Most of us have heard the terms “just sweep it under the rug” or “put it off for a rainy day”. But as we all find out, that’s just not good housekeeping. I’ve written a few times about different website tips, but one of the most important articles I have written is this one on good website housekeeping.
In previous articles I’ve talked about testing or auditing your systems, but in this article, I want to focus on just basic housekeeping. In our house, we do the normal things such as vacuum, laundry, and pick up things. We need to do the same thing with our website.
Many business owners are utilizing WordPress to build their website; add to that the different plug-ins and other integrations that are added to it. Something we have to think about is that many of these tools are “Open Source” which means the code is posted online so other developers can write plug-ins and suggest modifications for the source code.
While this is great to build an already good platform there is always the other side of the coin. The people out there that we refer to as “hackers” look at the open source code to look for loop holes or back doors to gain access to your website to use for free hosting to create phishing sites or to hack other sites so they can’t be traced.
While I don’t mean to scare you, I do intend to alert you on the importance of making sure you log in once or twice a month and update your website software. It really only takes a matter of minutes to save yourself hours of headaches.
Frank Deardurff
Since I am a serial entrepreneur and web guy myself as well as providing hosting and website maintenance services I see hundreds of websites that are not kept up and have to report to the website owner that hours of work will be needed to clean up or repair their website.
If you are running a WordPress website all you need to do is Login to your website. Generally, YourDomain.com/wp- admin will get you there.
Once logged in you will see the menu on the left at the top of that menu is an item labeled “Dashboard”. Clicking on that will reveal a sub menu called “Updates”.
By following the updates link you will see a list of any updates you need to run. Simply click the check boxes and push the button to update.
Just doing this simple step alone will save you a lot of headaches and possibly even lost sales.
If you’re just too busy to take care of the maintenance of your website, you can always check out the plans on my service at https://wpjustfixit.com.
