WordPress Maintenance
Site maintenance is necessary to ensure your pages and content are displaying properly and your website is running smoothly. With the many plugins and security patches that are constantly being released, regular maintenance of WordPress is vital to keep up with all the updates that occur on a regular basis. This is advantageous for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ensures that your visitors see a site that functions correctly. Your website is your welcome card to your users and you need to ensure that your site has latest updates for their security as well as yours.
If you are doing this on your own, you should do this steps. You should always have a backup of your site. Most hosting companies do this automatically for you, but it will be up to you to restore it. We also recommend ManageWP.com for backups and restoration can be done in minutes.
There is a process:
- Update WordPress Plugins -When you are updating plugins, do them one at a time and check after each update that nothing is broken (e.g. links) in the front-end and in the admin area. Ensure that your new update is compatible with your current version of WordPress.
- Update Themes -When you are updating themes, WordPress comes with core themes called the Twenties (e.g. Twenty-one) you should update these before your main theme. These core themes allow WordPress to work should your activate main theme somehow get corrupted.
- Update WordPress Core – This is last, and most important piece. You should read the log on what the new update brings. Most important, after you have updated the WordPress Core take a look at your site and pages and ensure that everything is working properly. I suggest you do this using different browsers as well.
If everything goes smoothly, this should take 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how many plugins and themes you have.
If you’re still not confident you can do this or just don’t have the time contact us and we’d be happy to help you.
