Why website maintenance is important for your website?
Having a website is an important part of your business or brand, but simply having a website is not enough. Regularly updating and maintaining your site is crucial to ensuring that your site is running at full capacity. Just like cars, websites require maintenance to operate properly.
Websites have some different parts to it; they are built on core software (and that was probably up to date when you have your website built). But like all technology, improvements are continuously made, so you need to update websites components such as PHP, plugins, themes, etc, to make sure that your website stays relevant and is running at full capacity.
Why is website maintenance needed?
Website security is the main reason that website maintenance is so important. You want to ensure that your site has the latest software and security patches installed so the hackers can’t get in.
Also, a well-maintained website is a faster website! Regular maintenance can also affect the speed of your website. Keeping your website up to date not only helps with the overall visitor experience but can also drive more traffic and improve your Google rankings.
What are some steps that you need to do to in order to have an updated website?
Step 1: Backup your website before you start your website maintenance!
Step 2: Update your PHP
Php is a scripting language that is used for web development that is open source. It is at the core of most websites, with an estimated 8 out of 10 websites utilising it. Php takes care of website scripting, being the core way of making a website.
PHP updates are important as usually it will improve site speed and fix security vulnerabilities. In most cases, PHP updates are handled in your website hosting control panel or your website area.
Step 3: Update your plugins
The add-ons or plugins that are added to your website offer more functions, better user experience, improve speed. Plugins are more susceptible to security flaws, so updating these will give you peace of mind.
After updating your plugins, it is important to go through your website and make sure everything still works, plugin updates can also cause conflicts with your theme or even with other plugins. A good plugin to use if you are thinking of updating is PHP checker, it is used to check the compatibility of plugins with your version of WordPress.
Step 4: Update your WordPress theme or Design
A Theme or design is what gives your website its look, it controls aspects such as branding, buttons, typography, widgets, and header and footer content. An update to a theme will most likely improve site useability and offer more compatibility with some plugins. In most cases, updating your theme will not cause any theme configurations to be changed.
Step 5: Improve your website speed
Website Maintenance has the potential to affect your website speed. Updating aspects of your website such as the PHP will significantly improve speed. Outdated plugins can also slow down your website as generally, plugin updates will improve compatibility issues. Website speeds affect your SEO rankings so staying on top of updates is the best way to keep your website going.
You can use GTMetrix to perform a speed test.
Step 6: Improve your content
While updating themes, PHP, and plugins can help with site speed, updating your content helps with your user experience. Updating content or headings are the best way to improve your websites user experience, it can also drive more traffic.
Google’s algorithm thrives on user experience and small tweaks here and there will promote Google to crawl your website more often. This is also a good time to go over your SEO strategy and see what is working and try new keywords.
Conclusion
Keeping your website up to date is easy and helps your website keep going for as long as it can. It is the best way to prevent downtime and the need for a new website design. A website deteriorates overtime so regular updates to your PHP, plugins and themes is essential.
An outdated website can affect your user experience and slow down your website. Website Maintenance keeping your website fast and up to date website will help not only your user experience but your SEO rankings.
Dorin
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