course, you can get creative with this.
Your main goal is to increase your sales, and one way to do that is to market your content.
3. Backup Recovery
No matter how much you work on your website, predicting the time when it will crash is still out of your control.
Instead, what’s more controllable is preparing a backup version.
This way, when there’s a sudden spike in traffic or an unforeseeable circumstance, you can have your website back up and running—as if there’s no problem to begin with.
The best practice is to backup your website daily to prevent significant data loss.
4. Performance Optimization
Users hate slow website.
50% of them will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
As a business, you can’t risk losing potential income.
Thankfully, there is one sure-fire method to optimize your web performance.
First of all, identify the culprits that cause the slow loading time.
These can include third-party data integrations, bulky code, and excessive HTTP requests.
A simple web audit can be done through pagespeed.web.dev, but this tool may not capture all the issues found on your website.
If you’re looking for a more expansive and holistic review of the technical problems in your site, contact us.
When it comes to improving web performance, focus on increasing your mobile and desktop scores to 80 or 90.
5. Monitor Uptime
If you want every user to be able to access your website and shop through your products, then you’ll need to aim for a 99.99% website uptime.
There are a lot of free uptime monitoring tools out there, but they’re not always accurate.
If your website continuously crashes, then you might consider changing or upgrading your hosting server.
Still, maintaining your website’s uptime is not always easy, and that’s why many businesses use professional services.
Conclusion
A website is the heart of your business.
We’ll keep it in good care so it can continue to perform healthily, serving every customer that steps into your door.
Contact us and let’s find out how we can collaborate to maintain and optimize your website.
