Website Maintenance
What Type of Maintenance Does a Website Require?
Some websites do not require much routine maintenance. This is especially true of traditional HTML sites that do not have regular changes in the site content. Many times; however, a website requires regular attention to keep it secure from automated attacks from “robot” hackers.
If your website runs the under the WordPress or Drupal™ platform, it is important to regularly apply updates and security enhancements. WordPress itself and WordPress plug-ins must be kept up to date to keep a website secure and running smoothly. With many WordPress installations it is possible to configure the system to automatically apply security patches as they become available.
Regular backups of site content and code should be performed even if a website is not changed often. Having backups stored somewhere other than the server that hosts the site allows the site to be restored in the event the site is compromised or the server fails. Sites should be monitored for possible security problems, such as hacking attempts, so that appropriate corrective and preventive action can be implemented quickly. If a site allows user feedback, the website needs to be monitored for comment spam.
BridgeTown Hosting Can Help Keep Your Website Updated
For customers requiring only occasional changes to the information on their site, BridgeTown will do that without any long term obligations or service contracts. We are quite flexible in our billing options and will bill a flat fee or hourly for this type of work. Contact us to discuss services available for website content management.
Do You Need to Learn How to Update Your Site Yourself?
Updating a website may not require a tremendous amount of technical expertise. Depending upon how your website is constructed, it may be that with a little guidance one can learn to make changes to existing websites themselves. We can provide the training you need to do this. If a site is built using traditional HTML, CSS, PHP, and Pearl, that may be too complicated for the novice to maintain. Maintaining WordPress sites can range from relatively simple to quite complex; it all depends upon the details of how the site works. For those unfamiliar with the inner workings of a website that someone else put together for them, BridgeTown will evaluate the complexity level for a nominal fee and advise the client accordingly as to their options.
Converting an Older Website to WordPress
It is often the desire of a website owner to update their HTML site to WordPress. In many cases, once this is done, the site owner can then update the site themselves with relative ease. Contact us to see if this is a practical approach for your current situation.
I have a wordpress website hosted at godaddy. I now have a new domain name and want to switch to the new name and host it with a different provider. I’ve read a bit about that and it looks like it might be difficult.
What do you suggest?
We’ve done this many times. It can be a bit tricky.
There are several steps to accomplish this. You might want to break this task into two phases, although you don’t have to. It’s just simpler if you do.
1. Changing the domain name.
2. Moving to another server.
Changing the domain involves updating all the URIs in your WordPress database. If only you do a MySQL/MariaDB search and replace from example.com to example2.com, you’ll end up with serialization problems. The way around that is to run this php script. You need FTP access to the server to use that method. Alternatively, you can use the Better Search Replace plugin. We’ve had good luck with both methods.
Moving to another server can be as simple as moving the files and the database from the old server to the new. Sometimes it gets more complicated.
No matter which methods you use, be sure to backup everything first (database, code, and uploaded files). Of course, you’ll also have to update the DNS record associated with new domain name to point to the new server.
Read more about this in the WordPress codex before beginning.
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