Many web design professionals provide maintenance plans to their clients as an easy recurring revenue stream. These plans typically consist of security services, backup solutions and site optimization for an additional monthly charge.
Regular malware scans are one of the cornerstones of WordPress maintenance plans. Doing this helps prevent blacklisting in search engines and protects against hackers.
Security
One of the key aspects of WordPress maintenance is ensuring its security, which requires running regular malware scans, setting up two-factor authentication for user accounts, and selecting strong passwords. Additionally, updates should be performed regularly on core, themes, and plugins – helping prevent hacker attacks while increasing website performance.
Malware scanning is an integral component of WordPress maintenance services, as it detects and eliminates malware before it causes any damage. By doing this regularly, your site can avoid being blacklisted by internet browsers and hackers from accessing valuable customer data.
Apart from protecting the security of your website, a good WordPress maintenance service will also take steps to ensure it runs regular backups – essential should data loss occur or there be any site crashes. By keeping an archive copy, this ensures you can restore both website and business without any difficulties.
WordPress maintenance services also involve regular optimization of databases, images and scripts to increase load speed – a key component in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A faster-loading site provides more user-friendliness while ranking higher in search results – giving customers an enhanced experience while encouraging repeat visits in future.
Backups
Updating WordPress plugins, themes, and core regularly is critical to protecting against security vulnerabilities and optimizing website performance. Furthermore, regularly backing up your website helps mitigate against data loss or site crashes – particularly vital when dealing with an ecommerce store where customer and transaction information may be stored – so protecting your investment with regular backups ensures you can restore it if something does go wrong with your investment.
UpdraftPlus, a free tool, allows you to automatically backup your website on an ongoing basis and store a restorable version in the cloud, providing security against anything from code errors and hacks to incompatible updates and upgrades. Make sure that every time you add new posts or pages, the backup process begins again automatically.
An important service provided by WordPress maintenance services is website uptime monitoring, which alerts if your site goes offline, helping you detect potential problems before they escalate further. Offering this as a valuable service can make an impressionful first impression for your clients; adding this into maintenance plans easily will keep clients coming back for more. You could use iThemes Sync to automate this task and deliver weekly reports to them; justifying their investment while showing clients why ongoing maintenance services are worth their while!
Contact Forms
Contact forms are an ideal way to interact with visitors to your site, helping build relationships, gather important data and promote your brand. One way you can add one is with one of the many WordPress plugins available – these may be free or paid, with most offering at least some feature sets.
Provide your website visitors with an efficient and user-friendly contact form is of vital importance, and to create one you have several WordPress plugins at your disposal such as Contact Form 7. It offers great performance options with its minimal set of features; plus it features reCAPTCHA integration and can easily drop forms anywhere via shortcode integration into pages, posts or widget areas.
Not only should you ensure your forms work correctly, but you should also regularly inspect for broken links. Broken links can be an annoyance for visitors and damage user engagement on your website. They can also compromise SEO performance; so it’s vitally important that they’re checked regularly.
When providing WordPress maintenance services, investing in a tool such as iThemes Sync to track updates and backups is essential. Not only can it manage all of your clients’ websites in one convenient place, but you can customize these reports for each client to show what work has been completed on their site.
Cache
Caching is the practice of saving copies of static content to reuse later, which speeds up page loads and decreases bandwidth consumption. Unfortunately, outdated cache files can prevent visitors from seeing new updates to websites and contribute to site bloat. Caching management is an integral part of WordPress maintenance that can be handled using various tools.
W3 Total Cache and WP Fastest Cache are among the more well-known caching plugins. Both offer several features to boost performance, including minification, feed optimization, HTTP compression and an intuitive dashboard displaying the status of each cache type; additionally they can also be used to clear cache on specific pages.
Caching solutions that support Redis are another effective way to enhance website performance, relieving strain from MySQL database servers while increasing response times and search engine performance by making information more quickly searchable by visitors.
Maintaining a well-kept website can deliver an exceptional user experience, and the most effective WordPress maintenance measures include timely updates, intelligent backups and periodic performance tests. By making these tasks a regular part of your workflow, you will reduce the chance that increased loading times or security vulnerabilities arise as issues.
