When people talk about WordPress and the benefits of using the platform, they usually mean the development and creation of a remarkable WP website. Whether you want to build a blog, a portfolio, a company website, or an e-commerce, WordPress has always got your back.
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Back in 2003 when WordPress started as a blogging tool, nobody expected that it would grow as the principal content management system (CMS). WordPress now commands the web development industry and the web itself. The competitors of WordPress are not even close when it comes to web coverage and web maintenance. But, how exactly did WordPress grow to run more than 30% of the Internet?
The growth of WordPress as a content management platform boils down to a few important factors:
- Flexibility from the start – It is a powerful and modular piece of software. Since the beginning, WordPress blogs were customizable. Today, you can transform a WordPress blog into a Social Network, E-commerce store, a News Portal or even a Dating Platform.
- It is constantly being refined – WordPress has a big volunteer community of tens of thousands of developers that contribute to the development of the platform. From core contributors to plugin and theme developers, these people give back to a community where every contribution matters.
- It is a free CMS – Everyone can download WP at the moment and install it. You can build your website and even extend it through custom plugins and themes, but you will need to host it in order for people to see it online.
- It is open source – Meaning that developers can patch the core of the platform. Developers find issues in their use case that could solve a global problem and push a patch to the core, which will later be available to the whole world.
- Freemiums – The WP ecosystem currently has tens of thousands of free and premium themes and plugins.
- Easy installation – If you’re a tech-savvy person, it will take you no more than a minute to install WordPress.
- It is multilingual – Want to use WordPress in other languages? No problem. WordPress has been fully translated into more than 60 languages. While 60 languages are a lot, there’s a lot more out there that can make your WP closer to your native tongue.
- Detailed documentation – There’s not a single thing that you can’t find about WordPress online. If you need development directions, the Codex is there for you. If you have problems, there are WordPress architects that constantly blog on topics how to solve them.
- Excellent for SEO – Even back in 2013, former head of Spam at Google, Matt Cutts explained why WordPress does 80% of the SEO optimization for you. Five years later, this still rings true today more than ever.
However, all the popularity of WordPress as a CMS has also brought complexity to the equation. Namely, there are over 54 thousand plugins that you can use on the platform. These plugins have been downloaded over 1.5 billion times! That is a lot of downloading. Also, the number of WP themes is in constant rise too, with tens of thousands of WordPress themes developed to date.
This complexity, merged with low-quality hosting providers and bad website management can result in website hacking, security attacks, spam, and lots of web errors. To not let that happen to your WordPress website, you need to make sure that your website is flawless and that you have a top-notch WP maintenance process.
Why WordPress Maintenance Matters
A lot of problems can occur if you don’t maintain your WordPress website. It can lead to shallow security and if your site gets broken, you can lose your existing and potential clients in the process. With a badly secured website, your business will become a victim of website hacking, which is hard to recover from.
What Does Maintaining Your WordPress Website Involve?
There are many tasks that can be categorized as WordPress maintenance. But, the crucial ones involve:
- Backups – Backup the database and all the files that go with the website, in case of a website breakdown. Ensure that the backup files are functional and safe before making major alterations to your WordPress website.
- Security – You need to continuously scan your website for malware and intrusions. If a hacker manages to crack your WordPress website, you won’t be able to use the site, unwanted advertisements all over your homepage will appear, or worse – a complete breakdown of the site will occur.
- Performance optimization – According to data, a speed higher of only two seconds can boost your conversion rate to 74%. That’s great for your business growth, UX, and search rankings.
- SEO optimization – SEO optimization will help you improve your content, and ensure that your site’s internal structure is more readable for search engines to rank you successfully.
- Server maintenance – A top-notch hosting package is a must if you want to have a serious online presence for your business. Investing in a managed hosting will make your website capable of handling traffic spikes. Plugin maintenance, server monitoring, and continuous security scans are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to server maintenance.
What Can Happen If a WordPress Website Is Not Maintained?
First of all, if you use an outdated WordPress theme for your website, it is possible for the theme to not be compatible with updated plugins. That’s why you must have a high-quality WP system that can be continuously developed and maintained, with a 24/7 support service.
The plugins on your website can become outdated too, and be a target for attacks. You must update your plugins on a regular basis and remove any plugin that isn’t updated by the developers for more than a year. Updating plugins means that you will preserve the security and utility of your WordPress website.
WordPress gets updated too. With each new WordPress version, bugs are fixed, performance is improved and existing features are enhanced. If you don’t update your WordPress website, you will miss out on the latest WP improvements.
What Is the Solution?
If you want to constantly have a healthy WordPress website, you must prevent every possible malware and problem that can occur. This is particularly important from a business standpoint. If you look at your website as a long-term investment, you will realize that you need to take good care of it.
WordPress maintenance is similar to buying a brand new luxury car. In order to keep the car in mint shape, you have to clean it, change the oil, do regular service maintenance, put gas in it, etc.
You want your car to be safe when you park it, right? You don’t want the car to be stolen, so you install an alarm system. It’s exactly the same with your WordPress website, you don’t want the site to be hacked and taken over by hackers. That’s why you need to look after it and constantly protect it from spam and attacks.
WordPress Maintenance Benefits for Your Business
So far, we can all agree that website maintenance is crucial to your online business success. Whether you do it on your own or you outsource it to someone else, your WordPress website must run efficiently. The following benefits for your business correspond with your website maintenance:
- Secure website – Your WP website can’t be secured just by installing a theme and a plugin. Also, while it’s important to have backups, you can’t rely only on a rollback when a problem occurs. Yes, installing WordPress is easy and adding a plugin is even easier but, the more you add to your website, the bigger are the chances to be hacked. With regular maintenance, you’ll make sure that your website is continuously secured.
- Accessible website – There is no point in having a website that constantly shows errors to the users. Any normal user would probably leave the website and never come back again. That results in lost sales and it’s very bad for your brand overall. With WP maintenance, you can regularly spot and eliminate your website errors. This, in turn, will provide a better experience for users and you will obtain more customers for your business.
- Maintaining SEO score – Keeping your WordPress website fast is one of the regular tasks of WP maintenance. Page speed is one of the principal factors that Google uses to rank your website. Testing your WP website consistently with Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix gives you insight where you can improve your UX by reducing page load times.
Related: 21 Tips for Building an Accessible WordPress Website
The Secret of Remarkable Websites: WordPress Retainers
You grow your business, and you grow your online presence too. You listen to your customers’ online feedback and you improve your WP website. But, identifying problems, bugs and continuously delivering an improved UX for the users can be hard, especially if you need to be focused on different areas of business development.
WordPress Retainers are a perfect choice if you’re a business that needs constant development work, but you don’t have enough money to hire a full-time developer for regular development and maintenance on your WordPress website. A WordPress Development Retainer Plan is a long-term development, support, and innovation for your WordPress platform/website.
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Successful businesses grow online through their websites by scaling powerful WordPress solutions. WordPress Retainers are designed for businesses to ensure that your WP platform follows the latest coding standards and features, while at the same time optimizing your website for speed, security, and usability.
DevriX provides WP retainers and technical support for SMEs and fast-paced startups. So far, we’ve built WordPress solutions and we scaled platforms that generate up to 20,000,000 page views per month. That is a lot of maintenance, but, building a reliable and scalable WordPress solution is not a one-off project.
With regular WordPress maintenance, we can learn more about your business and in the process, we can efficiently implement new features on your website that will increase your traffic and make your WordPress website remarkable in every possible aspect.