How to Optimise a WordPress Website

One of the greatest achievements you can ever make as an entrepreneur is creating and running your own WordPress website in Singapore for your brand.

Thanks to its powerful features, this platform powers more than a quarter of the world’s giant websites.

Once you include WordPress in your to-do list, you will be part of the global community to receive support from many developers.

With a multitude of features, innovative designs, and strong security features, WordPress will continue to be the most powerful CMS tool in the market. 

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Why do you need to create a WordPress Site on your Own?

As a Singaporean entrepreneur, you are supposed to learn how to customize your WordPress site to suit the brand requirements.

Not only will it save you a lot of money, but it will also help you to make a few changes without seeking help from a third party. Hiring web developers or designers based in Singapore exposes you to affordable web design services.

However, you will still need their help when making changes. This prevents you from lagging behind your competitors due to stalled projects or outdated web pages.

How Does WordPress Work?

WordPress can only run your website efficiently if it partners with a reliable host. 

Remember, you don’t have to be a genius to build your website.

Here are is a step-by-step guide to help you create a WordPress website in Singapore for your brand:

How to Set Up a WordPress Site

Setting up a WordPress site doesn’t require rocket science.

However, you can still hire a web developer to help you set it up for free. If you want to go about it on your own,

then you will need to follow these steps;

• Find a Domain Wheel to tailor the perfect domain for your site
• Purchase the website hosting from Bluehost, then acquire your domain name for free
• Use the Bluehost interface to install WordPress
• Create pages in WordPress
• Select the best theme for WordPress
• Tailor plugins to optimize your website abilities
• You can now create pages and blog posts
• Customize the navigation tools for your website

Why a WordPress Website is the Best

If you are a newbie, you will get access to many web builders to help you create a website.

Going for a self-hosted website account is a viable option for you because it supports nearly 28% of all sites across the globe.

With WordPress, you will get access to dozens of website design services and extensions. Also, it is versatile enough to accommodate extra tools and services for web owners. This explains why most of them prefer to use it.

Once you have subscribed to WordPress Hosting plans, you will get a free domain name for one year. With this, you can customize your domain name to suit your organization’s agenda.

Your Microsoft Office experience will be improved thanks to WordPress hosting plans.

Here, you can access your email anywhere using Microsoft Office 365.

It also allows you to build your brand thanks to a customised domain name.

Once you have set up your WordPress website account, you will get the chance to change the standard password into something of your choice.

There are no limits to the type and length of password you want to use as long as it is secure.

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How to Maintain a WordPress Site

Once you have successfully created a WordPress site, you will need to maintain its core functionality, customized add-ons, and any other thing related to it.

This tool can only be efficient in the Singaporean market if you keep customising it to meet your expectations. It takes excellent technical skills to maintain a WordPress site.

You may have the option of hiring a person who qualifies for web design in Singapore to assist with the core functions.

However, it is better to do it on your own to ensure it remains safe and secure.

You can use the following WordPress maintenance tactics to avoid going wrong;

• Update your WordPress Site Regularly

The latest version of the WordPress website in Singapore is designed to sort all your backup needs. Find out the types of updates available for you as a WordPress beneficiary. It will prevent all attempts of hacking. You can also optimize your database by eliminating unnecessary plugins or themes.

• Keep Tabs on Your Site’s Speed

Waiting for slow-loading pages is one of the most discouraging factors your visitors may face. Its gets worse when they find untidy images and obsolete links. Avoid this by filtering the outdated comments and other unnecessary media files to boost its speed.

• Back-Up Your Site Regularly

A typical WordPress site requires regular backing up regardless of how busy you are. Not only does it ensure your website stays fresh and relevant, but it also corrects any mess before it gets worse. Backup versions are quite many depending on the duration you are subscribing for. You can choose to do it every month, or subscribe to the daily versions for blogs. Weekly backups are recommended for corporate sites.

• Optimize your Content Storage Area

A database is a core storage area for your blogs, pages, images, videos, and other content. As your site advances, the storage space gets full, and this may slow down the page loading process. This may prevent your visitors from accessing any extra information you may have for them. To avoid this, always ensure you optimize the database. A typical WordPress website in Singapore can be optimized using a plugin option. This will eliminate any unnecessary content and improve your site’s performance.

