Only 43% of small businesses intend to invest in website performance. Meanwhile, poor user experiences drive almost 50% of people to go with competing brands. If your site is slow or outdated, you could lose customers.
Here are 12 WordPress website management tips you can use to ensure your site is well-designed and optimized. With these tips, you can impress customers before converting them into leads and sales. As a result, investing in your website could boost your ROI!
Read on to start managing your WordPress website today.
1. Schedule Quarterly Reviews
First, make an effort to review your website every quarter. Quarterly reviews can ensure you catch potential problems before they impact the user experience. It will also give you a chance to update any outdated information.
For example, you may want to focus a website banner on new products, services, or sales.
Schedule a time every quarter to review your website. Make sure everything runs smoothly with content, layout, and functionality.
Setting a time to review your website will help you discover areas of improvement before your customers complain. You can also ensure website maintenance doesn't fall through the cracks.
If you don't have time for these quarterly reviews on your own, consider hiring web managers. They can complete an analysis of your website every quarter to ensure the proper changes are made. With their help, you can free up time in your schedule while finding peace of mind that your website is in the best possible shape.
2. Maintain Brand Consistency
As you review your website and continue making updates, make sure every page is on brand. Maintaining brand consistency will help awareness and recognition grow. Consumers will also easily associate your website with other branded marketing materials.
Your brand includes your:
- Voice
- Tone
- Personality
- Logo
- Color palette
- Font styles
- Imagery styles
If a page doesn't match your brand guidelines, visitors might think they've landed on the wrong website.
About 80% of people will stop engaging with content that doesn't display well on their devices. In fact, 48% say web design is the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. People will judge your company based on your website's appearance.
You can also work with a WordPress website management company to improve the overall appearance of your site. You can choose design elements and trends that align with your brand, industry, and customers. Appealing to your target audience with an eye-catching design could help you generate more leads and sales.
3. Choose the Right Web Hosting Provider
Your website hosting provider can significantly impact your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. SEO can help your website rank higher on search engines. In addition, reaching the top of a search engine results page (SERP) can help you generate brand awareness and website traffic.
Providing your customers with helpful, relevant content can help you generate more leads and sales.
The wrong hosting provider could hurt your rankings before you get the chance to reach these customers, in any case.
For example, your host can affect your website downtime. First, run your website through Google's PageSpeed Insights to determine if it's lagging. If it is, choose one of the best WordPress hosting providers to improve your site's performance.
4. Speed Up Your Website
Google will consider your website's loading speed when it determines your rankings. So, in addition to choosing a better hosting provider, you can also make changes on the backend of your site to improve your loading speed.
For example, you can start minimizing HTTP requests.When someone visits your site, their browser automatically makes HTTP requests to download page elements. Merge scripts and styles in one file to minimize these requests.
You can also use asynchronous loading to tell the browser to load all page elements simultaneously. Otherwise, compress your images. Image files take up a lot of space, thereby impacting load times. Instead, choose the correct file format and run your images through a compressor before uploading them.
You can also improve load times by deactivating or uninstalling unnecessary plugins. Otherwise, these plugins can overload the server, reducing page speeds.
Talk to your web management team about using a CDN, too. A content delivery network (CDN) can serve your web pages from nearby servers to reduce load times.
If your site is slow, visitors might get frustrated. They could leave without exploring, causing a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate can indicate a negative user experience, which could cause your rankings to drop.
5. Publish Quality Content
As you begin making these updates to your website, consider your content as well.
Outdated content won't encourage consumers to visit your website on a routine basis. But on the other hand, fresh content can benefit your marketing and SEO strategies. For example, you can rank for a range of search queries to reach more people online.
Google prioritizes fresh, unique content. Develop an SEO and content marketing strategy to post new content on a routine schedule.
As part of your SEO strategy, make sure you're using an SEO plugin like Yoast.
6. Step Up Website Security
Security is another essential SEO ranking factor. Make sure your site is secure with an SSL certificate. SSL can help protect your website against cyberattacks.
Consider hiring a WordPress management agency that offers other security services, including:
- SSL certificates
- Daily cloud backups
- Database protection
- 2-factor authentication
- Force secure passwords
- Website firewall
- Daily plugin and theme scans
- Inactive plugin management
- Database optimization
- Block fake crawlers
- Daily malware scans
Though it's not foolproof, an SSL certificate could reduce the chances of data theft, protecting your business and your customers.
7. Optimize Web Page URLs
Optimizing your URL structure will help search engines and visitors understand what to expect from a page. For example, integrate the page's target keyword into the URL.
You can change your URL structure by going to Settings, then Permalinks. Choose an option that best matches the content's title and context.
Improve your website's structure, too. For example, you can sort blogs using categories and tags. As a result, visitors will have an easier time finding the information they need, improving the user experience.
8. Use Schema Markup
You can add more context to your pages with Schema markup. Schema markup adds additional code to content, making it easier for search engines to understand what's on the page.
You could have an easier time ranking for featured snippets, which can help you stand out on SERPs.
9. Optimize for Mobile First
On average, people check their phones every 5.6 minutes throughout the day. Optimizing your website for mobile users will help you reach consumers even when they're on the go. Unfortunately, 96% of consumers have come across sites that weren't optimized for mobile devices.
Bad mobile optimization annoys nearly 50% of users. Meanwhile, visitors to mobile sites will leave a page that takes over three seconds to load 53% of the time.
Take the time to optimize your website for mobile-first audiences. Google will check the mobile version of your site first when determining rankings. If your site isn't optimized, you could alienate a large part of your target audience.
You can use plugins to optimize your website for mobile devices. For example, AMP Project will allow you to enable accelerated mobile page compatibility on your site. In addition, AMP can boost your page load speed on mobile devices.
10. Consult Customers
As you continue with your website management checklist, consider consulting your customers. After all, they're the ones who interact with your website the most.
Ask what they like or don't like about your website. Determine where they're experiencing bottlenecks, too.
Gathering information from your customers can help you further improve the user experience. You can make informed changes to benefit their interactions with your business online. Improving these experiences can make converting people into leads and sales easier.
11. Review Your Web Analytics
You can also make more informed changes to your website by checking your analytics.
Make sure you have Google Analytics installed for your site. Then, track key performance indicators like unique visitors, traffic, and bounce rates.
You can also use a heatmap to determine where people interact on a page or drop off. A heatmap could help you determine the best place for a form of a pop-up.
12. Hire WordPress Professionals
You don't have to worry about your WordPress website management alone. Instead, consider hiring a professional team this year. Asking for help will ensure you make informed, effective changes to your website.
Meanwhile, you can focus on day-to-day operations, 0like helping your customers to ensure long-term growth.
Look for a company that offers website management care plans that align with your needs and goals. For example, you might need the following:
- WordPress optimized hosting
- WordPress core updates
- Firewall protection
- Malware and virus scans
- DDOS mitigation
- Daily on- and off-site backups
- Image compression optimization
- Plugin updates
- Malware removal and virus cleanup
Your web managers could help you recognize areas where you can also automate your website. For example, they can automatically update your plug-ins for you to ensure your site never falls behind.
Boost Your Site: Apply These WordPress Website Management Tips
Don't neglect your website this year. Instead, plan for routine WordPress website management to ensure your site runs properly. With these tips, you can improve the user experience before converting visitors into leads and sales.
Remember, you don't have to manage this list on your own. We can help. Contact your WordPress website experts today to get started.