How to Make WordPress Down for Maintenance Easy
WordPress is the most popular open source blogging platform and CMS (content management system). Its success is due to its simplicity and power. No matter whether you’re a seasoned web designer or a complete beginner, you’ll be able to use WordPress to maintain your blog.
You may be wondering how to make WordPress down for maintenance easy, so that you can quickly return to blogging when needed. While WordPress provides many options for hosting, there is a more simplistic way of doing this that doesn’t cost you a penny. Keep reading to learn more about how to make WordPress down for maintenance easy.
Choosing The Simplest, Most Basic Hosting Plan
Remember, the simplest form of hosting is best, especially when you’re just getting started. You don’t need to rent a server or purchase expensive software to launch a successful blog. Instead, you can take advantage of the ever-growing list of shared hosting providers, which offer completely free WordPress hosting. That way, you don’t have to worry about hosting costs and can focus on building your audience.
You can’t beat free. But, sometimes, this can be tricky as all the free hosts on the market offer a limited amount of storage. This may cause a problem if you have lots of images or videos on your blog. In that case, you should consider paying for a premium plan to get the full feature set, including the amazing ability to use a popular CDN (content delivery network) to speed up your page loads.
Use The Right DNS Provider
DNS stands for domain name system and is the small program that helps your computer find the IP address of the server that hosts your blog. Sometimes, the nameservers associated with your domain name may not be configured properly, resulting in your webpages taking ages to load. So, it’s important to make sure that the DNS entries for your domain name are set up correctly.
If you don’t know what DNS is or why it’s important to have correct entries, speak to your web host. They will be able to help you out.
Set Up A Maintenance Plan
If you want to make WordPress down for maintenance easy, you need to take the time to set up a routine maintenance schedule. You can do this by simply installing a WordPress plugin that will automatically run a backup of your site every week. This will ensure that you can quickly return to blogging when needed. You can find a number of such plugins on the WordPress plugin repository.
If you do decide to go this route, be sure to create a separate maintenance account, just for the plugin. This way, you don’t risk any damage to your main blog while it’s being backed up.
Make Sure Your Site Is Visible At All Times
If you have a blog geared toward a local audience, like a restaurant review blog, you may not want to expose it to everyone on the internet. Instead, you can use a free tool like Google Domains to make sure that your site is always accessible even when you’re not around to monitor it. This way, you can rest assured that your blog will remain up and running smoothly.
Google Domains provides users with a free dedicated IP that they can use to access their site from anywhere. This is great if you want to make sure that your blog remains available even when you’re on the move or in a different country. Since your IP address will be hidden, people will only be able to access your site when you want them to. This, in turn, can lead to a bigger audience.
Monitor Your WP-Engagement Score (Active Users)
WordPress has a built-in function that records how many people are engaging with your content. This metric is called the WordPress engagement score and is based on the number of visitors to your blog who are currently interacting with it via various actions, like commenting on a blog post or checking out its social media accounts. This metric is a good indicator of how much content you’re actually engaging with.
If you want to make WordPress easier to maintain, you should focus on increasing your WP-Engagement score. The best way to do this is by simply encouraging more people to engage with your content.
To calculate your WP-Engagement score, simply navigate to your blog’s dashboard and click on the engagement tab. From here, you can see everything you need to know about your blog’s activity, including the number of comments, the post’s views, and how many people have engaged with the content, via social media or otherwise.
Regular Backups
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you may have built up a considerable amount of content on your blog’s backend. This, in turn, could make managing and backing up your site more complicated. If you don’t want to end up spending hours upon hours trying to find files that have been deleted or trying to remember where you hid a particular image, you should consider setting up automated backups. This can be done with a simple WordPress plugin called BackupBuddy. Simply click on the plus sign in the upper right corner of your WordPress dashboard and select the backup plugin you want to use.
BackupBuddy will walk you through the settings needed to ensure that once a week, your whole site is backed up, including all content, settings, and associated databases.
If you have a hosting package that includes a free domain, you can take advantage of that and set up a small blog, just for fun, as a test run. You can install WordPress to the root of your domain and then connect it to PayPal or a credit card to accept payments.