• Secure your Site

It is easy to place your trust in SSL encryptions to keep your website safe and secure from hackers. While this may be true, you will still need to prevent your site from being vulnerable. You can avoid this by installing a valid security plugin. If you are using a MacBook, you can select the iThemes security plugin to shield your site from 3rd party trespassers. Alternatively, you can go for malware or virus detectors to prevent them from accessing your files.

• Customize User Accounts

You may have shared passwords with your colleagues or junior staff members to make work easier. It may seem harmless at first, but it may take a significant toll on your site. If you are a new user, you should desist from sharing your login details to other users. Each person should have his or her own details and passwords to prevent the site from being vulnerable. Most site owners prefer to login through “admin” usernames, which is quite risky. You can try to change it into a complicated username or issue a lengthy password which is challenging to crack.

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Most beginners in website development are fascinated by opting for WordPress to create their site.

It is the most effective Content Management System platform offering users a simple website development process.

Every website owner aspires to have their website appear on top of Google’s Search Engines Results Page (SERP).

When the site’s ranking is high, it will most likely attract more traffic as a significant number of people might end up clicking on the link.

Indeed, increased traffic has favourable effects on your site as it results in a high lead conversion rate. As more people enter your website, they become prospective buyers of your products and might eventually turn into being your customers.

To increase your site’s ranking, you need to establish strategies that will facilitate its visibility thereby ranking.

In this article, we shall look into a process referred to as search engine optimization (SEO) and how to utilize it for improving your WordPress site.

Significance of Website Optimisation

Website optimization is essential as it eventually results in favourable outcomes.

First of all, a well-optimized site will have high rankings and therefore appear among the top sites in the search results.

That boosts confidence within users as they deem the site as trustworthy and dependable. With an increased number of visits into your website, your business is more likely to develop due to increased sales.

Optimization also saves you some pennies by reducing your expenditure.

Unlike other forms of advertisements and promotions which are charged, optimizing upholds your site without having to pay for advertising on Google while the final results are more or less the same.

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Tips to Enhance SEO For Your Site

Now, let us look into some guidelines that are of great significance in elevating your site’s SEO ratings.

• Set up WordPress optimization plugin

WordPress has plugins that are developed to aid in optimization for you by improving on your website’s metadata.

With well-structured title pages and meta descriptions, the visibility of your site is significantly improved thereby boosting its ranking.

There are several plugins each with a specific application such as Autoptimize which checks for defectively designed HTML, SmartCrawl and Yoast SEO which assists in creating an XML site for your site, WP smush which helps optimize images, among many others.

Installing a performance plugin can work significantly for your website in improving the content on your site.

Nonetheless, you should remember that a WordPress plugin does not add content for you; so, you have to consider aspects such as well-selected keywords by yourself and include them in the site’s content.

• Include tags and website sections

The structure of your website is essential in determining your SEO too. If the content in your site is poorly organized, it would be tougher for search engines to identify features such as keywords.

You should, therefore, arrange your content into groups of similar relevance.

You can also include tags and buttons to enhance access to the content.

With customized tags and widgets, they act as keywords and search engines can identify them thereby improving the site’s SEO.

• Ensure to set visibility active

In WordPress, there a provision for deactivating the visibility of your website. That means any search engine cannot suggest your site while it is in that status.

You might have set the option during the development of your site as the blunder mostly occurs on new websites.

Therefore, any time you realize that your website is not appearing at all in the search results, you need to confirm in the settings section, whether you have your site’s visibility active and if not, you can turn it on.

• Add Inbound links

Website authority requires website owners to add links to their sites to determine their legitimacy.

In that case, search engines will recognize your website as valid and hence include it in the search results. Inbound links usually redirect users to content on other websites.

What you need to do is copy the URL of the other site and paste it into your website. If you have succeeded in that, you will distinguish the link from the rest of the content as it should have a blue font colour.

You can also add links to your internal site’s content such as blog posts. WordPress has a function that lets you do it; you only need to highlight the word/s you want to add a link to and then click on the link button.

• Create a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

An SSL provides a high level of security for your website content by encoding the data you share with your website visitors.

