So you’ve developed, tested and launched your site. You probably d id a little SEO optimization and, more importantly, secured it. Now you’re in the maintenance phase.
We can’t stress this enough. It is important to . These updates will patch newfound vulnerabilities and greatly reduce your risk of having issues with hackers. WordPress is really good about letting you know when a new version is available when you log into the Dashboard. Some hosts will also auto-update you, but when possible you should initiate the updates yourself after making backups.
Keep an eye on your plugins and themes for updates. Again, this greatly reduces your risk of being hacked. Usually you will get a notification in your Dashboard when a plugin or theme has a new version available – simply click on it, review what is being updated and click the Update link. Each update only takes a few seconds.
By now, you should have an adequate backup plugins, plugins, third party service, service, or something included from your hosting company that is doing regular backups. You’ll want to check your backups periodically to make sure they are capturing everything correctly. A lot of the better backup options will send you emails letting you know each time a backup was successful or if it failed. You may also need to manually clear some of your older backups to save space if they are piling up on your server. Daily backups can really add up.
Interact with your visitors that are taking the time to leave comments on your blog posts or pages. It will make your site more interactive and help you build a community. If you have a membership site, it is imperative that you keep up with your users.
You’ll probably get some automated spam comments from time to time. You’ll want to clear these out occasionally in your Dashboard under Comments. If you’re getting a lot of spam, you should install the popular and very helpful Akismet plugin, which will flag a lot of your spam for you quietly in the background.
Most hosting services will include stats in your control panel to keep track of daily visitors. If you want something right on the WordPress dashboard, we recommend using the popular JetPack plugin. plugin. If you’ve signed up for third party services, like Google Analytics, Analytics, you can monitor your stats there as well.
Periodically check your resource usage to ensure things are running smoothly and are optimized. Your resources are things like your server disk space, your available memory, etc. You can usually do this through your host control panel. You can also install the P3 Plugin Profiler to assess your plugins and make sure none of them are using an unusual amount of memory.
Every time you add a new page or post and make edits, WordPress keeps a copy saved as a revision. This is very helpful if you need to ever revert your post back to a previous version. The more revisions of pages and posts you have, the more it can bog down your database with entries for each one, which could also affect site speed. This isn’t good, especially if you have a site with hundreds of pages and posts that are updated regularly. You can install WP install WP Revisions Control plugin Control plugin to help you manage these on the WordPress Dashboard. If you’re an advanced user, you can add the following code into your wp -config.php file to limit revisions to 3 per post: define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);
Naturally you can change that number to whatever best suits you.
The big search engines such as Google and Bing offer tools which allow you to better manage your web site listing with them. These tools also give you useful feedback on your sites. They’ll alert you if their crawler found a missing page, you can also use these tools to submit sitemaps, exclude pages from their results and much more.
https://www.google.com/webmasters
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster As always, if you would like TLC for Coaches to do some of these tasks for you, just get in touch! LINK
www.tlcforcoaches.com We are a team of virtual assistants and web developers that specialize in supporting great coaches – allowing them to focus on doing what they love, while saving them time and money. How can we help you be more awesome today?
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