Whether your website is brand new, or reaching the adolescence stage – with a few awkward growing pains and embarrassing things – it deserves a responsible owner. Remember, you and your marketing team worked for weeks, probably months, to build that website. After many meetings of planning, several design proofs, and fine tuning every detail to perfections, your website has become a living and growing thing.
Your company’s website is an important investment that comes with a handful of responsibilities… kind of like a car. So what does it look like to own a website? What should you do to protect, maintain, and get the most out of your investment? Below are a few tips:
1. Know where your website lives. Hosting? DNS? Domain? All of that tech-speak can be intimidating, but there are a few basics (and logins) that every website owner should know. Where is your domain registered? This is most likely the domain giant, GoDaddy, but it could also be one of the smaller registration sites like Network Solutions or Register.com. Where is your website hosted? To continue with the car analogy, hosting is where your website is parked. Your website is really a collection of files stored on some server, somewhere, through your host magically making your website accessible via the internet. This could be a separate service or account or it could also be tied to your domain registration. Keep that information (and those logins) in a safe place.
2. Have an emergency backup plan. If a worst-case scenario occurred, do you have backup files of your website? Does your host? If so, when did the last backup occur? Don’t make assumptions that it’s all taken care of, make sure these questions are clearly answered by you, your host, or your website guru. We suggest having a backup plan in place. Backup your website on a regular basis. Depending on the amount of blog posts, changes and updates you make to your website, a bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly backup is recommended.
3. Give it a tune up. Back to the car analogy: if your mechanic gives your car an oil change every 3 months or so, don’t you think your website deserves similar treatment? A quarterly tune-up – we’re talking under the hood, in the depths of the code – helps protect your website against malware and hackers while also helping it run better, faster, and stronger. At Orbit Design, we offer a Website Health Program that provides quarterly updates to your WordPress platform, your plugins, and an overall speed and safety inspection to make sure your website is performing at its best. Contact us for more details. WordPress owners beware, if you update your WordPress platform or plugins on your own, you risk “breaking” your website, because plugins and platforms aren’t always compatible. Learn more about why you should have a professional update your WordPress website here.
4. Keep it safe. This goes back to giving your website a tune up every once in a while. The older your website becomes, the more likely it is to be targeted to hackers. 83% of WordPress websites that are hacked are not up-to-date. Also, follow basic internet safety and change your passwords every once in a while.
5. Know the basics of updating your website. If you wanted to change your address or add a product to your website, how would you do it? Do you have a webmaster who makes content changes for you? If so, what does that process look like and how long does it take to have that update completed? Or, is your website on WordPress where content updates are in your control? Make sure you and the main decision makers of your company are aware of that process.
If you ever have questions about your website or WordPress, don’t hesitate to give us a call. For more information on our WordPress Website Health Plan, click here.