3 top tips for wordpress website maintenanceIf you’re a website owner then the chances are you are gung ho on SEO, link building and social media to boost traffic to your WordPress site. That’s great but what if the onsite problems are not resolved and all this traffic coming to your site is worthless? Inbound links, SEO etc is the way to get traffic but if your website is not performing as it should you will be missing out on sales.

WordPress website maintenance plays a large role in your whole online strategy and should not be ignored. Imagine your website as a high street shop. You have worked hard on creating a great looking shop floor, spent time advertising to make the public aware of your shop and now people are flooding in through your doors. But wait, there is nobody serving, most of your products are missing, prices are not labelled correctly and there are intermittent blackouts occurring every hour.

This is the exact same level of user experience if your WordPress website is not maintained correctly and regularly. How long do you think your website/shop will last? Not very long at all! Looking after your site is just as important as driving people to look at it. If you own a large eCommerce shop this can be a bigger job than the Internet marketing itself so if your time is best served else where its worth looking into a WordPress website maintenance company to look after these day to day tasks for you to ensure sales are coming in efficiently.

In this post i am going to give you 3 top WordPress website maintenance tips for keeping your website performing efficiently, how to easily boost conversions and how to keep your web pages looking fresh and up to date.

Boost Your Load Speed

A slow website is the biggest killer for any business online. Nobody in this day and age will wait for more than 5 seconds for a website to load, they will just go to your competition and give them their money instead. Making your web pages load in lightening fast time should be your top priority in maintaining your WordPress website.

To start with you need to install 2 free plugins to boost your load speed and performance.

W3 Total Cache

This plugin allows you to fix 75% of your loading and performance problems. The settings are pretty complex so you do need some knowledge and experience before applying these settings. Here is an overview on how to apply settings so you have a pretty good idea about what each section does for your WordPress website.

It is important to understand that not every website is the same! Some settings that will work for one website and not for another. This is down to what theme you are using. The key is to experiment with these settings until you get the optimal performance out of your site.

There are a couple of speed tests you can run before and after each setting has been changed so you can monitor a your improvements.

WP Smush

The main cause for slow load times is your images. If your web pages have a high number of images they need to be optimised correctly. Wherever possible use JPEGs. These are smaller sized files and will load 10x faster than a large PNG file. It is important that the size of the image is scaled to the same size as its display on the page.

Installing WP Smush will automatically reduce the data size of each image to improve load speed. This should not be confused with changing the dimensions of the image.

Another great method to boost your speed is by using a CDN (content management system). A CDN delivers all website files, such as images, CSS, JavaScript etc, instantly to the user. This is done by the CDN delivering these files from a server closest to the user. This cuts out a lot of connection time especially if your server is hosted on the other side of the world.

There are some free CDNs available but if you are looking to maintain your WordPress site professionally you should opt for a paid CDN.

Sky Rocket Your Conversions

The biggest gun in your WordPress website maintenance arsenal is improving your conversion rate to boost sales. This need to be constantly changing working from visitor data. This data can be collected from your Google Analytics and settings goals. Monitor your data over 4 weeks by looking at which page visitors are landing on and then the path they follow through your site.

If you find a web page where users seems to be exiting on a lot, then this is the page you need to work on. Start adding some call to action buttons to encourage users to view your services and products. The most common way to improve high exit web pages is to list a few sale items on.

All of your main landing pages need to have a call to action as you could be losing a lot of valuable sales. Go through you pages and ensure you have some kind of sale conversion visible without going overboard.

A Little Dab Will Do

Everyone loves up to date information! Google loves it, users love it so this has to be kept on top of on a regular basis. Keep making little content updates to your main landing pages to keep them fresh and ever changing. If you are supplying users with the latest spec, details or upgrades as soon as they are available you will start to build up trust with the user. This will lead to referrals and returning orders if you are trustworthy source of information.

Google will also love you by keeping your content up to date. Working along side with your internet marketing and content updates will give you a very quick boost in rankings across all updated web pages.

Still Fixed On Just SEO?

As you can see, spending time working on your WordPress website maintenance and inbound marketing/SEO. You are going to see a huge boost in Google rankings while working on maintaining and managing your website correctly which will deliver quick, long lasting results.