10 Tips for Effective WordPress Website Management

WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS), powering over 40 percent of websites. Its ease of use, flexibility, and vast ecosystem of plugins and themes make it a go-to choice for many businesses and professionals. However, running a WordPress website isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task. 

Effective website management is essential to ensure that your site remains secure, fast, and accessible to your audience. There are lots of tools you can use to automate some of these WordPress maintenance tasks, and if you choose the right hosting provider, they will handle some of the work for you. 

In this post, we’ll explore the importance of website management. Then, we’ll offer some tips to help you manage your WordPress site effectively. Let’s dive right in!

Why Is WordPress Website Management Important?

A well-managed WordPress site can provide a better user experience for visitors. This may boost conversion rates for your business, and even help you rank better in search engine results.

On the other hand, poor management can lead to slow loading times and even downtime. A slow website can deter visitors and negatively affect your search engine rankings. 

Plus, since WordPress is such a popular CMS, it’s a desirable target among hackers. Therefore, it’s essential to regularly update and secure your site.

While website management may sound like a daunting task, most of the work is pretty straightforward. And if you’re unable to handle it, you can always look for WordPress maintenance services or switch to managed WordPress hosting. 

10 Tips for Effective WordPress Management

In this section, we’ll show you how to manage WordPress sites and ensure a smooth performance.

1. Make Regular Backups

No matter how well you manage your WordPress website, things can go wrong. Your site might break due to an accidental mistake, or your host’s server could experience a security breach. 

In these instances, a recent backup can be a lifesaver. You’ll be able to restore your site to its previous state, and you won’t lose any important data. 

You can use a plugin like UpdraftPlus to schedule daily or weekly backups:

It’s important that you store your backups in cloud solutions like Google Drive to ensure off-site safety. You’ll want to avoid saving them on your server – if something happens to it, you risk losing your website as well as its backups.

2. Keep WordPress, Themes, and Plugins Updated

One of the most important aspects of site management is keeping your WordPress core files, themes, and plugins up to date. 

Developers release updates to fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, and introduce new features. Ignoring these updates leaves your site vulnerable to attacks and performance issues.

WordPress lets you enable automatic updates for plugins and themes:

But if possible, you’ll want to test updates on a staging site before applying them to your live website. This way, you can avoid any compatibility issues that could break your site. 

3. Conduct Regular Security Audits

WordPress security should be a priority for any site owner. A security breach can compromise sensitive data, damage your reputation, and even result in search engine penalties. 

Regular security audits can help you identify potential vulnerabilities and take the necessary steps to fix them.

First, you’ll want to install a security plugin like Wordfence to monitor your site for malware, brute force attacks, and other threats:

It’s also a good idea to change the default login URL (yourwebsite.com/wp-admin), as this is an easy target for hackers. You can use a plugin like WPS Hide Login to do this:

Moreover, adding two-factor authentication (2FA) ensures that even if a hacker obtains your login credentials, they won’t be able to access your site without the code that’s sent to your mobile phone or inbox. 

WP 2FA lets you add this authentication system to your website. This can be particularly beneficial if there are multiple users with access to your website (like subscribers, customers, and authors). Some of them may not be using strong passwords, so enforcing 2FA will add that extra layer of security. 

4. Review and Delete Spam Comments

Spam comments not only clutter your website but can also harm your rankings and user experience. 

Search engines might penalize your site if they detect too many spammy links in your comments section, while users might find it frustrating to navigate through irrelevant or malicious content.

Plugins like Akismet automatically filter spam comments:

You can also enable comment moderation to ensure that every comment is reviewed before it appears on your site. Plus, you’ll want to regularly clean up spam comments to free up space in your database and improve site performance.

5. Limit User Permissions

WordPress allows multiple user roles, such as Administrator, Editor, Author, and Contributor. Giving users more permissions than necessary can lead to accidental changes or even security risks, especially if an account is compromised.

Therefore, you’ll want to assign Roles Carefully. Only grant Administrator privileges to trusted individuals, as these users will have complete control over the website.

You’ll also want to periodically review user accounts and permissions to ensure that they are still necessary. And if some users have become inactive, you can delete their accounts.

6. Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider

Your choice of WordPress hosting provider can significantly impact your website’s performance, security, and uptime. 

Ideally, you would have selected a reliable web host from the start. But you can always switch to a different hosting provider. 

At NameHero, we can help you migrate your WordPress website to our servers. Our hosting plans include free daily backups and auto WordPress updates, so you’ll have fewer management tasks on your hands!

Plus, we help keep your site secure with a web application firewall, real-time malware scanning, DDoS protection, and other security features. 

Meanwhile, our LiteSpeed caching solution ensures that your website runs optimally at all times. 

7. Perform Regular Speed Tests

Website speed is a critical factor for user experience. A slow-loading website can frustrate clients and lead to higher bounce rates. Search engines like Google also take page load times into account when ranking sites.

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom will measure your website’s loading times and give you suggestions for improvement:

For instance, you might need to compress and optimize images to reduce page load times. 

You can also install a caching plugin such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache. This will store a version of your website’s pages and deliver them faster to returning visitors:

Excessive or poorly coded plugins can also slow down your site. Therefore, you’ll want to periodically review and deactivate unnecessary plugins.

8. Optimize Your Database

Over time, your WordPress database can become bloated with content like old post revisions, spam comments, and trashed items. This can slow down your website and make it less efficient.

Plugins like WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner can clean up your database by removing unnecessary data:

You can also regularly review and delete unused media files from your WordPress media library to save space and reduce database size.

9. Implement Regular Content Updates

Regularly updating and adding new content keeps your site relevant and helps with its search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines prefer fresh content, and your visitors will appreciate up-to-date information.

You can start by reviewing your existing pages and posts to make sure that they’re still accurate and relevant. Update any outdated information, broken links, or missing images. You might even use Google Analytics to see how these posts are performing.

Then, you can plan and schedule new content in advance using a content calendar. This way, you’ll have a steady stream of new posts. 

Remember to optimize your content for search engines using plugins like Yoast SEO. These tools will help you identify keyword opportunities and improve readability.

10. Monitor Website Uptime

Uptime is the amount of time your website is accessible and running without interruptions. Downtime can occur for several reasons, such as server issues or security breaches, and can result in lost revenue and frustrated visitors.

Services like Jetpack will monitor your website and notify you immediately if it goes down. However, you’ll want to ensure that your hosting provider offers a strong uptime guarantee, ideally 99.9 percent or higher.

Conclusion

Effective WordPress website management requires a combination of security measures, performance optimizations, and regular content updates. For instance, you’ll want to make regular backups, update your WordPress theme and plugins, perform site speed tests, and more.

When you choose a reliable WordPress host, most of these tasks will be automated. At NameHero, our plans include daily automated backups and WordPress auto updates. We also have a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and use LiteSpeed caching, so you won’t need to worry about downtime and performance issues.

Do you have any questions about the management of WordPress websites? Let us know in the comments section below!