The majority of websites today are powered by WordPress. It’s user-friendly, quick to set up, and supported by a massive community. As a full-service marketing agency, we build WordPress sites for business owners because we love how easily they can manage and freshen up their websites, even with little to no technical background. That means we don’t hold your website hostage once it’s done. You can get in there to manage the technical and content side of things.
If you’re running your business website on WordPress or thinking about it, follow these six essential web design and management tips to keep your site running smoothly and performing at its best.
1. Don’t Fall Behind on Your WordPress Updates
One of the most common mistakes we see in WordPress web design is to “set it and forget it.” When you let updates pile up, especially over months or even years, they can cause massive compatibility issues when you update them all at once. We’ve seen updates:
- Take your website down.
- Break critical functionality like forms.
- Force teams to scramble and troubleshoot errors that could have been avoided with a regular maintenance schedule.
- Worst of all, you may need to rebuild the whole thing because fixing it would cost more.
Make it a habit to regularly update your plugins, themes, and WordPress core files. Regular updates are crucial for security, functionality, and compatibility. For a smoother web design experience, set a recurring reminder to confirm updates weekly or bi-weekly. This proactive approach helps keep your website safe and functional.
2. Keep Your Website Content Relevant and Engaging
Your website is the most important digital marketing asset for your business. It’s your storefront, and it needs to stay fresh to 1) keep visitors engaged and 2) signal to search and answer engines of fresh content. Regularly update your site with new blog posts, service pages, case studies, or other high-quality content that reflects your brand, latest offerings, and insights.
As you improve and update your content, base it on customer feedback and performance data. Make sure you track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates to understand which content is engaging and being consumed by your audience.
If you don’t have proper data tracking in place, reach out to us for help! We can implement Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, and other analytics tools to improve visibility into your web traffic.
3. Be Proactive with a Staging Environment
Making changes directly on your production website is risky. In fact, I’m sure we’ve all experienced an update that breaks your website! A staging environment prevents this! It allows you to test new plugins, design changes, and other updates in a safe space without impacting your live site. It’s a duplicate version of your production website and lives on a separate domain (example.com) or subdomain (sub.example.com).
Once everything works perfectly in staging, you can confidently push updates to your production. This is a must-have best practice for any business that takes its online presence seriously, and is why every smart WordPress web design agency uses one.
4. Make Data-Driven Decisions
Data is the backbone of successful web design and is core to our common sense approach. Every decision you make about your website, whether it’s a new landing page, redesign, or content update, must be backed by solid data.
Ask yourself:
- Which pages are getting the most traffic?
- Are users engaging with your content, or are they dropping off quickly?
- Which marketing campaigns are driving the best results?
With proper tracking tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, and conversion tracking, you can gather actionable insights to guide your web design decisions. Better data leads to better decisions, which in turn lead to a better-performing website.
5. Automate WordPress Backups
The more your website grows, the more critical it becomes to have reliable backups. A crash or major error could cost you tens or even hundreds of hours of rework, not to mention potential lost revenue during downtime.
Good web design isn’t just about how your site looks; it’s about protecting it, too. That’s why you should use a reliable hosting provider that backs up your website correctly. With working backups, you can quickly restore your site in minutes after an unexpected crash, avoiding costly disruptions to your business.
At Uplancer, we’ll configure automated backups with redundancies for all our client WordPress sites to ensure fast recovery when things go sideways.
6. It’s Okay to Outsource Your Web Design Services
Let’s be honest, running a business is hard enough without having to worry about website maintenance. Managing a complex WordPress site isn’t your full-time job, but it can be ours! What might take you days to research and fix could take our experienced web design team just a couple of minutes. By outsourcing your web design services, you can free up time to focus on what matters most: growing your business.
The Bottom Line: Simplify Your WordPress Web Design Management
Managing a WordPress site can be simple for business owners. With a few smart web design practices, you can keep your website running smoothly and effectively to support your business goals.
Here’s a recap of how to keep your WordPress site up and running smoothly:
- Perform regular updates for WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
- Keep your content fresh and engaging for visitors.
- Use a staging environment to test changes safely.
- Rely on data to drive your web design decisions.
- Automate your backups for peace of mind.
- Don’t be afraid to outsource part or all of your web design services.
Let Uplancer help you simplify your WordPress web design services. Connect with us today for a free consultation and discover how we can keep your site secured and optimized, and drive growth for your organization
