The realization of a website is only the beginning of your journey towards an effective online presence. Then you need to produce content all the time, optimize your site for search engines and do some maintenance so you don’t ruin all the effort and keep your WordPress site at the top.
A poorly maintained website is a bit like a top athlete who is no longer training: he is running towards downgrading.
For your website to be the best it can be, you need to know where you stand at all times:
- Is your website always accessible?
- Are there any PHP errors that you should correct?
- Is your site loading fast enough?
- Are there any HTML code improvements to implement?
- Do your pages and articles have broken links?
The answers to these questions can help you improve the user experience and SEO of your site. And that’s why you need to learn how to monitor your WordPress site and understand its importance.
Why monitor your WordPress site?
Monitoring and tracking is an essential part of managing a WordPress site. In fact, monitoring and maintenance is a standard part of every serious digital agency’s quote. Monitoring will help you ensure that your website is running smoothly and is in good health
Never forget, a website is like a car: it needs regular maintenance.
WP Umbrella: a free extension to monitor your WordPress site
The good news is that there is a free extension developed by two French people that will allow you to keep an eye on all the things you should watch out for.
It is WP Umbrella, an uptime monitoring plugin developed especially for the WordPress community.
WP Umbrella will allow you to monitor different aspects of your site at a glance and in the same place:
We have started to deploy the extension on sites we have in maintenance to have a near real time visibility of what’s going on there.
Check the availability and downtime of your WordPress sites
If there is one thing you need to check, it is the permanent availability of your websites! Downtime is indeed extremely harmful to your brand image, your sales, but also for your SEO. An offline site represents a lot of frustration for your potential customers ready to take action.
Downtime is any period of time when visitors cannot access your content, for example, because your servers are down or your WordPress site has a bug.
In concrete terms, WP Umbrella will constantly check that your site is online and available.
If this is not the case, the service will alert you by email or via Slack. A multiple alert system is also available (but reserved for the premium version) to allow professionals to directly alert the different people in charge of the site’s maintenance. An appreciable time saving when it comes to minimizing downtime!
It also allows you to avoid having to visit each of your sites one by one to check that they are fully functional.
Measure and optimize the loading time of your site
There is nothing more frustrating than a slow site.
Users expect to be able to access content quickly and in a minimum amount of time. In fact, studies show that 40% of Internet users leave a site that has not loaded in 3 seconds.
This is why you must constantly monitor your loading speed.
Do some pages load slower than others?
Do you need a cache plugin ( SPOILER : YES ! ) and, if you have one, does it work properly ?
These are all questions that need to be answered in order to have a site that is pleasant to visit and, above all, that converts.
WP Umbrella will allow you to measure the performance of your website over time and to access performance graphs directly in the plugin or via a web application.
If you want to have an overview of your loading time, you can play for free with this load time measurement tool.
Monitor and clean up PHP errors generated by themes and plugins
WordPress developers often leave bugs in themes and plugins. This is unavoidable. It is therefore important to monitor your website for PHP errors.
Thanks to WP Umbrella, you can easily identify and fix these bugs before they cause real problems. If you’re about to deploy your site in production, the extension is really very useful.
Likewise, monitoring errors on your sites allows you to act quickly and know where to look in case of big problems.
The extension also offers a health check, which will give you advice on how to improve your website (SEO, performance, security, etc.):
We therefore recommend you to test WP Umbrella to monitor and control your WordPress sites.
It’s a great companion to keep track of all the important data of your sites in one place easily and to have access to all the information at a glance.
For more information, visit WP Umbrella.
