WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS). It’s a popular tool for individuals who want to build websites and blogs. The software costs nothing. Anyone can install, use, and modify it for free.
But over time, WordPress has become much more than a CMS. Today, it has become the number one choice for building a website or a blog. WordPress is a free publishing tool that is free to download and use.
There are different themes to change the design of the website and plugins for different functions. Some are free, but there are also paid versions. WordPress is a modern publishing tool, i.e., a program that makes publishing things online, such as texts and images, easier.
A big focus for the platform is that it should be easy and simple to use; nobody likes poor user-friendliness. The result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to everyone – even people who aren’t developers.
To get started with your WordPress website, you should start by choosing a theme. A theme defines the overall design and look of your website. Each theme comes with its own design, layout, and features. The theme you choose is customizable, and you can change it whenever you want without losing your content.
You can publish content by working with an editor to create pages or posts. The default editor works in blocks, which are different building blocks, such as headings, paragraphs, buttons, and images. This gives you room to build your page and have a structured layout. If you want and have the knowledge, you can switch to the code editor and change things directly in the source code.
To get the most out of your website, you can use extensions, sometimes called plugins. Extensions are additional features that you can install on your website. There is a huge range of free and paid plugins, each with its specific focus.
For example, they can increase your site’s performance, protect it from spam, or help you with SEO so you have a better chance of appearing in Google’s search results. Extensions generally make it easier for you to create and maintain your WordPress site.
A WordPress plugin is a small software package that can be added to a WordPress-based website to provide additional functionality and improvements. Plugins can do various things, such as integrating with social media such as Instagram or Facebook, creating contact forms, optimizing a website for search engines, and much more.
WordPress offers a variety of plugins that can be downloaded and installed directly from the WordPress administration panel. These plugins are created by developers who have contributed to the WordPress community and come in various categories, such as search engine optimization (SEO), security, marketing, and more.
A plugin may be free to use, or it may cost money. Some plugins also offer pro versions with additional features and support for those willing to pay. Plugins are a great way to extend the functionality and improve your WordPress site without writing code yourself. There is a wide variety of plugins, so there is something for most needs.
There are many reasons website maintenance is important and in this article, we will discuss some of the benefits of website maintenance. First and foremost, it helps keep your website running smoothly. If you don’t regularly update your website, you may eventually encounter problems such as broken links, outdated content, or even security breaches.
Additionally, website maintenance is important for search engine optimization (SEO). Ensuring your website is up-to-date and error-free can improve your chances of ranking high in search results. This can help you attract more website visitors and grow your business.
Finally, website maintenance is important for maintaining a good reputation. If potential customers see your website needs to be updated or better maintained, they may not take you seriously. In contrast, a well-maintained website shows you’re professional and committed to providing a great user experience.
1. Scan for Vulnerabilities
Security should be the primary reason for website maintenance. Check for spam that may have surpassed your filters. Scanning for vulnerabilities regularly assures that your website is not attacked or taken over.
2. Repairs and Fixes
This is all related to errors, bugs, and broken links. Both internal and external links should be checked. A link checker can be run to look for broken links that frustrate the users and reduce the search engine rankings.
3. Browser Compatibility Testing
Ensure that all aspects of your website are functioning properly in the most common browsers. Your website must also be compatible with less-used browsers.
4. Software Update
The critical software your site relies on should be updated. For example; the content management system, its themes, and plugins. Also, upgrade non-critical software if they are worth applying.
5. Website Backups
The database backups would be automatically performed on a weekly basis and restored at least once every six months.
6. Site Speed
This is a very critical point to check. Use Yahoo’s YSlow or Google Pagespeed Insights to identify the issues which are slowing your site’s speed.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With SEO you identify the issues which are affecting the ranking of your site.
8. Analytics
Through the Google Analytics dashboard, check the important metrics of your site and the trends in those key metrics.
9. Functionality
Check all the important functions like filling up signing forms, contact forms, checkout forms, etc to ensure that everything is working smoothly.
