Your website is the anchor of your business. It establishes your online presence, conveys your brand and its values, and showcases what you have to offer potential customers. That’s why it’s important to keep it up to date, seamless for the end user, and perfectly optimized.
But unless you have an in-house WordPress specialist, you may be taking a risk by fumbling through the many maintenance needs for your website. Often, outsourcing WordPress support and maintenance tasks to a company like Highforge that specializes in keeping the hottest Central Florida websites chugging full steam ahead is a better and cost-effective option.
Why Do You Need WordPress Support & Maintenance?
To begin with, WordPress maintenance is an ongoing process that demands your attention on multiple tasks that will keep your site optimized, secure, and running as smooth as silk. Let’s explore five of the most important tasks.
Site Security
Even the slightest brush with malware can negatively impact your site, compromise customer information and even lead to a blacklisted site. Having the right security plugins will enable daily scans of your site, which will notify you if anything suspicious is located.
In addition, strong firewall protection will prevent attacks like a brute force attack or a cross-site scripting attack (XXS), which can steal user credentials and login to your website for nefarious purposes.
Site Backups
Website backups are probably not at the top of your to do list. However, they are a necessity. If your website gets hacked, you may lose all of your data and your site may be suspended by your web hosting service. Can you afford to be offline indefinitely?
A strong backup site can have you up and running in no time. A backup plugin is a good way to do this, but some are better than others. Do you know which one to choose? Highforge does, as we regularly perform this step for our WordPress support and maintenance clients in the Southeast. In addition, a manual backup of your site may be worthwhile, depending on what your business entails and what your risk level is. But a manual backup is monotonous at best and without expert knowledge, it is often prone to errors.
Site Upgrades
Upgrading your WordPress version is another maintenance task you should be performing regularly. WordPress is constantly offering updates to its customers, often twice or more per month. These updates contain new features, bug fixes, security patches and much more. Failure to upgrade your version when it’s offered can lead to compatibility issues with your current theme and plugins. That can ultimately lead to a broken site.
Site Optimization
Website optimization is how you improve traffic to your site as well as the user experience and even sales conversions. Consider this: How long do you stick around if a site you visit is slow to load? Chances are less than five seconds. Slow load times are a huge no-no as it’s one of the easiest ways to lose a customer before you’ve even had a chance to show them what you have to offer.
Luckily, there are a plethora of plugins and other tools that can help you improve your site’s performance through optimization. Do you know which ones are the best performers? Highforge does, as site optimization is one of the many WordPress support and maintenance tasks we perform for our Orlando clients.
Another aspect of site optimization is your site’s search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is how people find your website and how Google ranks your site in its search engine. Optimizing should encompass all site content—new and old—and should include titles, meta tags and meta descriptions just to name a few. Do you want to show up on the first page of Google results for a set of keywords? Google is constantly revising its algorithm. Do you know how to stay abreast of its changes? A Central Florida WordPress support and maintenance expert like Highforge does.
Site Analytics
At Highforge, we’re big proponents of Google Analytics, which is the gold standard for measuring your site’s performance as well as your customers’ behavior. You can slice and dice the many metrics offered to better tailor your marketing to reach more of the type of customer who spends money on your site. Do you know where they’re based, what type of content is performing best and what keywords are bringing you more customers? At Highforge, we set up a matrix of your most important metrics and measure them over time, helping you plan, update and optimize your content to outperform and excel against your competitors.
Still think you can handle your website’s maintenance tasks yourself? Knock yourself out. But when you regain consciousness, reach out to the Southeast’s premiere WordPress support and maintenance experts at Highforge. Contact us today!
