In today’s digital era, having a website is essential, but maintaining it is equally crucial to ensure it performs optimally. At Matter Solutions, we specialise in driving digital growth for healthcare and technical businesses. Here are some reasons why a website maintenance plan is indispensable:
Security
Your website is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Regular updates to software, plugins, and security patches can protect your site from malware, data breaches, and other cyber threats. A comprehensive WordPress website maintenance plan includes security hardening measures, ensuring that your site remains secure even as technology and cyber threats evolve.
Regular Updates: Keeping your website's core software, themes, and plugins up to date is the first line of defence against security vulnerabilities.
Malware Scanning and Removal: Continuous monitoring for malware and immediate removal if detected ensures your site remains safe.
SSL Certificates: Regularly renewing SSL certificates protects the data exchanged between your site and its users, ensuring encrypted communication.
Firewall and DDoS Protection: Implementing and maintaining firewalls and protection against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks prevents unauthorised access and service disruptions.
Performance Optimisation
A slow website can drive visitors away. Routine maintenance ensures your website loads quickly and functions smoothly, providing a better user experience and improving your search engine rankings. This includes optimising your site's responsiveness across multiple platforms and ensuring fast load times, both of which contribute to retaining visitors and enhancing overall performance.
Load Speed Enhancements: Techniques like image optimisation, cache management, and minifying CSS/JS files can drastically improve load times.
Mobile Optimisation: Ensuring your site is fully responsive on all devices guarantees a seamless experience for mobile users.
Regular Audits: Conducting performance audits to identify and fix bottlenecks ensures sustained high performance.
Server Management:Efficient server configuration and regular server maintenance prevent downtime and ensure quick response times.
Content Updates
Outdated content can harm your credibility. Frequent updates keep your site relevant and engaging for your audience. Fresh content also signals to search engines that your site is active, which can boost your SEO efforts. Regular content updates include adding new features and technologies, such as social media buttons, to keep your site modern and user-friendly.
Visual Content: Updating images, videos, and infographics helps maintain visual appeal and relevance.
Service/Product Updates: Reflecting changes in your services or products ensures your audience has the most accurate information.
User-Generated Content: Integrating reviews and testimonials adds credibility and fresh content to your site.
SEO and Analytics
Regular maintenance allows for continuous monitoring of your website’s performance through analytics tools. This helps identify areas for improvement and provides insights into your audience's behaviour and preferences. Optimising meta tags, keywords, and other SEO elements keeps your site competitive in search engine results, driving organic traffic to your business.
Keyword Optimisation:Regularly updating keywords based on current trends and search behaviours keeps your content relevant.
Meta Tags and Descriptions: Ensuring these are optimised and accurately reflect the content improves click-through rates from search engines.
Link Building: Maintaining and acquiring quality backlinks enhances your site’s authority.
Analytics Monitoring: Using tools like Google Analytics to track user behaviour, conversions, and other key metrics to continually refine your strategy.
Backup and Recovery
Regular backups ensure you can quickly recover your site in case of data loss or other emergencies. This minimises downtime and protects your business continuity. A robust maintenance plan includes routine backups so your data remains safe and can be restored swiftly.
Automatic Backups: Scheduling automatic backups at regular intervals ensures data is consistently saved.
Offsite Storage: Storing backups offsite protects against local data loss events.
Disaster Recovery Plan: Having a clear and tested recovery plan minimises downtime and ensures a quick return to normal operations.
Incremental Backups: Performing incremental backups reduces the amount of storage needed and speeds up the backup process.
Functionality Checks
Broken links, outdated forms, and other functionality issues can frustrate users and lead to lost conversions. Regular checks and fixes ensure everything works as intended. This includes updating the core Content Management Systems (CMS), plugins, and themes to prevent any potential malfunctions and keep the site running smoothly.
Form Testing: Ensuring all forms work correctly and capture data accurately avoids losing potential leads.
Plugin and Theme Updates: Keeping all elements up to date ensures compatibility and functionality.
Usability Testing: Regularly testing the user interface and experience to ensure it meets user expectations and is free of bugs.
Compliance
Web compliance standards evolve over time. Regular maintenance ensures your site adheres to the latest legal and industry standards, helping you avoid potential fines and penalties. Keeping your website compliant with current regulations not only avoids legal issues but also builds trust with your audience.