Whenever you enhance data security for your site, Google and other search engines will then rank it more than one that has not secured their data. WordPress has a feature that adds an SSL automatically to your website.

All you have to do is install and activate the plugin responsible for the SSL security.

• Adjust the image sizes

Customizing your website can give it a boost in its appearance which may attract users. Images are crucial to users as they provide more elaborate information compared to content that a user has to comprehend.

However, if you do not precisely consider the most appropriate size, it would affect the site’s SEO.

You need to consider the size of the image in regards to the display and dimensions. A

n image that has high resolution and is large in dimensions might not be easily accessible by users as it might turn challenging to view or download. WordPress has plugins that help in adjusting the size of the images.

• Create XML sitemaps

Information about your site’s URLs and content that include the date of creation and the frequency of content modification is essential too.

Such information is contained in an XML sitemap, and it helps search engines evaluate the relevance of the content thereby determining the ranking.

Yoast SEO is a plugin in WordPress that helps generate the XML sitemaps for you.

You can install and activate, otherwise with the appropriate knowledge on website development; you can create XML sitemaps yourself.

• Modify the permalinks

While permalinks to a specific post ought to be permanent, sometimes it might be a hindrance to your SEO’s improvement.

A permalink might turn out to be vague and hence may lead to reduced traffic as users are not enticed into finding out what is inside the site.

You need to analyze the permalinks and establish whether they are original and artistic.

Changing the permalinks usually has a positive effect on the SEO, and you should, therefore, click on the settings option to replace them.

• Use a suitable URL format

It does not matter what format you choose, as that might not directly determine your site’s SEO. You might decide to include ‘www’ at the beginning of the URL or exclude it where both formats are suitable for a website.

Nonetheless, once you have already chosen a format you prefer, you should ensure that you don’t change it to the other regularly or even at all if possible.

The two formats are appropriate for use along with the title of the website, but search engines interpret them differently. Therefore, choose one of the formats and settle on it to avoid an already highly ranked site from dropping.

• Optimize reviews on your site

It is definite that a perfect website for business must have a section for customers’ reviews and comments. This section is essential as it reflects the relationship between the servers and the customer.

Good reviews will inevitably boost the level of traffic for the website as people will develop trust in the content posted. Optimizing these review messages and comments involves filtering those that are not relevant as well as the promotional ones.

WordPress has plugins to help you achieve that automatically.

hey aid in blocking such comments plus the person/s who sent the review.

• Enhance the site’s security

Apart from just creating SSL for your website, there is a need to enhance security in regards to its firewall, together with several other vulnerable sections.

A safe site usually attains higher rankings than the one marked as unsafe. You can install security plugins to help you manage security for your website by keeping track of threatening issues.

WordPress provides such plugins for you including the iThemes and Wordfence security plugins.

• Generate No-follow external links

Unlike internal links which only improve the SEO of your site only, including an external link helps boost the ratings of the redirecting site thereby high rankings.

Since adding links is beneficial to even your customers and website visitors, you can never avoid them.

You should, therefore, consider assigning No-follow value to the links. That will ensure that the site to the link does not outshine you in the search rankings.

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There are various kinds of WordPress users.

However, they can be classified into two main categories – those who understand everything about WordPress (normally developers), and those who rarely utilise a content management system and merely understand the technical part about it (normally bloggers).

The second group of individuals gets attracted by the massive number of plugins and themes that WordPress offers and its competencies as a platform for blogging, but they don’t know how to maintain their WordPress website updated or about its security.

That is when you need to employ a WordPress maintenance service provider.

A WordPress maintenance service provider is a company that offers to keep your website updated and monitor its performance at a small cost.

Their services are helpful to website owners or bloggers who lack patience or time to learn how to maintain their WordPress content management system.

This article covers more about WordPress maintenance services including what they are, the reasons why you require them, other similar alternatives, and some of the top services available in the market.

Let’s dive in.

What Does a WordPress Maintenance Service Mean?

I gave a brief description of what a WordPress maintenance service is, but I did not discuss what it does and its benefits to your business.

If you own a WordPress website, you should at least understand the way it functions by now.