10. Website Content
Fresh and updated content on websites is what users and search engines like. Therefore regularly review your content, correct the mistakes, and upload new information with targeted words in a fresh style.
Well, these are the basics of website maintenance services. A business may go deeper into it, based on its website but must not ignore it. Nurturing and maintaining the website is the simple funda for the online success of a business. Maintenance really ensures the website’s performance at its peak by removing errors, and security issues and delivering the best user experience to the customers.
Just because you have a website you’re happy with doesn’t mean you’re done with it. Your website needs to be maintained! If you want to attract new customers and increase traffic, you need to regularly update and renew your website.
The big question is how often do you need to update it, and what should you concentrate on? How often you need to update your website depends entirely on you and the nature of your business. Setting aside one day each week and month to spend 1 hour reviewing your website is a good idea. You don’t have to do everything at once, but review, evaluate, and decide what you need to do moving forward – be efficient!
Today, we are completely dependent on businesses or services that are totally digital or are supported by digital channels. Common things business leaders really think of: is a website really needed, and how secure is our website to transact?
With an increased amount of business across the digital landscape, we can see an upward trend of cyber attacks, making business websites vulnerable and leaving them at the mercy of infiltrators; hence, securing websites is important.
Protecting a website against malfunctions, phishing, cyber crimes, or cyber-attacks to avoid data loss of the company or customers is called Web Security. Scanning an internet site for vulnerabilities or security testing is needed to defend against the thefts or loss that occurs due to digital hackers.
To keep up with the new threats that come with advanced technology, security features for the website must be implemented from the start and proactively monitored and maintained. When a website is hacked or attacked, it usually crashes or slows down, loses traffic, and loses sensitive client information.
Some of the most common types of risks that arise due to lack of proper website protection are
The need for web safety should be taken with a proactive approach to defend the web applications from malicious software injected into the site to gather data, redirect traffic, or even hijack computer resources.
Remember, the vulnerabilities will not only destroy your web application but also result in a loss of reputation and a decrease in the number of visitors.
It provides a secure place to store online content. The code, images, videos, and text that comprise a website must be stored somewhere. With a stable digital repository, we could consistently access content on the web.
That makes hosting one of the most critical parts of developing an online presence for anyone, from huge companies to small-scale personal accounts.
Web hosting allows users to store content offsite, reducing local storage costs and the associated physical footprint. It also makes building a genuinely durable web presence easier, with built-in advantages like backups for security and support.
Some web hosting happens locally via personal computers or servers, but cloud-based third-party providers are used more frequently. Once you start searching for a hosting service, you should be able to find a wide range of both free and paid options to consider.
For most websites, web hosting is provided by a web hosting company that owns and maintains many servers and essentially allows customers to rent space on them. You pay the web hosting provider either monthly or annually for that space, and, in return, they keep your website up and running.
If spending money continually for your website is frustrating, you may wonder if there’s a way to get around paying someone else for web hosting services. While it’s technically possible for a business or individual to purchase and maintain their private web server, it’s expensive and impractical for most website owners. Servers require maintenance, proper climate control, and advanced skills to manage.
Plus, the bandwidth required to host your website on a server launches you far beyond what most internet plans will allow for an individual or SMB business. Since bandwidth relates directly to speed and uptime, having enough is an important part of keeping your website accessible to visitors.
There are several different types of web hosting.
Depending on the situation of the particular individual or business, their needs will be different.
Shared hosting is typically considered the most basic option for website hosting.
With these plans, server space is shared with other websites and resources will be the same across them too, meaning the hardware components will be identical and cannot be configured.
Shared hosting is best suited to website owners who don’t receive a lot of traffic, as—while affordable—they are more susceptible to slowdowns because of the shared resources
VPS hosting is more appropriate for site owners who need a more customizable option than a shared server.
While technically still shared, VPS replicates the experience of a dedicated server, offering more personalization and better performance for sites that have higher volumes of traffic.
A dedicated server provides the most options in terms of customization, as the website owner controls all the hardware.
