How to Maintain a WordPress Site

As business owners, time is in limited supply, which is why we need our website to perform at top capacity on a daily basis. Launching a new product only to have your site crash a day later is devastating. Failing to catch a substantial drop in organic website traffic results in backtracking to figure out the cause. Start with a solid foundation by building your site correctly, then avoid a marketing nightmare by performing regular WordPress maintenance.

Build it right

A DoubleClick by Google study reported that more than half of web users abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load, making a solid foundation essential. You’ll find a plethora of WordPress how-to guides online that’ll help you set up your website accurately. Depending on your experience level and business needs, building a new WordPress site could take a few hours to a few weeks. Services, like managed web hosting, save you time and headache over the long run.

Website building is not an area to skimp on as it impacts your future traffic and revenue. Choose a flexible theme that embodies your desired website structure and appearance. Then build your site to avoid the headache of error messages, redirects, and lost traffic due to slow loading times.

Keep your WordPress site updated

Your website isn’t a one-and-done type of deal. Fundamental website maintenance, like updating your plugins and theme, keeps your WordPress site running smoothly. Failure to update your site results in decreased security, broken functionality and increased page loading time. In turn, the user experience plummets, and your site may face penalties from Google. Refreshing your site applies to more than upgrading the digital components that keep it functioning. Add checking for dead links, creating reliable backups, and tweaking your content strategy to your to-do list.

Monitor site activity

While plugins monitor everything in the background, business owners ensure peak performance by inspecting their WordPress site’s performance along with their business analytics.

• Site performance. From ongoing hacking efforts to a website suddenly slowing down or missing mobile optimization checkpoints, stay on top of your site’s performance by viewing the activity on your site. Catch a problem, like slow loading time, when it happens instead of weeks after your WordPress site tanks in rank.
• More than keeping you aware of where your customers are coming from and how long they stay on your site, monitoring your analytics gives you the feedback to tweak your strategy and stay connected.

Add new website content

Your WordPress website is like a living being, and you need to feed it with fresh new content to keep it relevant and accessible to your audience. Sure, you may add new blog content a few times a month, but you also need to add pages, content upgrades, and images. New content satisfies your customer’s needs for current information and maintains your presence in online rankings.

Control SEO on WordPress

Once you’ve developed your editorial calendar, complete with related keywords, then make sure that your search engine optimized content is meeting your goals. Here’s the thing, SEO goes beyond your blog posts. Your website pages, ecommerce product descriptions, blog categories, and images all need optimizing. Various plugins, like Yoast, help WordPress users verify keyword usage.

• Make a plan, then verify with analytics that it’s working.
• Use data to tweak your strategy and maintain control over your search engine results.

You may not be able to control the complicated algorithms of social media platforms or search engines, but you can build a site that withstands whatever the outside world throws at it. Time-strapped business owners benefit from professional web design and outsourcing maintenance-related tasks. Through proper maintenance, you’ll guarantee that your WordPress website stays accessible to customers and search engines.