What Are Some Must-Have Tools for WordPress Maintenance?

One of the main reasons for running a WordPress website is the peace of mind of having a stable, safe, dependable site. It frees you from worrying about technical difficulties so you can focus on more important things.

But WordPress maintenance is still an important thing, especially if you’re hosting your own WordPress site. Luckily, there are all manner of powerful tools to ensure your WordPress site stays functioning smoothly and efficiently.

Keep reading to find out some of the most essential tools for WordPress maintenance.

UpdraftPlus

Downtime can be disastrous for a website owner. Not only are you missing out on potential revenue, it’s also bad for your reputation. If things go wrong too regularly, your customers will take their business somewhere else.

Tools that provide effortless backups and restores mean you have a strategy in place when things go wrong, such as in the case of a malware attack, or when a plugin or theme update break your site.

A backup tool like UpdraftPlus means you can rest easy, knowing that your site is being backed up daily and can be easily restored with minimal effort.

Site updates are just one occasion where you might need to have a backup. Data breaches and site hacks can also leave your WordPress site offline or unfunctional. There’s a reason UpdraftPlus is used by everybody from Princeton University to the NBA.

iThemes Security

Data breaches can be disastrous for customers and site owners alike. They can break the trust your customers have placed in you and your website. They can also reveal sensitive information, often with disastrous consequences.

Unfortunately, data breaches are not at all uncommon. On average, over 30,000 websites are hacked every day. Some form of cybercrime happens every 39 seconds. Therefore, a good security tool is one of the most important WordPress must-have tools to have in your toolkit.

iThemes Security ensures that your WordPress site stays up and running and secure with minimal effort. It’s also easy to use and implement. The plugin includes standard security templates you can use to quickly enable the most common settings based on the type of your website – from eCommerce to blogs to online communities.

iThemes Security also offers real-time website analysis via a security dashboard. It also lets you secure your WordPress site with a handful of additional security options. The pro version supports everything from two-factor authentication to reCaptcha to multiple device support.

Advanced Database Cleaner

If you’re serious about your website’s success, you need to make sure it’s operating as efficiently as possible. Page load time is an important metric for Google’s SEO ranking.

Advanced Database Cleaner maintains your WordPress database to make sure it’s as fast and clean as possible. This useful plugin monitors for abandoned drafts and discarded posts, as well, to make sure you’re not taking up unnecessary server space. The plugin also lets you schedule database cleanup and table optimization to run automatically.

Many plugins don’t do a good job of cleaning up after themselves when they are deleted.  Many of them leave behind database tables and settings, called options, that clutter up the database and reduce performance. The Pro version of Advanced Database Cleaner scans your site’s database for discrepancies left over from these deleted plugins, highlighting the “orphaned” tables and options that can be safely removed.  Cleaning up orphaned entities will decrease the size of the database and improve the loading speed of your website.

Redirection

“Page Not Found” or 404 Errors are never a good look for a website. They can leave your audience feeling confused and diminish the trust they place in your site. 301 redirects help you avoid these errors, ensuring a smooth and dependable user experience.

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that does just that.  The Redirection plugin essentially allows you to redirect your website visitors from one page on your site to another. When you change the URL of a page, for example, a 301 redirection rule will ensure people are redirected automatically to the new page.  The Redirection plugin has been around for over 10 years and has over 2 million installs. It’s also completely free and easy to use, even with no knowledge of coding or server scripting.

Uptime Robot

Downtime is disastrous for website owners. At best, it can shake your audience’s trust. At worst, it can mean missing out on revenue. This is especially the case if you’re running an eCommerce website or paying for an advertising campaign.

If you’re serious about your site’s success, you need to have some sort of monitoring solution in place in case something goes wrong. Uptime Robot is a particularly good resource to have in your stack. There’s a reason it’s running over 6 million monitors on over 1.5 million websites.

Uptime Robot offers numerous ways to monitor your WordPress website. There’s standard HTTP monitoring to alert you immediately when your site goes down.

Uptime Robot has a free tier that lets you set up to 50 monitors that run at 5-minute intervals. A paid subscription allows you to configure the monitors to check your website every 60 seconds.  It also handles SSL monitoring, which will alert you 7 to 14 days before your site’s security certificate expires.

WordPress Maintenance Service

A WordPress Maintenance Service offloads the tasks of maintaining your website to a professional WordPress agency.  You can delegate the various chores of running a reliable and secure website to WordPress experts, while you focus on more pressing matters – building your business and delivering a world-class customer experience.

At WPAssist, it is our passion to help businesses and website owners with our experience and technical expertise. You won’t have to worry about your site going down or falling victim to ransomware attacks because of outdated plugins and themes.  We proactively look for ways to improve the performance and security of your website so it’s always performing at its best.

If you’re ready to find out how WordPress maintenance can boost your business, book a call with us today and let us know how we can help!