The importance of maintenance & security of WordPress websites

WordPress is the best and most frequently used Content Management System to allow non techies to easily design, develop and the maintain their website. But the real risk and security threat comes after completion of the site build and the site goes live. WordPress websites are under constant attack from Malware injections or other hacks that can take over your site and even lock you out leaving you with a non functional site.

Recovering from an attack is not easy as there are so many different types of hacks. Malware can not only inject itself into your website files, but also into your database where all of your site content is stored.

Why is WordPress maintenance important?

Maintenance is a ongoing process and it’s very important due to several reasons such as website hacks, malware injections, declining search engine ranks, slow loading pages, ransomware, WordPress security vulnerabilities and much more!

To overcome a hack, a WordPress pro will charge a high cost to fix the problem and the worse the hack, the higher the cost will be to fix the website. If your WordPress site was hacked and was fixed, it doesn’t mean it’s safe. You will be required to do the regular updates to your site to prevent another hack. If this is not done monthly, it is not a matter of if, but when your site will be hacked again.

So what’s the solution to this problem? Well, a website owner can be trained by a professional on the ways to properly maintain and backup their WordPress website monthly. This type of training normally takes an hour or less.

If the owner of the site runs a business and does not have the time or interest in maintaining the site on their own, they can hire a company to do the website maintenance services monthly to keep the site secure and protected. At Internet Solutions For Less, we not only provide that training to site owners, but we also maintain hundreds of WordPress sites for clients monthly that prefer professionals to handle it. In most cases, WordPress maintenance monthly is an hour or less to keep it up to date, protected and secure.

The following is a list of the ways to properly maintain your WordPress website:

Use the Latest WordPress Version
Always work with the latest WordPress version to ensure all bug fixes and security patches are fixed. It is very important to run a backup of your site prior to starting any maintenance because sometimes updating to a new version of WordPress can cause incompatabilities with your theme and plugins and break the site. This way if you go to upgrade WordPress to the new version and the site breaks, you can simply run a restore of your backup to get a working version of the site back up quickly until you can determine what cause the incompatability.

Many site owners leave the automatic upgrade feature turned on in WordPress and if the site breaks when the system is doing an auto-update and no backup was run prior, it will take a professional time to figure out the problem leaving you with no website for several days or longer. By manually updating to the latest WordPress version after running a backup, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing you can always run a restore from your backup plugin. Speaking of backup plugins, there are many out there, but we suggest Backguard or Updraft Plus.

Use a Strong Login Password
A strong password is highly recommended to avoid attacks and especially Brute force attackers. Also, never allow your browser to save the password in the browser settings for ease of logging in. The reason for this is that if your computer become infected with Malware, the Mlware will look for your saved password stored in order to try to compromise those online accounts and a WordPress hack will be the least of your concerns if the Malware gets into your financial related accounts.

For a secure password, it is highly recommended to avoid Dictionary names, personal names or any easily identifiable names. You can use a password length with a multiple combination of symbols and characters and make sure to change your password every few months or so.

Neglect using the “Admin” Username
“Admin” is a generally used name, therefore its better to avoid it. But you can use any name instead of Admin but make sure to use a unique name which is not related to the person using the Website to avoid guesses. You can simply set a nickname and keep it a secret.

Alter the WP Table Prefix
The default database prefix used by WordPress is “_wp”. Do change the prefix to random characters to avoid malicious attacks as the attacker could enter malicious codes such as an SQL injection to corrupt your database or even to receive data.

Update the Plugins frequently
An easy entrance for attackers is using plugins due to its vulnerabilities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use plugins, but make sure to frequently update and selectively choose plugins.

Backup your data frequently
Backup data frequently stables the win/loose probability as you always have the essential data on your pocket so there is less to worry. To easily update the data, you can use a plugin to save it to the cloud frequently. You can either backup only your database or the entire source file through the host provider to ensure a recovery plan.

Operate a Security Service
To ensure that you operate with a security service, use plugins such as Sucuri, Wordfence security plugins as a malware scanning tool. You can spy your WordPress from attackers using a security service to avoid the downside of WordPress.

Why Use a WordPress Website Maintenance Service?
If you are a sole individual self maintaining your WordPress website or lack sufficient knowledge to dive deep into maintenance or you don’t have an in-house maintenance team, then it’s the best choice to go for a WordPress Maintenance Service to avoid the risk of being attacked by malicious attacks.

What should be included in Website Maintenance Service?
The WordPress maintenance package can consist few of the below services based on the pricing tier:

• Security audit & recommendations – Your WordPress needs to be frequently checked for security threats, malware and virus scans and updates to ensure security and stability.
• Technical support- To assure Search Engine Optimization, gain high traffic, filter the title, meta-description and keywords technical support is recommended.
• Full-site & database backup- An automated backup is essential to ensure uninterrupted and continuous service.
• WordPress version updates- This feature will fortfy frequent changes are updated to websites to catch up performance caching, solve bugs and much more advantages.
• Plugin version updates- Broken plugins and themes give arise to unstable issues, thereby plugins needs to be updated routinely.
• Uptime monitoring- The website needs to be monitored frequently to notify with regard to anomaly behaviors, to execute contingency plans as well as to keep up 24/7 monitoring.

• Strategic & planning- Being strategic ensures to solve ongoing troubleshooting of problems with your WordPress site.
• Database optimization and cleanup- A proper knowledgeable worker is essential to optimize Database as per the client requirements and to ensure the stability of the website.
• Security audit- This feature needs to be maintained to respond to priority urgent request support in case of an emergency.
• SEO analytics report- An SEO analysis report will definitely speed up your website to grow more traffic traffic.
• Tighten security- By tightening the security you can fix broken links/codes and ensure site performance check & recommendations are fixed.
• Mobile responsive on all devices- A website needs to be responsive on all devices and specific requirements needs to be satisfied to accomplish Mobile responsive on all devices.
• Site migrations- In case of site migrations or scalability the essential setups should be made in advance to avoid uninterrupted and continuous service of the website to the users.
• Custom development of the website as per requirements- When a user has insufficient knowledge with regard to WordPress, a WordPress Maintenance service can be used to build the website as per the requirement of the client for higher satisfaction and credibility.

Conclusion
To conclude, WordPress offers vast amount of services for it’s clients and users with pros and cons. Go forth and experiment with different settings and techniques to see what works best for your website, alongside never forget the importance of WordPress maintenance and to choose the best package for your WordPress maintenance based on your requirements. At Internet Solutions For Less, we have over a decade of experience working with WordPress websites and properly maintaining them from hacks, malware injections or complete takeovers. Visit our WordPress Maintenance Services page to learn more about how we can protect your website for the long term.

Thanks for reading!