There are billions of websites and blogs out there on the Internet and running a website for your business is no less than a struggle. Being able to stay on your feet and managing this website calls for taking care of a lot of tasks and regularly maintaining the website to ensure a smooth run. WordPress is currently a very popular Content Management System and a website builder that powers over 30 percent of the websites existing over the Internet. It makes it seamless for the website owner to easily manage and run their websites, thanks to its power of automation.
Automation in WordPress is marked by its features that help the new as well as experienced website owner easily make changes to their website, introduce new features, carry out updates and maintenance tasks and everything else periodically without having to manually do it. If this excites you and you are willing to know more about how you can take the full advantage of WordPress automation, keep reading through this blog post.
Updating your WordPress and its themes and plugins
A very important task that needs your time probably on a regular interval is the update schedule of your WordPress installation and the other themes and plugins on it. Ignoring these updates is never a good idea because these updates help in maintaining and running the websites. However, taking care of each and every update can be a cumbersome task which can eat a quite lot of your time.
To ensure automatic updates for the themes and plugins on your WordPress website, you can seek help from some amazing plugins such as the Easy Updates Manager and the Automate. The Easy Updates Manager is a lightweight plugin that manages all types of updates on your single site install or in WordPress Multisite. The Automate tool takes the pain out of updating WP core and trusted plugins and themes.
Backing up the Data
Have you been thinking of making a change on your website? Do you always remember that backups are crucial at all time so that any impending change can’t affect the other data on the site apart from the intended? But, backing up your site every time you move ahead to make a change can be yet another time-consuming task. However, WordPress automation has that sorted for you.
There are several good Backup plugins available in the WordPress repository that will do the work for you. However, the plugins that can help you create different backup frequency schedules are better suited. Plugins like BackUpWordPress, UpdraftPlus, and VaultPress are recommended among others.
Monitoring the site’s Security
Probably a top priority for most of the website owners and brands using WordPress apart from the performance of a website is its Security. Given the open source nature of the platform, a lot of WordPress websites get hacked daily. Hence, it is crucial for website owners to take care of their security and monitor the events 24*7. But, that isn’t manually possible. This is where automated security scan and monitoring can come to your rescue.
To lock out the bad guys and make sure that this is regularly taken care of, WordPress plugins like WordFence Security, BulletProof Security etc. can be of huge help.
These plugins offer a myriad set of security features for your WordPress website such as active security monitoring, Malware scanning, Security hardening, Post-hack help, Firewalls, Brute force attack protection, security notifications etc.
Cleaning up the site
Well, in order to keep your website running smoothly without any downtime or slow loading time issues, you must regularly declutter your site’s database and do away with unnecessary files, themes, and plugins. Downtime can be annoying but investing in good web hosting like VPS hosting can solve such issues.
But, we all agree that this can be quite a lot of work. So, why not use plugins to automate these WordPress cleanup tasks such as image cleanup, deletion of post revisions etc.
Plugins such as the WP-DBManager allow you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It also supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.
Search Engine Optimization of the website
Taking care of your site’s SEO is a continuous process that only yields result after a certain time. This marks the need for gradual processes that can help you optimize your site and its images to achieve a better search engine ranking.
SEO plugins such as the Yoast SEO that tunes the engine of your site so you can work on creating great content. Its cornerstone content and internal linking features help you optimize your site structure seamlessly. For the image optimization tasks, you can use plugins such as the EWWW Image Optimizer and the Smush Image Compression and Optimization.
Taking care of the Social media management
Sharing your site’s updates over Social Media is important so that the visibility of your site’s content can be amplified. To automate social media sharing on your WordPress website, plugins like JetPack and Sassy Social Share, and WP Social Sharing.
Analytics
Analyzing the return on the efforts of your website maintenance and optimization tasks is important so that you can calculate the ROI. Simply adding a tracking code to WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin by MonsterInsights can help you pull in data related to your traffic.
Other Automated Tasks:
- Scheduling blogs on your WordPress site with the Editorial Calendar
- Controlling Spam with the help of Akismet
- Install Caching and take care of your site’s speed with the help of W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache
- Sending out automated website emails and Newsletters using SendPress Newsletters and Mailster.
Conclusion
WordPress offers the power of automation and with the many plugins and tools available in the market, users can share their workload and focus on growing their business while the tools regularly do their work. With this blog post, we have tried to focus on all the WordPress site related tasks that you can automate and enhance your site’s performance and functioning.
Author Bio:
Catherrine Garcia is a professional writer and currently works at WPCodingDev Ltd., an ideal place to hire experienced WordPress developer from the team of 150 experts. She along with her group of freelance developers are experts at creating Web sites on CMS.