In simple terms, you should have known that WordPress is a self-hosted content management system.

It means that it does not offer site security services apart from its secure code during the development of your site. It also doesn’t update your website, the plugins or themes for you.

It is your responsibility to undertake all this and mend the flaws.

Okay, but what occurs if you get busy creating content for your site and spend the other part of your time undertaking other personal responsibilities that life induces?

What transpires when you don’t get concerned about becoming a WordPress pro and utilise your time to enhance the growth of your business and blog?

Sure, there is a higher possibility that you will not maintain your website updated, and execute security plugins and features.

You may discover that your site has been puzzled by bugs, is not functional, or has been hacked after some time.

If you decide to undertake maintenance services on your own, you may end up doing it so improperly. You may find out that you have introduced some errors that you are not sure of how to do away with.

These are issues that WordPress maintenance services can protect you from.

Simply put, most of the services these kinds of companies provide include:

• Bug fixes
• Security monitoring all round the clock
• Obtain and preserve backups
• Undertake secure WordPress updates

These are the primary services offered by almost all WordPress maintenance service providers.

However, you can get some companies providing less than that and others providing more.

The specific services each company offers are discussed below. But let’s first review the people who require this kind of service.

How Can You Benefit From WordPress Maintenance Services?

Maintaining your WordPress website up to date in an incorrect way or failing to keep it updated at all is a reliable means of introducing bugs and malevolent systems from hackers as mentioned earlier.

In other words, WordPress updates, plugins and themes, and security features must be carefully installed, and the updates for all those plugins and themes must be executed.

The method you use to implement them does not matter at all.

When you don’t have the mood to cook, what do you usually do? You pay off another person to do it on your behalf — a WordPress maintenance service functions in the same manner.

That said, the targeted groups by WordPress maintenance services include the following:

• Website owners who aren’t sure about their capabilities to undertake their website’s maintenance.
• Website owners who are not interested in learning how to do maintenance on a WordPress site.
• People who own WordPress sites but don’t know how to perform maintenance.
• Any individual who is not willing to undertake maintenance on their website in spite of their expertise in WordPress.

Thus, it is evident why these services are directed towards occupied business owners and bloggers more than other parties. Let’s now look at the list of maintenance service providers that you can consider in Singapore.

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7 Common WordPress SEO Mistakes and Solutions

We have already discussed how to create a WordPress website and the many maintenance processes you should do regularly.

However, some mistakes can hurt your website’s performance and hinder you from realising your online business’s full potential.

Over the last month, we have scoured the web, and here are the top seven WordPress SEO mistakes we found and their respective solutions.

• Failing to Optimise Images

With the attention spans of us human beings getting smaller, you cannot afford to have a slow WordPress website. The average loading speed of a landing page on mobile is 22 seconds and 10.3 seconds on desktop.

According to Google, this page load speed is too slow and could result in most website visitors leaving before the page elements load fully. The search engine recommends striving to achieve a page load speed of 2 seconds.

One of the significant elements that impact page load speed is images.

They significantly slow down the speed if not optimised correctly. Therefore, it’s imperative to ensure that all graphics on your WordPress website, including illustrations and charts, are optimised.

Here are two tips on how to optimise WordPress website images.

• • Compress the size of the images
  • Write keyword-rich alt text to help search engine bots understand the context of the images

Proper alt-text will boost the ranking of the images on Google image search results, thereby increasing your site visibility in SERPs.

• Not Doing Site Audit to Identify Broken Links

A site audit helps to pinpoint SEO errors on your website that should be rectified to boost its ranking and visibility.

If you don’t audit your website regularly, you will end up with un-optimized images and broken links.

You don’t want potential customers and search engine bots to be redirected to a 404 not found page when clicking on the links. Such links compromise user experience, conversion rate, and ranking on SERPs.

Use secure WordPress plugins such as Broken Link Checker to locate and fix broken links on your website.

Like other recommended plugins, it analyses external and internal links and lists all the broken ones in an easy-to-understand report.

You can manually correct the identified links by visiting each post or page or directly on this plugin’s dashboard – the choice is yours!

• Poorly Structured Headers

Properly structuring your website page content and blog posts will help Google bots crawl and index your content better. The rule of thumb is to ensure you use the proper HTML subheadings, that is, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and more.

