Now I have a wordpress website, how do I maintain it?

If you want to remain with your own host and maintain your new wordpress website yourself, this is what we recommend below.

Maintaining a WordPress website is essential to ensure that it stays up-to-date, secure, and optimized for performance and search engine visibility. With regular maintenance, you can help prevent issues like website downtime, malware, security breaches, and poor user experience. In this article, we’ll discuss the top tips and techniques to maintain your WordPress website.

1. Regularly Update WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes 

WordPress frequently releases updates for its core software, plugins, and themes to fix bugs, enhance features, and improve security. Therefore, it’s essential to regularly update your WordPress website to ensure that it’s running on the latest version. We recommend at least monthly.

You can update WordPress core, plugins, and themes from the WordPress dashboard. To update WordPress core, go to the “Dashboard” menu, click on “Updates,” and click on the “Update Now” button next to the WordPress version.

To update plugins and themes, go to the “Plugins” or “Appearance” menu and click on the “Update” button next to the plugin or theme you want to update.

2. Backup Your Website Regularly

Backing up your website is essential to ensure that you don’t lose critical data in case of a website crash, plugin conflict, security breach, or other issues. Regular backups can help you restore your website to a previous version if something goes wrong.
If we do not host your website we highly recommend you contact your website host to organise a backup plan for your website before doing any updates.  Updates alone aren’t enough—you also need to regularly back up your site. In case an update or hack causes issues, a recent backup ensures you can restore your site quickly and avoid data loss.

With a Webeasy Standard Hosting and Maintenance plan we include weekly backups of your website ( we hold 3 backups of site ) which we can quickly reinstall a copy of website if needed and get you back up and running fast.

3.Use a Secure Hosting Provider

If you do not use Webeasy to host your website, then choosing a secure hosting provider is essential to ensure that your website stays protected from security breaches, data loss, and other issues. Therefore, it’s important to research and choose a hosting provider that offers security features like:

• SSL certificate: SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is a security protocol that encrypts the data transmitted between your website and the user’s browser. SSL certificates ensure that your website stays protected from data breaches and other security threats. Many hosting providers charge yearly extra for this ( check with yours ) Webeasy supply standard with hosting account.
• Firewalls: Firewalls are software programs that prevent unauthorized access to your website’s server. A good hosting provider should offer a firewall that blocks malicious traffic.
• Backup and restore: A reliable hosting provider should offer regular backups of your website’s data and provide an easy way to restore your website in case of a data loss or security breach. Webeasy backup your full site weekly and hold 3 version of it so we can reinstall quickly if needed.
• Php Versions: Allows you to update PHP versions on your hosting account easily, incase any of your updated plugins will not work on your current version of php.
• Monitoring: If you are on our standard hosting and maintenance plan we also have a monitoring feature where we are informed if your website goes down. Make sure your host has this feature to alert you if this happens. Otherwise you could have costly downtime on your website and not even know about it potentially for weeks.

Maintaining a WordPress website requires regular updates, backups, optimization, and security monitoring. By following the tips and techniques discussed in this article, you can ensure that your website stays up-to-date, secure, and optimised for performance and search engine visibility.

Compare – It all comes cost and your time

Our standard hosting and maintenance plan is $396 a year. This comes with

• Hosting – Reliable Australian based Server
• SSL certicate – Free with hosting account
• Regular Backups – Incase your site gets malware, hacked or crashes after wordpress  or plugin updates we get get back up and running quickly
• Monitoring – If your site goes down we get alerted
• Maintenance – Monthly updates of wordpress and plugins to help keep secure and up to date. Also with monthly reports.

Compare yourself

We highly recommend you add up the cost to you in lost time to complete the monthly required wordpress website maintenance your self, and pay your current host for all the above essential requirements of running a secure and optimised website to get a true refection of cost and time. Then you can make a more informed decision on deciding on what host and who you want to do the website maintenance.