WordPress is the most widely used tool for creating websites today. And when you look at the trends, that's not likely to change anytime soon. The CMS currently powers more than 41% of the one million most popular websites in the world.And the march just keeps going.
Why maintain your WordPress site
Whether you own a WordPress site, are an agency, or a freelancer who creates WordPress sites, you're surely concerned about providing the best possible service and experience to your clients. And that starts with a secure, fast, and user-friendly website.
When it comes to WordPress, it's not all about creating the site. It's important to ensure that, over time, the site functions as intended. That's where WordPress maintenance comes in.
In simple terms, system maintenance is a set of modifications and operations performed on a system after its implementation. Its purpose may be to fix bugs, improve the system, or adapt it to evolving needs.
Like any other system, a WordPress site can (and needs) maintenance. A link to a page can stop working, a plugin can become outdated, and so on. WordPress maintenance is therefore designed to prevent and mitigate such events.
The different types of WordPress maintenance
On a WordPress site, several types of maintenance can be performed on an ad hoc or regular basis, depending on the needs of the site.
Preventive maintenance
The purpose of maintenance is to prevent and avoid problems that could occur on the site.For example, following a failure to perform an update. On WordPress, this will therefore consist of the regular update of the different systems that make the site work: the WordPress core, themes, extensions and translations.
Corrective maintenance
This type of maintenance will be carried out specifically and on an ad hoc basis to "repair" or restore the site following a one-off problem encounteredFor example, a failure following a virus infection of the site, a hacking of the site, or a site feature that has stopped working.
Evolutionary maintenance
We will use adaptive maintenance to evolve the site according to needs that arise throughout its lifespan. This could, for example, involve adding a feature such as a newsletter, or integrating a members' area.
How to maintain your WordPress site
Before implementing a maintenance strategy, it is essential to know the current state of your site. WordPress audit will allow you to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement
Depending on your site's situation, its current stage of development, and your future plans, one or more of the maintenance procedures mentioned above will be implemented. Each time, specific actions will be carried out on the site.
Backups
Have you ever had your website go offline due to a mistake? Now, imagine the impact this could have on an online store with thousands of visits per day!
This is an example of a situation where backups can prove to be lifesaving.
Backups allow you to have (regular) copies of your website, which you can reuse as needed.Perhaps to perform tests, or in the most critical case, to restore a site that is experiencing a technical problem or is no longer working.
Therefore, this is one of the good maintenance practices that should normally be implemented at the very beginning of the process of creating your site.
Speaking on WordpressIt is possible (with extensions or services) to schedule automatic backups at regular intervals and store them in multiple locations. Indeed, it would be pointless to store your backups on your website's server and then lose access to them if that server experiences a problem.
Several solutions are available to schedule backups of your WordPress sites. You can either opt for plugins or SaaS services.
Here is a list of some extensions or services you can use:
- UpdraftPlusIt's a free extension with a paid version. You can schedule backups of your website content and databases directly from your WordPress dashboard and store them in multiple locations such as Google Drive, AWS, Dropbox, etc.
- BackWPupIt's also a free WordPress plugin with a paid version. It offers roughly the same features as UpdraftPlus, namely scheduling site and database backups and storing data in different locations.
- BlogVault is a WordPress backup service bundled with a plugin. The service is paid and allows you to schedule daily, weekly, etc., backups of one or more websites. Backups are stored in the service's cloud and can be accessed and managed through a dedicated interface.
Security
A website, like any other resource on the internet, can be exposed to security vulnerabilities.Zero risk does not exist. WordPress, its themes, and its ecosystem extensions are not exempt from this.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of attacks are launched against WordPress sites, and an equally large number of sites are hacked.
Over the past thirty days, more than eight billion attempted website attacks have been blocked by the security company WordPress. Wordfence.
To protect against this, there are certain basic rules to follow.
- WordPress usernamesMany people install WordPress using one-click installation scripts included with most hosting services. Some of these scripts create a default user with administrator privileges named "admin".
It's pretty easy to guess, don't you think? A brute-force attack program with statistical observation optimization will start by testing these kinds of usernames first. So, you need to be careful not to use overly common usernames.
- PasswordsYou must take care to create a sufficiently strong password. Passwords like a B C D, Password, 1234 … will not withstand attacks for very long.
In addition to this, it is recommended to use a WordPress security plugin to automate and strengthen security measures on your sites. Among the most popular, you will find Sucuri Security, SecuPress or, WordfenceI invite you to read the descriptions of these extensions and choose one that meets your expectations.
