Top 5 Reasons Why Wordpress Maintenance is Essential

Wordpress is the most popular and largest website management system in use today on a global scale. It is used by more than 60 million websites and supports more than 30% of the top 10 million websites as of 2018.

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Even though the most popular use of the open source content management system is blogging, it can also be used to host other types of websites such as media galleries and online stores.

One of the most useful features of the system is its plugin architecture and template system. Since wordpress is being continuously developed, it is essential to properly maintain your wordpress site to keep it safe and up to date.

The Need for Maintenance

Every new version of Wordpress offers new functionalities and includes security fixes wherever necessary. If the owner of a site made on Wordpress is not up to date and neglects maintenance, the performance of the site would not be optimum and might cause problems for the visitors.

The main components that get updated with every new version of Wordpress are the core of the system, the plugins and the themes. Even though updating the elements of the site is essential, it can be a bit risky for regular people to do it themselves as botched updates can malfunction and break the entire site.

Any Wordpress site which is not running on the most up to date software runs the risk of being vulnerable to hackers as well, as the latest security fixes would not be present on those sites.

It is sufficient to say that without a proper maintenance plan, any Wordpress site is doomed to be broken in the near future.

Professional Wordpress Site Maintenance

There are many professional services which deal with the task of maintaining a Wordpress site and making sure it is up to date. The owner of the site can skip minor details but a professional service will make sure even the minutest technical details are also taken care of.

The professionals will also monitor the site and make sure it is on a proper management plan so that it is properly updated and any security breaches will be prevented.

Why Wordpress Maintenance is Essential

Securing the Site

One of the major reasons why Wordpress keeps pushing updates to its software is because it is constantly monitoring for possible security vulnerabilities and fixing them. If a Wordpress site is professional updated and managed in a timely manner, it can be ensured that the site is safe against the latest security vulnerabilities and prevents hackers from gaining access to the site through exploits.

Plugin Management

Since Wordpress employs an excellent and deep plugin management system, it is hard to find any site which doesn’t use any plugins. These plugins need to be updated constantly in order to make sure they run smoothly together. Monitoring and updating the plugins also makes sure that any unused plugin is not present on the site, bottling its speed and performance. Sometimes security vulnerabilities also exist in the plugins through which hackers might be able to find exploits to get access to the site.

Fixing Broken Links

Broken links are very bad for websites for various reasons, the primary one being that they negatively impact the search engine ranking of the site. By examining and inspecting the broken links and professionally managing a Wordpress site, it can be ensured that the visitors of the site are not confused. For any site that is trying to be competitive and win over the rankings of other sites, it is essential to make sure there are no broken links present.

If a site is regularly maintained properly, the broken links would be inspected regularly and removed as required.

Updating the Theme

Themes are a very essential and important part of the Wordpress system as they allow each site to have their own individual look while all of them are based on the core platform of Wordpress.

As is the case with the core software, themes need to be regularly updated too in order to apply to standards that might have changed or to provide the best experience to visitors.

Updating and managing the themes is also a very important process on its own right as themes can break down over the time and their functionality might be reduced or disabled, leaving the site broken.

Off-Site Backup

It is essential to backup a Wordpress site in order to prevent the entire site from getting lost due to the site getting attacked by a hacker or some other security breach. It is better if the backup is stored off-site as this allows the data to be safe away even if something happens to the main server.

A professionally maintained site will be backed up off site on remote servers, making sure that the website would not have to be rebuilt from scratch in case something goes wrong.

Updating the Core Wordpress Software

The core component of the content management system is the most important part that is essential for its functioning. It is required for all functions to be performed by the system and if it is not up to date, the site would lose out on a lot of new features and would not be able to compete with websites which run on the latest version of the software.

A lot of features might stop working too if the core software isn’t updated and can cause the site to not perform in the most optimum manner.

Removing Spam

Another positive effect of properly maintaining a Wordpress site is the removal of spam. Any site that receives more than the average amount of traffic should expect to endure some amount spam in the comments. By properly maintaining the wordpress site, these spam comments could be taken care of. The removal of spam comments makes the site look more professional and acts as more of an incentive for a visitor to comment and further engage with the website, which should be the ultimate goal for any blogger.

Conclusion

Any Wordpress website which takes itself seriously should have a proper maintenance plan which ideally should be performed by professionals regularly. This ensures that the site will keep running smoothly through the changes in the core Wordpress software and none of its functionality would get broken through the changes.

With proper maintenance, themes and plugins of the site are also updated as when required which ensures that the site would continue to look and function good throughout any changes and the owner of the site can focus on the content instead of worrying about the site breaking due to some problems in maintenance.

For any website to be smooth running and bug free, it needs to be properly managed and professionally maintained. Without a proper maintenance plan, it is unrealistic to expect any site to rank highly in search engine results or to perform flawlessly over a long period of time.