How to maintain WordPress blog
This is one of the most neglected thing in the world of blogging, most of us think that we’ve setup our blog nicely and that’s about it. Some even know about how important the maintenance of your blog is but don’t know where to begin with.
Like every other thing maintenance have its own value, without maintenance your blog will start to get bulky and slow.
Many of the people asks why they need to have maintenance of their blog when it is running smoothly, well to be simple if our car is running smoothly it doesn’t mean that you should not bother to get it serviced or neglect its maintenance, if you do so then soon your car will ditch you in middle of the road.
Same goes for your WordPress blog, if you don’t bother to maintain WordPress blog then even after having a proper initial setup your blog will start to slow down, increase in loading time, getting a reduced search engine ranking, or your blog can even get hacked.
Lets start with the most important things that you should consider on maintaining your blog.
How to maintain WordPress blog?
There are few things which you should take a note that you have to cover when you start the maintenance of your blog.
- Updating
- Optimizing Database
- Blog Security
- Comments Optimization.
- Monitoring Errors/Downtime.
- Backup.
With these things you can have your blog secure while running fast, grabbing a better search engine ranking.
Updating
When we hear the word updating we only think that we have to update the WordPress version, Updating WordPress version is very important as with the new version many of the security enhancements are added.
This security updates will help you to add a layer to the security, but this is not restricted to updating WordPress only. There are plugins and themes on your blog that you also need to update.
A lot of blogs gets hacked just due to an outdated theme or plugin. When ever there is a new version available try to update it as soon as possible.
Updating is always better for your blog, some times security vulnerabilities are targeted in updates or some times the loading time is reduced making your blog faster.
This will help in getting a better ranking in search engines, driving more traffic.
Optimizing Database
As your website progresses and gets a lot of traffic then you should think that there are many things that are stored up on your website. You should take an initiative to make it light by optimizing your database.
Optimizing database means that you have to drop the tables which is no longer in need but having a load on the database.
When you optimize your database it will delete many tables like post revisions of older posts, etc. These optimizations will help reduce the excess load from your database, resulting in your site performing fast.
You can use the WordPress plugins to optimize database.
Always Backup
This is one the part where everyone thinks that they don’t need it, even if they backup at the initial level but as the time passes taking regular backup becomes much of a hassle.
People get into more content building and less focused on the vital things like taking a backup.
They realize it when something goes wrong, and to make the situation worse they don’t have the latest backup. This is the time when you get to know the importance of backup.
To make the backup process easy you should use a plugin which can take the backup automatically, with plugins you can have multiple options by which you can take the backup the way you like.
You should try to take backup on various platforms like on dropbox, email them, save it locally. This will make the backup more secure.
Look into security of your Website.
Things keeps on changing so you have to keep the security of your website in check. There are ton of people who like to get the access of your admin panel.
So you have to make it secure, the time spent on making your website secure will pay you later, when all the attackers will fail to get your admin panel access.
To make your blogging journey filled with joy you should invest you time in making your website secure.
Clean comments
These are some thing which make a lot of table entries which is hinders the performance of your website. This way you can make your website perform more efficiently.
You should spend some time getting rid of the Spam that keeps on piling.
To keep your website safe from spam you can use anti-spam plugins which can take care of most of your spam needs.
Website Health
In our daily life we take a great effort to keep our self healthy so that we can do our everyday work efficiently, same goes with the health of the website.
A healthy website is something which will help you in heaving a fast website gaining more viewers.
To keep your website healthy you should check the broken links and take care of them. Broken links are not good for SEO, which plays a major role in website health
You can take help from Google webmaster tool to check the broken links and errors that your website is facing.
Website health is not limited to just broken links, there are other factors like downtime. You should keep a check on this and if your website is having more downtime then you should talk to your hosting company to solve the problem or simply make a switch to a faster one.
You should also check the website page load time, page load of different pages can have deep impact on viewer experience and SEO. You can take help of Google analytic tool to know which page is performing better than other.
Conclusion
You can use these points to maintain your WordPress blog, maintenance depends on the type of the website you have. The major part of this is that you should know the importance of having maintenance and give it proper time on regular basis. This will make your website more secure and fast.
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