Apart from enabling search engines to crawl your content, these headers will also help web visitors scan through your content quickly.

Understand that most potential customers don’t read the entire text. Instead, they rely on the subheadings to understand the content.

Ensure that you also add primary keywords in some of the subheadings to enhance on-site SEO. Ideally, a blog post should only have one H1 and multiple H2s or H3s, depending on the structure of the post.

Whenever you update the headings, also remember to update the title tags. WordPress automatically converts a blog title into an H1. If there isn’t one, Google will pick the first text on the post and display it as H1 to the searchers.

Woe onto you if the text does not match the text or searchers’ intent, as it will discourage potential customers from visiting.

• Poor External and Internal Linking

Correcting external and internal linking is one of the most important yet overlooked WordPress SEO hacks.

The links not only help visitors to browse the website seamlessly but also help search engine bots to understand the site’s architecture.

If the internal links are broken, the bot’s ability to correctly crawl the pages will be limited. This will, in turn, hurt your site’s SEO and ranking.

Therefore, ensuring that all your internal links are functional and lead to the correct pages is essential. For example, they direct potential customers to the right landing pages.

On the same point, make sure you use the correct anchor text to achieve optimal link juice flow across the pages.

Here are some common mistakes we noticed on the WordPress websites we analysed.

• • Creating internal links in the wrong places. Ensure you only link to content from the most essential or relevant subheadings and not random keywords or anchor text.
  • Using random anchor text. We recommend using anchor text that contains the primary keywords. The keyword should resonate with the target page you want to rank, and there is no harm in using exact match anchor text.

Make sure that the anchor text also matches the searcher’s intent.

For instance, don’t link to landing pages using anchor text whose intent is to inform, not to entice the visitor to buy or take any other desired action.

On the other hand, add weight to your content by linking to authority sites that the readers can click on to gather additional information. Use the links to back up claims and statistics.

Google considers these links a sign that the content is detailed, accurate, and more authoritative than posts with no links.

• Using the Wrong Schema Markup

In its early days, WordPress was merely a blogging platform. However, over the years, it has become an ideal content management system for creating eCommerce websites.

Today, there are hundreds of themes that you can tweak to create a custom eCommerce website for your company.

While that’s great, and most web admins are doing that, a significant number still doesn’t use the correct schema markup. Schema markup increases the chances of blog posts and website content showing up on SERPs as featured snippets.

What is schema markup?

Simply put, schema markup is a semantic set of tags that are added to the WordPress HTML code for purposes of helping Google and other search engine bots crawl and index the pages correctly.

Schema markup also directly impacts how the website contents, such as product prices, reviews, ratings, and availability, are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs).

For example, if you have a WordPress website that sells kitchen appliances and recipe books, you can use schema markup to display ingredients, calories, and cooking steps in SERPs.

Such a rich snippet is more effective in luring visitors to click on the website URL when displayed on SERPs than the conventional meta title and meta description.

Note that schema markup doesn’t significantly impact SEO but can potentially increase click-through rate in search results and organic traffic to specific website pages.

You don’t need to possess programming skills; use Schema & Structured Data plugins for AMP and WP to create schema markup for different pages.

Go the extra mile to use the Rich Results Test Tool to confirm whether the schema markup selected is correct. The plugin will also give you insights into which Google will likely generate rich snippets.

• Not Optimising Website Pages for Mobile Devices

It’s no secret that most people use and prefer visiting websites using smartphones than desktops.

In 2016, Google launched the mobile-first algorithm update, which resulted in mobile-friendly and responsive websites outranking their counterparts.

Today, Google uses the mobile version of your website to determine its ranking. This version also influences how the different pages are indexed.

Despite the many online posts on the need to ensure that website pages are optimised for mobile, we came across websites whose pages are inaccessible on mobile.

It has been proven beyond doubt that not having a mobile-friendly website will lower your site ranking and result in a poor user experience.

If you’re not convinced about the need to optimise your website for mobile, note that mobile traffic accounts for more than 50% of the global website traffic. You’re losing significant leads to your competitors by not making your website mobile-friendly.