The downside is that it requires expertise to operate and maintain it, in addition to upgrades down the line in order to scale it to the site’s needs should they experience growth in traffic and hosted content.
Cloud hosting is probably the most flexible option to run a website.
While it shares similarities to shared hosting in that multiple sites share server resources, it differs in that it can offer magnitudes more power.
This is because rather than several websites sharing one server, instead in a cloud system many servers are “pooled” together, and from there sites run on these shared resources.
This includes the processing power, memory, storage allocated to each site, all derived from a pooling of many (often) powerful servers in a data center housed by the provider.
This means higher performance, better reliability, a substantial amount of control over the virtual machine you are allocated, and better performance as a whole, making it a very popular choice for website owners—particularly businesses.
Managed hosting means cloud hosting needs are taken care of by a provider, whether that’s the vendor or a managed service provider.
In these plans, whoever is managing a hosting plan will be the point of contact and run the administration of ensuring the website is properly resourced.
Cloudflare is a global network designed to make everything you connect to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. Secure your websites, APIs, and Internet applications. Protect corporate networks, employees, and devices.Write and deploy code that runs on the network edge. With serverless functions, storage at the edge, and instant static sites, you can build your applications directly onto Cloudflares network. Cloudflare is the foundation for your infrastructure, applications, and teams.
Cloudflare secures and ensures the reliability of your external-facing resources such as websites, APIs, and applications.
It protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications, teams, and devices. And it is your platform for developing globally-scalable applications.
Your website, APIs, and applications are your key channels for business with your customers and suppliers. As more and more shift online, ensuring these resources are secure, performant and reliable is a business imperative.
Cloudflares Infrastructure is a complete solution to enable this for anything connected to the Internet.
Yesterday’s static access controls – and the closed networks they relied upon for trust and verification – are no match for today’s open enterprise. Cloudflare replaces legacy security perimeters with our global network, making getting work done on the Internet faster and safer for teams.
The traditional model of building cloud applications requires setting up containers and deploying them to zones. Should your application or website surge in popularity, you must manage the scaling process. Cloudflare Workers changes that.
You write the code, and Cloudflare handle the rest. With serverless functions, storage at the edge, and instant static sites, you can build your applications directly onto their network.
Speed up your WordPress site by up to 300% with Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin. APO allows Cloudflare to serve your entire WordPress site from Cloudflares edge network of over 250+ data centres worldwide, ensuring fast performance for your visitors no matter where they are.
Optimizing your WordPress site with multiple plugins can be overwhelming. Take your Website’s performance to the next level by switching to a single plugin for CDN, intelligent caching, and other WordPress optimizations with Cloudflare (APO)
The key differentiating factor between Cloudflare APO and other traditional page caching and CDN solutions is its ability to cache static HTML at Cloudflare’s edge directly. Every other plugin and CDN will cache your fixed assets (images, javascript, CSS), but none help you cache the actual content on your site (the HTML) using a massive edge network like Cloudflare’s.
The APO add-on intelligently caches your HTML pages and will automatically purge content from the cache that you update, so users will always see the latest content without compromising the performance.
Clouldflare’s APO is a paid add-on with a free plan and comes with an unlimited amount of subdomains. With APO, you also get to leverage many of the other benefits of Cloudflare, such as Free DNS, Free Automated SSL Certificates, Free DDoS Mitigation, and much more.
Cloudflare’s WAF is available on your hosting plan and comes with built-in rulesets specifically tailored to mitigate WordPress threats and vulnerabilities. With over 26 million internet properties under their protection, you can sleep easy knowing Cloudflare has your back.
Header rewrites to prevent a redirect loop when Cloudflare’s Universal SSL is enabled. Change Cloudflare settings from within the plugin itself without navigating to the cloudflare.com dashboard.
You can change cache purge, security level, Always Online, and image optimization settings. View analytics such as total visitors, bandwidth saved, and threats blocked.Support for HTTP2/HTTP3/Server Push.
