As a business owner, you’re probably not jumping up and down with excitement at the thought of updating your website. But it’s a crucial part of ensuring that your website remains secure, accessible, and up-to-date with the latest features.
Here are my top 5 tips for keeping your WordPress website updated, so that your website visitors don’t land in No Man’s Land.
Create an update plan
An update plan should detail the actions you will take, who is responsible for each task, and any team members involved in testing. Your update plan should be an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) that can be carried out by any competent team members.
Update out of hours
Schedule your website updates for times when your business isn’t busy. This could be an early morning, a late afternoon, or even a weekend. You’ve got plenty of scope to plan updates for when your business is quietest.
Don’t update a live site
Unless you have a very small business and infrequently receive website visitors, it’s always best to avoid performing updates on a live website. This is particularly important if you have an E-Commerce website, a membership website, or a website with a lot of traffic. If you have regular website visitors, test updates on a staging website first. Your hosting company or design agency should be able to help you with creating a staging version of your website. Once an update has been tested on the staging site, it can be performed on the live site.
Backup before updating
Before carrying out any updates, ensure you have a website backup available. The backup should be recent. For busy websites, you’ll want to take a backup just before updating. For most small businesses, a backup from the last day or two will be fine. After confirming that you definitely have a backup available, you can safely perform any website updates. You’re protected from any issues or errors because you can restore the website backup if you experience a problem.
Test after updating
After you’ve completed your website updates, there’s one last step. It’s an extremely important step that can be easily missed. You should take a few minutes to run through your website pages and check that they’re displaying correctly. Check each page of your website and ensure there are no visible errors. If your website contains any forms, test them by inputting your details. If the form successfully sends the inputted information to where you’d expect it to be, then everything is working as expected.
