Tips To Maintain Your WordPress Website

If you want to have a successful WordPress website, you need to maintain its backend functionality like having the installed plugins or themes up to date on a regular basis to fix security loopholes and bugs.

However, some company hire freelancers or even pay professionals to perform this tasks for them. Nowadays, maintaining websites are no longer something difficult and it doesn’t required a special skills to perform this tasks. In this post, we will stumble upon the 7 tips to maintain your WordPress website without any technical assistance.

1. Backup your website regularly

This is the most important things you need to do on a regular basis as it helps if something goes wrong with your website, you can restore it to a previous version immediately. How many backup you need is really depends on your company policy and some company only backup their website on a monthly basis. Our advice is if you regularly add new content to your website, we suggest to backup your website on a daily or weekly basis. You can backup your website via your web hosting provider or you can download a copy of your entire website to another location through FTP.

However, this would become a tedious tasks for your web administrator as it required manual process to backup your website. The good thing about WordPress is it offers wide variety of backup plugins that could perform automatic backup for your website. We strongly recommend UpDraftPlus as your website backup solution as it offers the backup and restoration functionalities on the fly. You can get more information on this stunning backup plugin at https://cheapcloud.net/backup-your-website/

2.Keep your website up-to-date

It is advisable to update your WordPress platform regularly whenever there is a new update as it offers advanced features and also security fixes. Same goes to your webpage builder tool (DiVi, Elementor, Beaver, Themify, Bakaery, etc) , it should be update regularly.

3.Remove unwanted or unused plugins

By installing plugins, it is a great way to extend the functionality of your website. However, too many plugins installed in your websites may affect the performance of your websites and the most concern part is the security loopholes from those installed plugins. Scan through your plugins list and remove the unused plugins.

4.Maintain your database

WordPress uses MySQL database. MySQL is a software used to create database and load stored data when requested. Without MySQL database, your WordPress website will not function properly. Hence, it is important also have a backup of your database on a regular basis. As mentioned above, UpdraftPlus not only backup your entire website, it also can backup your website database on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. If your database file is corrupted, it can be easily restored with UpdraftPlus backup solution.

5.Website security

Website security is another crucial factors that need to be considered seriously. To secure your WordPress website from hackers and other security threats, you need to install a reliable security plugins. You may install security plugins like SiteLock, Imunify360 and WordFence. What these security plugins can do for your WordPress website? For example WordFence, it provides endpoint firewall and malware scanner service to protect your WordPress website. Another cool feature from WordFence is your turn on its two-factor authentication (2FA) feature. Whenever you login to your WordPress admin page, it will prompt you for 2FA authentication which provide another layer of security to prevent hackers from gaining full access to your WordPress website admin page in the event your first layer of security which is your username and password is being compromised. You can integrate WordFence with Google Authenticator, FreeOTP Authenticator, 1Password, Microsoft Authenticator or any other time-based OTP authenticator. Other than that, make sure your WordPress website is always run on HTTPS by using SSL certificate. At Cheap Cloud, we provide free SSL certificate at no additional cost.

6.Website load speed

Website speed test assess how fast your website can load its content on a given time. You can measure your website performance by running site speed tests like WebPageTest.org. One way to improve the speed of your website is by using CDN or better known as Content Delivery Network. How CDN boost the speed of your website? It works by caching the content in multiple locations around the world using caching servers that located closer to end users or origin of the server. It means any user request for the content of your website will go to a CDN server first instead of going to the hosting server.

7.User accounts management

Avoid using “admin” as your username to access your WordPress administration page. This is a very common username used out there and is the first username hackers would use to try their luck to gain access illegally by using  this username. If you have multiple accounts that has admin right, enforce 2FA policy on it to add on another layer of security to prevent hackers from gaining access easily.