Accessibility Standards: Ensuring your site meets WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) makes it accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
Privacy Regulations: Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws protects user data and builds trust.
Industry-Specific Regulations: Adhering to standards specific to your industry ensures your site remains legitimate and trustworthy.
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Updates: Regularly reviewing and updating these documents to reflect current legal requirements.
If you’re using WordPress for your website, you’ll want to know how to ensure your site is completely secure. After all, you don’t want to risk your website being hacked. WordPress is a very popular publishing platform - in fact, it runs more than 24% of all websites. As a result of this, WordPress websites are often targets of hackers.
Who would hack your website?
If you're protecting your site, you’ll want to know what you are protecting against. There are a few ways your website can be hacked:
Humans: someone manually trying to attack your website
Automated bot: a singular bot can be used by a hacker to get access to websites
Botnet: a group of bots which are being controlled from the one source which are aiming to hack a website.
Most hacks will happen through bots, as they are automated, which means the whole process can be sped up.
There are numerous reasons people will try to hack into websites. This includes being able to send spam content, to host malicious content, or to steal data, to name a few.
Is your website at risk?
You can never be completely sure that your website will never be attacked. However, there are ways that your website can become more vulnerable to attackers. This includes:
Having a weak password
Using non-secure plugins or themes
Not updating WordPress
Using “admin” as your username
So how can you protect your WordPress website?
When thinking about securing your WordPress website, you’ll want to know where your existing security vulnerabilities are. You can do this by scanning your website. Fortunately, there are a variety of websites that offer this service. Some are free, while others have a free trial or a premium upgrade. Free versions will give you a basic overview of your website, but if you’re wanting something more detailed, you’ll generally have to sign up for a paid account.
A great security measure to introduce to your website is two-factor authentication. This means anyone logging in to your website will have to enter the password, as well as another factor, such as secret questions, text messages, or a code. This makes it harder for hackers to get into your WordPress website.
2. Lockout after failed logins
Having a lockout feature on your website prevents unauthorised people from continually trying to access your website. If someone has tried to access your website too many times, they will be locked out and you will be notified. You can use plugins such as iThemes Security or Login LockDown to have a lockout feature on your website.
3. Update passwords
One of the most obvious things you can do to help secure your website is to ensure you have a difficult password and update it on a frequent basis. Don’t just use “password” as your password. Consider using a combination of upper and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and special characters.
4. Don’t use “admin” as your username
You don’t just need to have a strong password, you need a username that is hard to guess as well. Keeping your username as “admin” means it is easier for hackers to access your website. They don’t have to worry about guessing your username, they just have to worry about the password. To help secure your website, remember to change your administration accounts username from “admin”.
5. Backup your website
If your website does come under attack, you don’t want to worry about having lost all of your data. You won’t have anything to worry about if you backup your website off-site. This means you can easily restore your website, and don’t have to start again from scratch.
6. Get an SSL certificate
If you’re running an e-commerce website, you’ll want to consider getting an SSL certificate. This will encrypt data such as credit card numbers and any other personal information provided by shoppers. This means you will be able to protect the data of shoppers, and they can be reassured that no one will misuse their credit card details. This will increase trust levels with shoppers, meaning you’ll be more likely to get business.
7. Update WordPress, plugins and themes
You want to make sure you keep everything up to date. The latest releases often come with a security update. Not installing the update means you’re left vulnerable to this security problem. It’s important to ensure not just WordPress, but your plugins and themes are all up to date.
It can be somewhat of a hassle for those that manage multiple WordPress websites to continually manually update their website, themes, and plugins. Fortunately, you can use tools such as ManageWP. This allows you to handle your themes and plugins from one central dashboard. Updating them all takes just a click of a button. This is far more time-effective than manually going into every website you manage and means you can secure your websites faster.
8. Secure all user accounts
Often a business will have more than one person accessing their WordPress website. Having multiple people allowed to access an admin panel means you’re open to vulnerabilities. You can add an extra element of security by using plugins such as Force Strong Passwords. This enforces users to have strong passwords and sends notifications when passwords are attempted to be changed. This prevents users from having weak passwords that can easily be guessed.
Following these tips will ensure you have a more secure WordPress website, and will be less vulnerable to attacks from hackers.
Got any other tips? Let us know in the comments.
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