WordPress website management isn’t for the faint of heart.
After all, even after you create a website, you’ll still need to manage your site to ensure it runs as smoothly as it should and won’t cause any issues for users and customers.
Keeping your WordPress website optimized and functional also facilitates your sales, marketing, customer service, and other critical processes and transactions.
While managing your WordPress website seamlessly involves a lot of factors and steps, this guide focuses on the five tips below to help kickstart your efforts.
Automate Where You Can
If you own an online marketing agency, you know how critical having a smooth-running website is to gain clients who need digital marketing qservices.
Any glitches, downtimes, or errors on your WordPress website can lead to slow load speeds and site performance issues, which can frustrate visitors and ruin the user experience.
All these issues can lead to lost opportunities with potential customers, seriously hurting your conversions and sales.
One way of keeping this from happening is to backup your WordPress website regularly.
Automate your website backups to protect your site and data if your server crashes or gets compromised.
Run daily or weekly backups automatically to help ensure you don’t miss backing up anything without running them manually, saving you time and energy.
You can also automate other tasks and workflows outside of your WordPress website, using workflow automation software. Doing so can save you tons of time and resources you can easily redirect to critical aspects of managing your site.
For instance, Vista Social takes away a chunk of your tedious, manual work by automating your social media content publishing via a modern, sophisticated social media management platform features.
You can centralize and streamline your social media marketing management while freeing up precious work hours and energy better spent on optimizing your WordPress website.
For core areas requiring human intervention, you can rely on professional website management services if you’re too busy and want to focus on the business side.
Website management experts can help reduce your workload, minimize downtime, and keep your data safe, assisting you from your first steps until you can handle your WordPress website.
You can centralize and streamline your social media marketing management while freeing up precious work hours and energy better spent on optimizing your WordPress website.
Ensure Your Plugins and Themes Are Up to Date
WordPress relies heavily on plugins and themes, making it easier to use than coding your website from scratch.
However, like most popular digital marketing software, WordPress plugins and themes continuously update.
As such, you’ll need to check for theme and plugin updates and ensure you update to the latest available version, ideally every month (when applicable) or at least once or twice a year.
If you’re using a theme that developers are no longer updating or maintaining, you might want to opt for (or switch to) another that gets continuous and recent updates, such as this WordPress theme below.
Check any unused plugins and themes and remove them since these can slow down your website.
Outdated themes and plugins can also lead to security issues since you don’t get updates containing security patches, leaving your site vulnerable to potential malware attacks and hacks.
If you’re choosing new WordPress plugins for your website, find out the last update date. A recently updated plugin is an excellent indicator of good developer maintenance. But be wary of plugins with too frequent updates, as they could mean developer incompetence.
Choose plugins with the most active installations, which indicates a good history of testing in various scenarios. These plugins are less likely to experience incompatibility problems and other technical errors.
Regularly Review Your Images and Videos
Photos and videos are critical elements to consider when you formulate your content development strategy. Adding these visual elements can make your website more attractive and interactive.
Photos, videos, and other visuals can also support and amplify your marketing initiatives, helping you increase traffic and boost conversion opportunities.
However, large-sized images, and videos loading from your host server, can slow down your WordPress website’s load speed.
The solution? Review your visual content regularly (ideally every month), particularly your videos and photos.
Use the standard optimized size set by WordPress to clear up your server space, help increase your page load speed, and improve the user experience.
Also, opt for dedicated server hosting since you’ll have exclusive use of a entire server. You won’t need to share resources such processing, memory, and bandwidth, allowing for faster page load speeds.
Additional tip: Go through all your website links connecting to your information or Contact Us forms, especially after automatic updates to your site by WordPress.
Doing so allows you to check if your forms are still working to avoid losing conversions and sales opportunities.
Leverage Website Content Optimization Tools
All in One SEO
It’s not enough to publish good content.
You also need to optimize your content for better quality and relevance to increase the chances of your web pages ranking higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Optimizing your web content can increase your website traffic and, in turn, conversions and sales opportunities.
Optimize your website content based on factors such as:
- Topic coverage (including content strategy)
- On-page technical SEO (including page speed)
- Grammar
- Click-thru-ability
- Readability
Leverage reliable website content optimization tools such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins.
For instance, the All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) plugin provides on-page analysis, including an actionable checklist to help you optimize your pages and posts (among other features).
Additionally, while it’s crucial to optimize your WordPress website’s blogs and articles with timely, new, and relevant information, updating your site’s core content is just as important.
Your core content includes website copy such as your value proposition or Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It’s the content that potential customers see to help them decide whether to buy from you.
Consider refreshing your core content once in a while to keep it fresh.
For instance, you can tweak your USP while still keeping the core message to ensure it doesn’t become outdated.
Another reason to update your core content is to ensure it aligns with your branding.
If you’ve made a few changes or your brand voice evolved, it only makes sense to update your website copy.
Consider introducing unique content, including infographics, videos, podcasts, and other visual elements. Pure text-based content can cause boredom and loss of interest among readers.
Optimize factual content, such as clinical study findings, statistical data, and research findings. You can present them in visual representations, like charts, graphs, and bars.
Don’t forget to add keywords on image and video descriptions to attain the optimization you desire for your content, which can boost your SEO with the help of SEO tools.
Optimize Your Database
While de-cluttering your database and tracking downtimes might not be as easy as when you speed up videos on your iPhone, the process is worth all the time and effort to help reduce website performance issues.
A WordPress database can become cluttered with spam comments, drafts, revisions, and other content and elements over time.
Remember to de-clutter your database at least once every three months or twice a year to help keep your website performance at optimum levels.
De-cluttering can help optimize your WordPress database for updates necessary to keep your site functional and running smoothly.
It also helps to regularly check for and track downtimes to pinpoint the potential causes and address the problems.
Besides de-cluttering your database, you can also buy VPS or Virtual Private Servers to help optimize your website’s performance.
Reliable VPS can offer faster read and write speeds, allowing for instant application load times, reduced boot times, and lightning speed system performance.
Streamline Your WordPress Website Management
Managing your WordPress website is no small feat, but knowing the time-tested tactics in this guide can help you hit the ground running.
Leverage the best tools and the right strategies that work for you to make managing your site more of a seamless process instead of a complex, tedious undertaking.
