OUR MONTHLY WORDPRESS MAINTENANCE PROCESS

We take great pride in making sure the websites we maintain for our clients are kept up-to-date and running at peak performance. In this article we’ll cover the tasks we perform on a monthly basis to keep your WordPress website firing on all cylinders and running great.

Please note, while we automate some of these processes, but for most of it, we manually go into each site and review everything to make sure it’s all good. In order to keep this blog post from rivaling the word count of War & Peace, we’ve included links after each step that further details the processes we go through.

Step 1 – Making sure your site is backed-up properly

All our maintenance plans includes daily backups of your website. If your site gets hacked, or if you or one of your staff go into the website to do your own updates and crash the site (yes it happens), we can restore the site back to its original state before the hack or crash occurred.  Most hosting company’s will charge at least $10 per month on top of their base rate for daily back-ups. Here’s a detailed article on the nuts and bolts of backing up a WordPress website: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

Step 2 – Updating your WordPress software

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool. In non-geek speak, it’s provides a mixture of the easiest and most powerful website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. 30% of the of all the websites in the world use WordPress, and that number is growing dramatically faster than just about any other CMS today. Here is an article that describes the steps we take before updating your WordPress software: http://websynthesis.com/updating-wordpress/

Step 3 – Updating your WordPress theme software

The WordPress software provides the platform, then we install custom software on top of the WordPress software to bring your site to life. For most of our sites, we use the Jupiter Multipurpose WordPress Theme. Jupiter is powerful, flexible theme that allows to huge customization and has a built in visual-composer, which makes updating content easy to do, once you understand how to do it. Making sure your Jupiter Theme is always up-to-date is very important, as security patches and optimizations included in these updates.

Artbee’s are the creators of Jupiter theme and usually update it at least once per month. This requires you to go in and update the theme software. Click on this link to see the steps to take to update your theme software:

Step 4 – Updating WordPress software plugins

WordPress plugins are pieces of software created by various developers around the World that give your site special functions and features your website needs to look good and provide a great user experience. Some provide functionality, and some are used to modify how your website looks. Each Plugin is usually maintained by the developer who created it, and the developer will create ‘updates’ to their plugins to make sure the plugin remains secure and working as desired.

Yes, website upkeep is a necessary evil. Without taking care of your site on a regular basis, you’ll run the risk of ending up with a slow and insecure website that is hard to use for both visitors and admins. With that said, what is more enjoyable than seeing your site load quickly, your business on track and search rankings rising?

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