Site Maintenance

Are you or Aren’t You Doing This on Your Website?

What does that mean to you?

Does it mean that you add posts / pages of content?

Many of my clients think so. But that’s not the answer.

Think about your car. If you were to do maintenance on your car, that means that you periodically have to take your car in for service – to have the oil changed, rotate the tires, check the brakes, inspect the undercarriage, and so on.

Maintaining your car does not just mean that you keep putting gas in it and keep going. Well I suppose it could, but at some point, all of those miles will add up and your car will begin to break down.

Well, the same thing happens with your WordPress website. If you keep adding content, and content, and plugins, and content, and don’t do the recommended service updates, your site is going to CRASH.

And it will ALWAYS happen at the absolute worst moments – as with anything.

Maintaining your site means that you routinely do some minor updates:

• Update Plugins
• Update WordPress – hopefully after WP 3.7 this will become automatic
• Remove Spam
• Backup Regularly – Full Database at least once a week
• Check page speed – and review (and implement) the suggestions

Those mentioned above are usually items that most website owners can do on their own. Just like some people are comfortable checking air pressure in their own tires, adding windshield washer fluid, or making sure the oil level is good. These routine maintenance updates usually take just a few minutes and you’re good to go.

There are some, potentially, more complicated maintenance services that should be routinely performed, perhaps by a professional. Think in this case about changing/rotating the tires, flushing your car fluids, or changing the oil – not something that I’m willing to tackle on my own even though I grew up with a dad for a mechanic.

Those same maintenances on your site should look like:

• Clean up posts revisions – those are all of those ‘autosaves’ and they can impact your site load times especially if you have a large blog
• Clean up database
• Delete plugin files – that didn’t get deleted when the original plugin was deleted. It happens, some of these files are hidden and still hang out on your site.)

There you have it. Go log in to your WordPress dashboard and check to see if you have some out of date stuff happening. You can usually tell because there are black circles with numbers beside the item that needs some T-L-C.

And for the bigger project, well you can always contact me if you don’t want to do it yourself – of get your VA / Web Developer to make sure that it’s done for you. It’s likely that you’ll have to pay a little for this service.

I figure it’s a lot better to have a mechanic check my brakes for me then it is to be heading down the mountain and have them go – and YES I know from experience how your life can flash before your eyes. Make sure you get your website checked out – and your brakes too if you haven’t had your car in for service in awhile 😉