Updates
From the very design phase of the site, it is important to think about how and how often updates to WordPress, themes and extensions will be made.
Over the months, or years, if you do not take them into account, updates will accumulate on the site, and this can lead to more or less significant security and/or compatibility problems.
For example, WordPress version 5.7.1The update, published in April 2021, addressed several security issues related to the CMS. If you are using an earlier version, your site pourrait be subject to attacks. These attacks could exploit these security vulnerabilities that have been patched.
Another interesting example, a few months ago: Wordfence's threat intelligence team discovered a massive attack on potentially more than a million sites WordPress; exploiting vulnerabilities in the Elementor Pro and Ultimate Addons for Elementor extensions.
Security patches were quickly released for both extensions. However, a website remains at risk if it continues to use older versions of these extensions.
These two examples highlight the importance of keeping your WordPress sites up to date regularly.
The good news, however, is that all is not lost. The security vulnerabilities discovered in WordPress Core are being fixed in future versions. minor.
For example, WordPress 5.7.1 is a minor version and WordPress 5.5 and 5.6 are major versions.
On a default WordPress installation, minor WordPress updates are performed automatically, unless they have been expressly disabled by the hosting provider or by you.
There are also services like MainWP ou ManageWP which allow you to automate updates on one or more sites. You can also opt for an all-in-one system like BlogVault (mentioned above in the backups section) to manage both updates and backups.
Another option is to subscribe to a WordPress maintenance plan. In this case, a team of WordPress experts will handle all the technical aspects of your site, such as updates, backups, security, optimization, etc.
Nobody wants a website that doesn't perform well. A customer certainly doesn't want to spend more than five seconds waiting for a product page to load before making a purchase. Performance is therefore not an optionThis is an aspect that is an integral part of the site's design itself. From the outset, it's essential to use the most appropriate tools and write the most optimized code possible.
There are good practices for web performance as well as standards that should be applied as best as possible.
To begin with, it is important that your WordPress site uses quality hosting. Hosting is a bit like the foundations of your website.If they are not of good quality, your infrastructure risks collapsing.
For the past few years, managed WordPress hosting are emerging; and offer optimal configurations for WordPress sites. You can take a look at Kinsta, o2switch or, SiteGround.
In addition to accommodation, several other aspects come into play for the WordPress performanceThis includes choosing the theme and plugins you use on your site. You'll need to choose a lightweight, fast theme that specifically has the features you require.
It's the same with extensions. Before installing an extension on your site, make sure to choose one that is well-recommended, highly rated, and has available and responsive support.Therefore, it is advisable to choose an extension that specifically provides the functionality you need; or one where you can disable features you do not use.
Finally, ensuring performance from the creation stage of your WordPress site also involves using web-optimized images (from a CDN if necessary), and optimizing your site's styles and scripts, etc.
Several online services allow you to obtain details about your site's performance, such as PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or, Pingdom.
Uptime monitoring
As a WordPress site owner, it's essential to ensure your site is always functional and available to all users. Several situations can compromise this functionality and render the site inaccessible. Therefore, it's crucial to quickly detect when the site is down and resolve the issue in real time.
Uptime is the period during which a website is accessible and functions normally. This is generally quantified using percentages. A website that has not experienced any downtime over a one-month period will therefore have an uptime of 100% for that period. The higher this percentage, the better..
Today, there are several systems/services that allow you to monitor website uptimeMost of these services have very advanced features that:
- regularly check that the site is still operational
- They send an email if the site is down for more than a certain period of time.
- They check 404 pages and broken links.
Here is a short, non-exhaustive list of these services:
- BlogVaultThis service, which we've already mentioned twice, is a kind of WordPress Swiss Army knife. In addition to backup and update features, it also has an uptime monitoring system.
- oh dear offers a complete range of services for website monitoring, from site accessibility to 404 pages and broken links, including status pages
- WP Umbrella is an extension (coupled with a web application) designed specifically to monitor the operation of WordPress sites. Among other things, it allows you to detect PHP errors on sites, monitor actual operation, etc.
- Uptime Robots is one of the most popular services for monitoring the performance of web pages. In addition to the usual features, the service allows you to create status pages for the monitored sites.
Maintaining or having your WordPress site maintained: what should you remember?
That's it, we've covered everything. You should now have an idea of what WordPress maintenance is and why it's important for your business. Another important point is that you're not required to do all of this yourself (as a business owner, for example).
Today, there are many professionals who offer comprehensive WordPress maintenance services, including ours. WordPress specialist agencyThey are there to take care of your site, and ensure that it is always in good condition while you only have to manage your business.
