Tips for maintaining your WordPress business site

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Here are some of the ways you can maintain your WordPress business site to ensure optimal performance:

1. Keep it safe

If you don’t protect your site, hackers can get access to it and cause a lot of damage. Therefore, you need to take proactive steps to ensure that your site is secured.

Choose a strong password which cannot be guessed easily. Remove the default ‘admin’ user and create a new one with a unique name. In addition, you need to get rid of any old WordPress installations. Installing a security plugin such as Better WP Security will help seal common loopholes and protect you from automated attacks.

Don’t forget to enable automatic backup of your site. This will ensure that you don’t lose valuable information in case your site is hacked.

2. Speed up your site

Web users are usually very impatient. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, your customers and prospects might just leave and go elsewhere. To avoid losing visitors, you need to find ways of speeding up your site.

Be sure to optimise your photos and graphics before uploading them. You can use plugins such as WP Smush It to compress all your existing large images without compromising their quality. Installing a content delivery network (CDN) plugin can also help boost your WordPress site speed significantly. If your web host is the problem, it would be advisable to migrate to a more reliable host.

3. Improve your SEO

One of the best ways of improving WordPress SEO is by using relevant and short permalinks. For example, a permalink such as ‘yoursite.com/?p=64745921’ should be changed to something like ‘yoursite.com/5-ways-to-improve-your-SEO’. This will make it easier for Google robots to crawl and index your pages.

Don’t forget to add ‘Alt tags’ containing relevant keywords to all your images. The content of your website should also be optimised for search engines.

4. Keep it clean

You should always make an effort to ensure that your dashboard is as clean as possible. Either publish your trackbacks and comments or delete them. Get rid of unused or old themes. Uninstall unused or old plugins. Whenever updates are available, be sure to update your theme and plugins. Don’t forget to turn on the auto-update feature for your WordPress core.

Taking these simple steps will not only make your dashboard clean but will also lower your vulnerability to hackers.

5. Create useful content

Content can either make or break your business website. If visitors cannot find the information they are looking for, they might never return. Take time to find out the topics that interest your target audience. Establish a content creation schedule and stick to it. For example, you could decide to publish new posts twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays.

Remember to add social media buttons to your posts to allow sharing. If you don’t have the time or skill to create content, consider hiring a freelance writer or agency.