Yes, You Need a Maintenance Plan for WordPress
Like any other complicated technology, setting up a WordPress website is only half the battle. The other half is maintaining the website. Proper website maintenance will protect your company from getting hacked. Failure to keep your CMS up-to-date with the latest patches and security updates guarantees that your data will get stolen at some point. Without updating your website regularly, there will be poor user experience. I will explain why any WordPress website maintenance is key to staying competitive.
It’s the Best Way to Keep Your Website Safe
According to a massive study 70% of all WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacking attacks. They account for 90 percent of all hacked CMS sites. The consequences of getting hacked are disastrous. It will impact your business in at least one of the following ways:
- SERP rankings will tank: once Google has identified that someone hacked your website, your SEO will suffer.
- Damaged Reputation: it will cause users to perceive you as untrustworthy, and they will no longer visit you.
- Somebody will compromise your System: Since many companies have integrated their websites to internal accounting systems, this gives hackers an open the door to your accounting system. That’s not to mention that many hacks can remove database entries and files, destroying your website in the process.
How Do We Protect Ourselves?
But there are a couple of different ways to maintain and protect your website:
- Install a WordPress Security Plugin: thankfully, you don’t need to advance knowledge of coding to check your website for malware. Plugins such as Sucuri.net, MalCare, WordFence Security, Ithemes Security, among many others. Many of them will scan your website for malware and offers 24/7 monitoring services. The more advanced ones offer file integrity features, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, and post-hack security actions.
- Use a Strong Password: you would be surprised how many people use passwords, such as “12345” or “abc123.” If any of you has a similar password, I would strongly recommend that you change it because those are easy to guess and hack.
- Install SSL Certificate: SSL got its start through securing specific transactions. Now, Google provides websites with an SSL certificate, and that will also help your SEO. Its importance has grown to the extent that now SSL is mandatory for any site that stores personal information, whether it is credit card information or passwords. Without this certificate, all the data between a user’s web browser and the server can be read by a third party.
Maintaining your WordPress website is also key to making sure your website scores well in the SERPS.
Your SEO Will Benefit
No one likes to keep up with the constant updates. Many businesses get caught up in day-to-day tasks that they forget to back up their data and ensure that the updates have been applied correctly. WordPress will power your website and involves mundane software updates to make sure that everything is working correctly. Here are a few steps to do just that:
-
- Update Your website’s Permalink Structure: when it comes to WordPress, Permalinks are just URLs that point to individual website pages, posts, and other content. This is how end-users will reference and link back to your websiteThis, in turn, will make the content easier for the search engines to interpret what your website has to offer and will boost it.
- Optimized Site-Maps: site-Maps is a list of all content on your website that is organized into a hierarchy. This gives everyone a wonderful user experience! While it does not directly boost the site’s SERP’s position, it is still precious from an SEO perspective. It allows crawlers to see all pages on the site and figure out their relationship to other pages.
- Image Optimization: this is another excellent way to boost your website’s SEO. Every website needs well-optimized websites. For starters, the quality and size of your images will affect the loading speed of the web pages, which is a significant ranking factor.
The Takeaway
WordPress is not going away. Neither are hackers who want to steal from you. It’s essential to keep at it. It does not have to be overwhelming for any of you. This blog post went over the steps that you can take to do just that. You don’t need to know how to code. All you need is a plan. That’s it. If any of you have questions about anything in the post, please reach out. That’s why we started this blog. Expect more posts about everything WordPress.
Want to upgrade your WordPress website? Try WP Homebase’s Hosting+ risk-free for 30 days. Click here to learn more.
