In an online world with ever changing technology and coding standards, predicting the future is tricky. Before you invest your hard earned money into your website build, taking a few minutes to think about future proofing your WordPress site will ensure that:
- Future customizations are easy to make
- Existing traffic is not lost
- You save time supporting and maintaining your site
- Avoid costly and time consuming problems
Using a mobile optimized and widely popular platform is the first step in future proofing your website. A condition fulfilled by a responsive WordPress theme.
Yet, this is not enough.
In this article, we'll cover some best known practices to help future proof your WordPress website.
Use a Good Hosting Company and Practice Good Security
In this announcement Google stated that site load time or website speed is now included among its 200+ ranking factors. This means that website speed will have an important effect on how Google ranks your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). With organic traffic accounting for the majority of web traffic on some sites, you certainly don’t want to miss out on that kind of potential traffic.
While a number of factors affect the load time of a website, using a good hosting platform is perhaps the most important of all. A good hosting company should provide optimized tools for WordPress users. This is usually a staging area for testing themes and plugins before finally releasing it to the public.
Articles such as Speed up Your WordPress Website and Separating the Good WordPress Hosts from the Bad will help you choose the right host that caters for serving clients using WordPress.
Practicing good security measures such as using strong passwords, not keeping backups in a public-accessible folder, regularly updating core WordPress, themes and plugins will also help you protect the integrity of your website.
Akismet , Wordfence Security and Sucuri are popular and effective plugins for controlling preventing spam and malware attacks.
Avoid Over-dependence as Much as Possible
Finding the perfect web design is hard and most websites iterate their site design through various tests e.g. A/B testing to find the perfect web design that would optimally capture leads and win more customers.
With many site owners resorting to freelance web designers or agencies, it's important that over reliance is avoided.
Copies of code changes should be made. Passwords and key configuration changes should also be documented.
This makes it possible to make appropriate changes in the future and avoid being left in the cold, not knowing or forgetting what was done in the past.
This also applies to the usage of themes and plugins. Consideration has to be made when selecting theme frameworks. Only popular and well-supported themes and theme frameworks should be used.
Also, all-in-one plugins should be used sparingly. This will ensure that the website’s core functions are not broken whenever modifications are being carried out on the plugin.
Continue reading %4 Ways to Future Proof Your WordPress Site%
by Adeleye Mahmud via SitePoint
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