There are few things more frustrating for a website owner than realizing that their site is down. Not only does this mean lost revenue and potential customers, but it can also be very costly in terms of website maintenance fees and other associated costs.
The good news is that there are several ways to help ensure your website is always operating at a high level.
Let's explore seven tips to help you keep your website up and running smoothly.
Choose a reliable hosting provider
Hosting provider outages are one of the most common causes of website downtime, and that's why it's important to choose a reliable hosting provider that can offer you uptime guarantees and 24/7 support in case of any issues. It would be also good to choose the AWS WordPress hosting provider, which will give you an additional layer of protection against hosting outages because your site will be hosted on the AWS cloud platform. And if your site ever does go down, you can be sure that the AWS support team will be there to help you get it back up and running again quickly.
Additionally, you should also make sure to keep your hosting account and WordPress installation up to date by always running the latest versions. This will help reduce the chances of your site being hacked or going down due to a plugin or theme compatibility issue.
Make sure your site is well-designed and coded
If you want your website to be able to withstand high traffic levels and stay up during times of peak traffic, then it's important to make sure it's well-designed and coded. That means using a robust theme or framework that is regularly updated and keeping your plugins and extensions up to date.
It's also a good idea to use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve static files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. This can help reduce the load on your server and make your website faster and more responsive.
On the other hand, if you have a poorly coded website, it's more likely to crash under high traffic or when using certain plugins and themes. So, it's important to make sure your site is coded well and using the latest web standards.
Monitor your website's uptime and performance
One of the best ways to ensure your website is always running smoothly is to monitor its uptime and performance regularly. There are several tools you can use to do this, including Pingdom, Uptime Robot, and SiteUptime.
These tools will help you track your website's uptime and performance so you can quickly identify any issues and take action to fix them. Additionally, they can also help you track your website's historical uptime so you can see how well it's been performing over time.
Regularly back up your website
Backing up your website is one of the most important things you can do to ensure it's always available so make sure to back up your site regularly, and if possible, set up automatic backups so you don't have to remember to do it yourself.
If your website does go down, you'll be glad you have a backup to restore it from. Additionally, if you ever need to move your site to a new server or host, having a backup will make the process much easier.
On the other hand, if you don't have a backup of your website, you could lose everything if something goes wrong. So, make sure to back up your site regularly and keep multiple backups in different locations so you always have a fallback.
Use a caching plugin
Caching is a technique that is used to speed up the loading of websites by storing a copy of the static files in a user's browser so they don't have to be downloaded each time the user visits the site. This is especially important for sites that receive a lot of traffic as it can help reduce the load on the server and make the site more responsive.
There are several caching plugins available for WordPress especially, including W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. These plugins will help speed up your website by caching static files in the user's browser. Additionally, using a CDN can also help cache static files on servers around the world so they are close to the user, which further reduces loading times.
Optimize your images
Images are one of the biggest factors that can affect your website's loading time so it's important to optimize them for the web. That means saving them in the correct file format, compressing them, and using the correct size and resolution.
Sometimes, you may need to use a plugin to help with this, such as the EWWW Image Optimizer or WP Smush. These plugins will help compress your images so they take up less space and load faster. Additionally, they can also help resize your images so they are the correct size for the web. Of course, there are other tools you can use to optimize your images, including Photoshop, GIMP, and ImageOptim.
Minimize your use of plugins
Finally, while plugins can be incredibly useful, they can also slow down your website if you have too many of them installed or if they are poorly coded. For instance, each time a page is loaded, WordPress has to load all the plugins that are active on that page, which can take a while and slow down the loading of the page.
Additionally, some plugins are known to be resource hogs and can harm your website's performance. So, it's important to be selective about the plugins and only install the ones you need. You should also make sure they are well-coded and up-to-date.
While there are several things you can do to ensure your website is always running at a high level, the most important thing is to be proactive and monitor it regularly. Use the tools we've provided to track your website's uptime and performance so you can quickly identify any issues and take action to fix them.
Additionally, back up your site regularly so you have a fallback in case something goes wrong. And lastly, optimize your images and minimize your use of plugins to help speed up your website.
