Any business looking to build a profitable online presence needs to have an excellent website. Today, a majority of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. WordPress is well known for dominating the content management system (CMS) market, a platform that makes it possible to build some remarkable websites without coding being a barrier. WordPress offers you a dashboard with a simplified interface to create custom designs, web pages, and content that entertains, entices, and educates your prospects and audiences.
We’ve compiled a useful list of best practices for running a WordPress website long term to ensure you offer your visitors a good online experience while remaining profitable.
Update your website frequently
Many beginners and even experienced WordPress users have a notion that if they install updates on their website it will cause errors and break their site which is not true. Failure to update WordPress leaves your website vulnerable to security breaches as you’re using outdated software. You can safely and easily update WordPress without breaking your website. Also, be on the lookout for WordPress themes and plugins’ regular update release for security patches, bug fixes, and new features.
Create a posting schedule
WordPress comes with two different content types; pages and posts. It’s important to note that static pages don’t change very often like contact, about, privacy policy, etc. However, posts are for time-based content like articles, news, updates, and blogs. WordPress posts are listed with the newest posts at the top. New WordPress bloggers make the mistake of not blogging regularly. Writing posts on a schedule will make people stick around to your website.
Not choosing the right WordPress themes and plugins
With an influx of WordPress themes out there, choosing the right design for a website is one of the biggest challenges faced by WordPress beginners. Selecting the right WordPress theme for your website allows your visitors to become familiar with your website, brand, and uniqueness. The consistency and continuity of your design will make a huge impact on brand awareness and recognition. A good WordPress theme should; work with popular plugins and WordPress page builders, look good on all devices (tablets, desktops, and mobile), be optimized for speed and performance, and be flexible and customizable to adapt to your needs.
A lot of WordPress plugins are free and you can install them with a few clicks. However, some plugins can affect your website’s security and performance. When choosing plugins, it’s important to look for plugin reviews and support forums because they’re a good indicator of a plugin’s quality and only install plugins from reputable WordPress companies or WordPress.org.
Optimize load speed
Users want instant gratification, therefore, slow sites lead to frustrated visitors. With faster internet connections, users find a few extra seconds of page load time to be extremely slow. Search engines also rank faster websites higher in their results. Ignoring website speed and performance risks search engine rankings as well as user experience. To make sure your site loads fast, you can either install a caching plugin and/or an optimization plugin.
Optimize SEO
A lot of WordPress users completely ignore SEO which helps them rank higher in search engines. Search engines are the biggest source of traffic so that more users can find your website. For your online business, SEO is crucial for its success. Therefore, optimizing SEO allows your website to appear more often in search rankings, especially once you’ve started posting.
Neglecting WordPress security best practices
Many WordPress users believe that their website is too small to be targeted by hackers. Hackers can use your website to distribute malware, steal data, or even brute force attacks. Also, by not securing your website, you can lose your website data, search rankings, and/or customer information. To prevent this, you need to build layers of security around your WordPress site and follow the security best practices.
Create backups
Yearly, billions of dollars worth of damages are caused by data loss. Almost every website on the internet is prone to hacking attempts, accidents, theft, and other disasters. The most powerful defense against these threats is automated backups. Without a backup, you could lose all your WordPress data which is sometimes even impossible to recover. WordPress backup plugins are excellent for setting up backups. These plugins automatically create backups for you once you set up. Also, consider storing backup files on a remote location, e.g. a cloud storage service like Google Drive, in case you lose your website data you don’t end up losing your backup too.
Not setting up Google Search Console
When planning a strategy to grow your business and website, having great data is really important. Many users fail to add their WordPress site to Google Search Console, which makes them miss out on important search data that could help them grow their website. Google Search Console, a free tool provided by Google, allows you to see how your website appears in search results and fix any search indexing problems quickly.