Nothing is worse than discovering that all the material on your website is suddenly gone. You may have been working on your website or blog for years, and suddenly, all your hard work is gone, which is especially bad if you make a lot of money from your website.
Unfortunately, these things happen occasionally and can be caused by a server crash or a nasty hacker. Thankfully, you can always restore your website if you have a backup at your hosting company or elsewhere.
Many web hosts back up all your websites for you on a daily basis, partly to keep you safe and partly because the web host is responsible for your lost websites in case their server crashes.
If your website or websites are affected, the web host will restore them from their latest backup, but keep in mind that if your website was last backed up four hours ago, all the material you have added since then is gone.
1. Be able to feel safe. You don’t know what will happen in the future. Maybe your web host accidentally deletes your website, or your computer breaks down. Whatever happens, you’ll be able to sleep much better at night when you have backups.
2. It’s not the web host’s responsibility to make backups for you. Most hosting companies don’t back up your website, and there’s no guarantee they’ll give you access to the files if needed.
3. You need to be able to get your website up quickly if something happens. It is important that you can get your website back up quickly. There are many reasons why, if you’re an e-commerce business, you won’t lose customers and potential income. It’s also important for SEO and your ranking in Google.
4. Protection against viruses: If your website gets infected by a virus, there’s not much you can do in hindsight. Backing up your website regularly protects against viruses, as you can quickly restore your website to a previous version that was not infected.
5. Is my local developer copy enough? Most people have a local development site that they use to test new features before they go live. Unfortunately, you usually don’t have an up-to-date database file. All posts and comments are in the database of, for example, WordPress. Also, the difference between the test and live websites may be so significant that they are not directly compatible.
Using the WordPress publishing tool, you can install a plugin to back up your website’s database.
There are many such plugins; search “backup” among the plugins in the WordPress control panel, and you’ll get lots of hits.
With most backup plugins, you can set how often your website should be backed up and back it up immediately after you have updated the site. We recommend that everyone who uses WordPress makes a backup with a WordPress plugin because it is a straightforward way to back up your website.
Backup on Your Web Host :
Many web hosts do this automatically every day. The problem is that automatic backups are temporary and are usually only available for about a month.
So if you are on holiday, for example, or simply didn’t notice that something happened to your website in time, you may not be able to restore your website to a working situation. Therefore, it is always a good idea to permanently back up your website from time to time.
eCommerce, or electronic commerce or internet commerce, refers to buying and selling goods or services using the internet and transferring money and data to execute these transactions. E-commerce is often used to refer to the sale of physical products online, but it can also describe any commercial transaction facilitated through the internet.
Whereas e-business refers to all aspects of operating an online business, eCommerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services. The history of eCommerce begins with the first ever online sale: on August 11, 1994, a man sold a CD by the band Sting to his friend through his website NetMarket, an American retail platform. This is the first example of a consumer purchasing a product from a business through the World Wide Web—or “eCommerce” as we commonly know it today.
Since then, eCommerce has evolved to make products easier to discover and purchase through online retailers and marketplaces. Independent freelancers, small businesses, and large corporations have benefited from e-commerce, enabling them to sell their goods and services at a scale that was impossible with traditional offline retail.
E-commerce can take on various forms involving different transactional relationships between businesses and consumers and exchanging different objects as part of these transactions.
1. Retail: The sale of a product by a business directly to a customer without any intermediary.
2. Wholesale: The sale of products in bulk, often to a retailer that sells them directly to consumers.
3. Dropshipping: The sale of a product which is manufactured and shipped to the consumer by a third party.
4. Crowdfunding: The collection of money from consumers in advance of a product is available to raise the startup capital necessary.
5. Subscription: The automatic recurring purchase of a product or service regularly until the subscriber cancels.
6. Physical products: Any tangible good that requires inventory to be replenished and orders to be physically shipped to customers as sales are made.
7. Digital products: Downloadable digital goods, templates, courses, or media must be purchased for consumption or licensed.
8. Services: A skill or set of skills provided in exchange for compensation. The service provider’s time can be purchased for a fee.