Sensible Planning For WordPress Website Maintenance

A WordPress website – commercial or otherwise – can be a source of joy and pride, considering the expertise and effort that goes into creating a quality website. It only makes sense, then, to invest in proper maintenance for your WordPress website.

All the established brands and businesses meticulously develop and stick to a plan for periodic maintenance, and you would do well to follow their example and save yourself a lot of eventual frustration. With time and experience, you can handle the maintenance activities like a pro, but it also goes without saying that if you’ve hired a WordPress agency for development, that also takes the maintenance duties off your shoulders and schedule.

What Does WordPress Maintenance Help With?

A systematic maintenance plan can prevent a lot of undesirable incidents and make owning and running a website a breeze. Let’s see how:

Updated and Optimized

One reason why most websites prefer to use WordPress is the constant stream of updates and improvements that ensure bugs are squashed and features are added – Maintenance is vital to helping you stay in-step with these updates and you benefit from them, not to mention the enormous savings you can reap by avoiding expensive fixes later on.

Preventive Maintenance

You can get a quick overall outline of your website’s state of health, and this can mean the difference between a quick fix now for a potential problem and a huge complication later on that might even need downtime to be fixed. You can also use maintenance as a chance to think of improvements, such as to the theme or the overall UX.

Security and SEO

Of course, we all know that a properly updated and regularly maintained website is much less likely to be successfully targeted by cybercriminals – a situation which, otherwise, could even adversely affect the website’s search engine visibility.

Designing the Best Maintenance Plan for Your Website

With the benefits of maintenance in mind, let’s get into the factors to consider while creating a great maintenance plan.

1. Frequency of Maintenance Activities

Depending on the size of your website and the traffic it has to deal with, you can make do with semi-annual maintenance for a smaller, newer website that’s still only building reach, and go up to even quarterly maintenance for a big website that gets lots of visitors.

Regardless of this plan, however, you’ll need to attend to some maintenance activities much more often – such as installing core updates for WordPress or getting rid of unnecessary media files to optimize the site performance. This means you’ll face less of a hassle with all of these maintenance activities if you space them out over the whole year.

Word of caution though if your site has unfortunately been hacked, running through the whole maintenance checklist is good practice to ensure that the website is back in great health. In such cases, check with your WordPress agency for development, and you can use their expert advice to ensure all bases are covered.

2. Prioritizing and Choosing Maintenance Tasks

Once you have a plan in place for WordPress updates and general website housekeeping, a good way of ensuring you don’t get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of other required maintenance that can build up over time is to prioritize the tasks.

In addition, a content audit can be a great tool to bolster the effectiveness of your maintenance plan by highlighting such issues as dead links and comment spam. Other areas you would need to look at are changing passwords and ensuring that they are strong against brute-force attacks, decluttering and optimizing your media files, and making backups of your WordPress website and database.

3. Outsourcing Decisions

As you can see, adding maintenance to your already packed day with running a website can really eat into your time. Plugins can help some, but you still can’t have maintenance on autopilot with them. So it’s only practical to think of delegating at least a portion of the maintenance, if not all of it, to a trusted WordPress agency for development for peace of mind.

Here at Vipe Studio, we’ve been handling WordPress website maintenance for a while now, and we have three plans to choose from for differing needs. Picking an agency like ours will of course help you stay worry-free about maintenance, but you also get added support and even help with web development if you’d like. The cost of hiring a WordPress agency for development, as we’ve seen above, is a good investment in keeping your WordPress website running great, and saving on expenses in the long run.

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• Scaling WordPress for Enterprise: Overcoming Common Challenges

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