Maintain a Website
Following up on the previous post about Website Maintenance, in this post I will outline a few website maintenance basics that any owner of a WordPress website can follow. These are simple general maintenance tasks that are often overlooked and can cause errors and ultimately a failure of the website.
Website Maintenance Basics
Here are a few basic steps that you can easily follow to help keep your website up and running and in good order. Once logged in to your site you will see the Dashboard and all the features below in the menu. Any Updates that need to be attended to will be highlighted on the menu. This will be your first task to perform. These updates refer either to a new version of WordPress itself ( at present we are running version WordPress 3.1.2) or a plugin update.
On the dashboard menu you find certain features.
1. Users: here you can enable the editor that you see and use when you write a post, do fill out the user name and nickname and add your email where people can contact you as an administrator. Also keep your eye on the other users you may find you get some unwanted guests, just delete them if neccessary.
2. Settings: Here you find various sections that need to be filled out, these all depend on how you wish to run your website and what you would like the public to see. If you use plugins, some find their way into this section if they need settings to be configured.
3. Plugins: this section displays any plugin that you may have installed on your web site. This section is important to keep updated. Plugins that are outdated can cause serious damage to a site. Be mindful that not all plugins are compatible with each other and can create conflicts. Any plugin that you decide not to use should be deleted, as it just ads to an unneccessary load on the server. The Akismet plugin is important to activate in order to keep down the spam.
4. Pages: here you can add pages to your site. Not many problems here normally in this section .
5. Links: normally no problems here but do delete any dead link.
6. Comments: if you post to your blog regularly and your site is visible on search engines you will find comments here, either legitimate or spam comments. The Akismet plugin filters out many of these comments, however some do get through. Some of the comments can be extremely large, full of links and can cause your web site to slow down – just delete all spam.
7. Posts: here is where you ad your personal contribution to the site. Using the text editor can be a big help if you are not familiar with code. If you ad images make sure they are not heavy as this slows down loading time. Usually no problems here unless something is added to a post that creates conflict and wreaks havoc on your site
All these tasks can be performed without a webmasters intervention, but it means regularly logging in to your WordPress based website and performing checks that all is running smoothly. If time is money and you have very little time then maybe a monthly website maintenance plan is the right thing for you. For more information about Web Maintenance Services click HERE .
