I posted a video today about this big mistake I often see with WordPress website owners.
WordPress maintenance is so important and is often neglected.
I imagine it is neglected because site owners are not sure what to do or how to do it.
Here is a 7 minute video for you…
Here is what I recommend:
- Add a Backup Plugin. Link your backup to an outside source.
- Update your WordPress installation, framework and plugins.
- Add a broken link checker plugin.
Here is the transcription of the video:
Hello, Hello it’s Stephanie Hellwig of StephanieHellwig.com. My mission is to help you Create, Manage and Grow your online presence using WordPress.
Today I want to talk to you about something I see quite often.
I had a customer reach out, I built a website for her several years ago and she was an awesome one on one client I loved working with her and periodically she reaches out to me to maintain her website.
I want to talk about something that I see so often that is a huge mistake for people who have a WordPress website.
I want to tell you today how you can maintain your website because the greatest mistake I see with one-on-one clients that I build these gorgeous websites for is that they don’t maintain them.
Yes, I can maintain them for you, I do have a service where I maintain websites for you… but a lot of time I know you want to maintain it yourself. The problem is that maybe you’re scared of the process or you don’t know what to do and so you neglect taking action. Isn’t it true, that when we’re a little bit fearful of a process we don’t take action? Maybe we kind of get in that analysis paralysis where we want to do that one day but not today or we’re going to research it and think, “I’m going to take care of that”, and then weeks go by and months go by.
With WordPress it is the most powerful platform that you can build your website on and it is the professional choice and there are so many options for you, but you need to keep it updated. There are always new plugins that need updated, WordPress needs to be updated, your theme really shouldn’t be updated but sometimes it needs to be updated, so there is maintenance that needs to happen and we don’t want to neglect that.
So what happens when we do neglect it?
Number one the scariest thing is that you can have bad scripts added to your website. If you have a plug-in that’s growing old in your website that’s not being updated or that has a security patch and you didn’t update it there’s a reason for that security patch so you need to update it and if you don’t then you can get bad scripts added to your website which could potentially take it completely down. You don’t want that to happen. Also your performance could be lagging because maybe WordPress needs updated and you didn’t update it and so your performances maybe it’s not loading as fast as I can visitors because they’re sitting there waiting for it to load and we just check it out and we’re going to move on to the next website and loose visitors. You want to keep it updated.
There’s a few things that I recommend you do at the bare minimum. If you have a beautiful gorgeous WordPress website that is working for you and increasing your Market to a 24-7-365 day Marketplace that’s awesome the don’t compromise it by not keeping it updated! Do the maintenance just like you would for your car or your house or yourself!
Do the maintenance.
The first thing I always do when someone comes to me with wanting to have their site updated and maintained here’s what I do number one… I add a backup plugin. There’s some really great backup plugins out there there’s one that I love to use it’s absolutely free and what it does is it sets it up on autopilot so that your website is updated on a consistent basis. Now the next question I often hear is how often should I be having my site backed up? How often you create content… if your website is like a white pages and it’s just kind of living out there for people to find you and you’re not really adding content or updating content you probably don’t need to back it up as often as somebody who’s blogging every week. If you backed up your website once a month and you were blocking every week if you have a problem and you had to revert back to it how much content you are creating on a consistent basis how often you back up so that’s the number one thing is I a link it to something outside of your website database to back up so we don’t want to save it on your database we want to save it somewhere else like Dropbox or Google so if your database is compromised your backup is safe that’s over what number to what I like to do when after I have a backup is update first your WordPress installation so if you’re worthless installation needs an update that’s the next step I’ll update your framework if your framework needs an update if you’re using a framework course everyone knows I love the Genesis framework and that’s what I use and it’s sometimes needs an update and so that would be the next thing update so then the next thing is updating plug-in now with plug-in you update them one at a time and the reason I update them one at a time is because if you have a problem with a plug-in and you update them all at once you won’t know what plug-in created the problem we update them one at a time and isolate what the issue is if you have an issue what’s the third thing that I like to do is add a link Checker a broken link Checker so you do all this work you have this gorgeous website you’re sending people to a freebie a lead magnet you’re generating some traffic your building warm traffic and it’s working for you but your link breaks and you don’t know it suturing all I do is work and you’re sending people to this freebie and they’re not getting it because you’re weak broke and you didn’t know it so to avoid that issue we add a broken wing so that is what I do the top three things that I recommend any WordPress owner do on a fairly consistent basis based on how often you are creating content Back It Up Update everything and check this break is broken links