WordPress Constantly needs Updates

This can seem annoying but ultimately it will help your site’s health, performance and prevent attacks like hacking attempts, Malware infection, DDoS or spam comments that can do a range of damage from an annoying time-waste to a real financial cost and a threat to your customer experience.

A cyberattack can cost a small businesses on average $36,000 to $50,000 and can cost larger businesses millions of dollars. This is obviously not to be taken lightly and it’s becoming more prevalent as digital expertise is shared more readily.

One of the things WordPress is well known for, might be that annoying amount of updates it requires between the WordPress core, plugins and the theme you are using.

All of these regular fixes take a few minutes each, but before you know it, it is a lot of time away from delivering the product/service to your customers. That is mainly the reason many website owners don’t do these updates, or end up leaving everything on “auto” which also carries its own risks.

Many updates “like the recent WordPress 5.6 update” can break the website’s look and feel if not not implemented carefully, also plugins conflict with each other more often than not, so leaving everything on auto will eventually break your site, especially if you do not check on these updates on a weekly basis.
– Let me ask you this: “Pilots often use the auto-pilot during the cruise, but they rarely use it for important activities like take-off and landing, furthermore they are always there to correct any issues, do you think they would leave the auto pilot on all the time and never check on it? So why do this to one of the greatest business tools you have?”

At HumanTalents we secure, maintain and optimize websites daily, so you can concentrate on your customer. Because of our expertise and scale, we can offer lower prices than what it would cost for you to do it yourself, or with an agency.
Actually since most of this work is back-end work that web designers often outsource to us.

– If you’re interested to learn more, check our website care plans out.They all include active security, daily backups, weekly updates and performance optimization.
– Need to ask questions, feel free to book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your website.

There are other tasks your WordPress website needs on a periodic basis. Some very simple ones are:

1. Frequent Password changes
2. Link and page audit
3. Optimizing your pages for speed

Password changes

This one may seem the most obvious and requires the least amount of effort but the funny thing is almost nobody does it. A good password should be long and complex so brute force hackers, who are people who try every combination of characters until they guess your password, can’t get in.

Brute force hacking is usually done by computer and can be accomplished within an hour. It is incredibly simple to deter, you can set up a limited number of password tries or a captcha form. All of these can be accomplished through different plugins in WordPress to make it simple for even the beginner.

However, this brings us to another problem. WordPress users are annoyed with the number of plugins they end up having on their website. Which actually can slow down load time.

Badly coded plugins blow up your website size which affects your SEO ranking and hurts your website’s overall performance.

So you might be asking yourself: can you design and operate your website without plugins? The answer is yes, however, it takes more advanced coding knowledge than the typical website owner has.

There are horror stories of website owners who spent hours or days or even weeks trying to fix a bug in their code because they want to do everything themselves. But they end up hiring someone to do it after all that wasted time and energy. Sometimes expertise cannot be replaced. That’s why at HumanTalents we are here for all website owners who wanna spend their precious time doing what’s important, serving their customers.

If you want the no-fuss website experience sign up for your consultation with our experts to go over your website design in plumbing needs now.

Link and Page Audits

This is something everyone is familiar with: you are surfing through the web and you find a 404 page or find a broken link. This can be incredibly annoying for your customer but also frustrating for you as a website owner to go through each of your pages and click on every link. Some longer posts could have up to 20 or 50 links.

Of course, there is a website plugin to do this for you, but as we said these plugins can be dangerous.

Plugin Hidden Dangers

You should be wary of sites that too strongly promote multiple plugins for every function you need to do on your website. Many of these linking or auditing plugins have hidden fees that don’t kick in until you’ve already integrated them into your site, making it extremely hard to delete.

The main point to remember is to avoid adding unnecessary plugins and instead consult an expert about which ones are reliable and necessary for your website

You can find out more about which ones are best from our WordPress experts in your consultation or check out our guide which will be on the website soon. Make sure you are staying in touch by following us on Facebook or bookmarking our blog page.

Google Search Console

One thing that can help you go through your site without any plugins is a free tool called Google search console. This is a free site offered to website owners that allows you to instantly crawl through your site and check for broken links or 404 pages and indicates which ones you need to fix. This is extremely helpful and requires little input except for a simple script tag.

Of course, going through the edits can take awhile. One thing to reduce the number of errors you find is to create a site organization system to help you remember where each of your cross-links is located. That way if you change one site you know exactly which links need to be edited or redirected. This can be difficult to keep track of and takes time which is why so many of our clients prefer our website care services.

If you wanna save time editing and going through your website to focus on your customers sign up for a free consultation to learn more about whether this service is for you.

Optimizing your files/images for speed

File sizes dictate your website speed and slower websites are ranked poorly by Google making the site speed integral to your SEO as well as your site’s overall performance. Some things that can speed up your website are optimizing your images for the web, limiting the number of revisions uploaded in your backups, and separating longer posts into separate pages.

Check out our guide on how to optimize website speed. You can also easily purchase a speed package that is guaranteed to increase your loading speed – or your money back.

A recent study showed the huge impact that shaving just a 1 second loading time can have on a website. It resulted in a 7% increase in sales, 11% increase in user impressions, and a 16% increase in customer satisfaction. I can’t tell you how important your website optimization is for the long term value of your business.

Ultimately, WordPress requires a lot of upkeep. We are HumanTalents want to support you in your website development and maintenance so you can concentrate on serving your customers and delivering product value. We offer affordable services and product packages to help you on whatever stage your website is at from merely an idea to a fully functioning e-commerce site. If you want to see how HumanTalents can help you serve your customers sign up for your free consultation.

For more information and detailed guides on performing WordPress check out WPBeginner, a great place to find tutorials.