The key to building a great website is to start with a solid foundation.
Get the foundation right and your website will purr. Get the foundation wrong and you’ll spend much of your time dealing with bugs and other fixes rather than, you know, actually building the websites and other products and services that you’re paid to build.
So, what goes into a solid foundation for a WordPress website?
A solid WordPress website takes into account five core factors:
- Performance: Slow websites kill businesses and careers. You need your WordPress website to fly.
- Monitoring: You need to keep a constant eye on the health of your WordPress sites. The minute something goes wrong and needs your attention, you need to know it.
- Security: The only thing worse than a site that is down down is a site that’s been hacked. You need WordPress security.
- Backups: You need an automated backup process that ensures you have a recent backup on hand when you need it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You need your WordPress website to be optimized for search engines and you need granular control over the way your sites look when they show up in search results.
Oinonen Designs Inc takes care of these five core needs in a way that is robust, affordable, and requires as little effort as possible. That way, you can stop thinking about your website functions and focus on building your business.
Let’s look at each factor briefly on how Oinonen Designs Inc works to build a cohesive strategy for a solid WordPress website foundation.
1. Performance
When it comes to the performance of a website, web page load time is arguably just as important as web design and website features. This is because a site that loads slowly will have a direct and pronounced negative impact on the performance of your site.
It’s clear that all websites must be optimized for performance. Oinonen Designs Inc. has this covered in every project.
2. Monitoring
There are two parts to the monitoring equation that every web developer must answer:
How will you keep on top of updates to plugins, themes, and WordPress core?
How will you keep an eye on the performance of your websites over time?
It is critical to update plugins, themes, and the core software. However, if you have more than just one or two sites, or if you just don’t log into your site every day, there may be times when days or weeks pass between the time an update is made available and the time when you install it.
In addition, if a frustrated visitor is the first to let you know that your site is down, you haven’t solved the second part of the monitoring equation.
Oinonen Designs Inc has Website Care Packages to keep on top of WordPress updates and keep an eye on your website performance and up time. There are lots of tools available to take care of this need and it’s also something we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
3. Security
The WordPress core really is secure. Keep everything updated and use secure passwords, and your site will be trending toward the upper end of the website security bell curve.
However, upper end isn’t good enough. You need to harden your WordPress sites against common attacks and scan them on a regular basis to catch and fix security risks before the bad guys find and exploit them.
Oinonen Designs Inc Website Care Packages provides plans for hardening websites and scanning your website on an ongoing basis to check for security risks. This is the only way to secure WordPress and keep it secure over time.
4. Backups
Servers crash, sites are hacked, and code hits the fan. When your site comes crumbling down around you, you better hope and pray you have a recent backup on hand.
Some web developers attempt to keep track of backups manually. This sounds OK in theory but the truth is that most developers aren’t disciplined enough to count on a manual backup process. This is a task better left to automation.
The ideal backup system will include these components:
Automatic backup creation,
Backup storage away from your site’s server, and
Automatic management of stored backups.
Oinonen Designs Inc has your website products set up on automatic backups, so if needed we can restore your site for you anytime, anywhere.
5. Search Engine Optimization
If you don’t optimize your WordPress website for search engines a few things can go wrong:
Your site may not look the way you want it to look when it shows up in search results.
It may take longer than necessary for Google and other search engines to index new content.
The answer to this problem is to use a good SEO Plan
With a good SEO Plan you can manually control the text displayed when your site shows up in search engines results. In addition, with a properly formatted sitemap that gets pushed to search engines after every update to your site, your content will be added to search engines as quickly as possible.
Oinonen Designs Inc Website Care Marketing Packages provides plans for small to large marketing requirements.