Here are a few tips on how to optimise your WordPress website for mobile today without breaking a sweat.

• • Use a responsive theme and template to create your WordPress website.
  • Make sure that all pages are optimised for page speed.
  • Leverage accelerated mobile pages (AMPs)
  • Disable interstitials and pop-ups – they distract searchers from the primary goal and result in a low page conversion rate.

During our research, we found an article that describes eight credible and secure WordPress plugins you can count on to optimise your website for mobile.

You can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check the degree of site mobile-friendliness and sections that need to be tweaked.

• Failing to Optimise Your WordPress Site Indexation and Crawl Budget

Firstly, the internet is a mammoth repository of information, and no search engine can index all the URLs online today. As a result, the bots have to limit the time they spend crawling a site. Every website has a specific craw budget.

What is website crawl budget? Website crawl budget refers to the number of pages that Google or any other search engine bot can crawl and effectively index within the specified timeframe.

At first, don’t worry about the crawl budget, but as your business grows and you create more pages, you need to start paying attention to this metric.

Also, if your site has many redirects, you must watch your crawl budget to prevent the redirect chains from exhausting.

Here are tips on how to maximise my WordPress site crawl budget.

• • Work on site speed to enable Google bots to crawl many pages at once
  • Use correct internal links to help bots understand your site architecture
  • Leverage a flat website architecture
  • Get rid of orphan pages – these are pages with no external or internal links
  • Avoid having duplicate content

MediaOne Marketing has a team of highly trained SEO experts who can audit your site and help you maximise your crawl budget. Get in touch with us today for more details.

Yoast SEO plugin can also help you keep tabs on your site crawlability. Concisely, index bloating and wastage of crawl budget due to having many pages that don’t move the needle and incorrect use of SEO plugins is a common technical SEO mistake we noted during our research and analysis.

Based on this fact, we recommend monitoring the crawlability of pages that you consider less valuable, such as the About Us Page, as there is no need to index them.

Yoast and All in One SEO plugins have an option that allows users to block such pages, thereby increasing the amount of time that Google has to crawl and index other more important pages.

We also noticed that some website developers forget to unselect the “Discourage this website from search engines.” As a result, the site is completed by never gets indexed after going live as it’s unavailable to the bots. This mistake is prevalent on new websites.

In addition, content pages can compromise your website indexation and crawlability. Some of the WordPress plugins are guilty of creating countless thin content pages that don’t significantly impact the website’s performance.

These unnecessary pages slow down Google bot crawl speed and exhaust the crawl budget. As a result, the website is perceived by Google as poor quality, which significantly negatively impacts its ranking and performance.

One of the downsides of having thin content pages on your WordPress website is that they often contain duplicate content that hurts the ranking of the important pages.

When such pages are displayed in SERPs, they result in a poor user experience, low conversion, and low engagement rates.

Consider deleting these pages to take full advantage of the available site crawl budget.

Other WordPress SEO mistakes are;

• • Keyword stuffing
  • Duplicate content
  • Not having a social media marketing strategy
  • Not working on bounce rate
  • Not having optimised CTA (Call-to-Action) buttons
  • Trying to rank for highly competitive keywords immediately after launching the site
  • Targeting high intent keywords with low search volume
  • Targeting high-traffic keywords with low-ranking difficulty 
  • Inconsistent post publishing
  • Not rectifying connection timeout

Get in touch with MediaOne Marketing for quality WordPress SEO services to give your brand a higher cutting edge in the market.

Our team won’t rest until the desired results are achieved, and your brand bounces back to profitability.

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6 WordPress Maintenance Services for Occupied Site Owners and Bloggers

The list below outlines six WordPress Maintenance services that you can consider for your Singapore website. We will highlight the pricing plans and the particular services offered by these companies.

Particularly, we will look at these service providers:

• WP Buffs
• GWP
• WP Maintainer
• Maintain
• WP Site Care
• WP Team Support

Let’s onset the list.

• WP Buffs

WP Buffs WordPress maintenance service serves a massive audience by offering various site maintenance services.

The company provides its services to site owners and bloggers based on the plans chosen.

It has three plans that you can pay on a monthly or annually basis. Most individuals choose the first two plans because the third one is costly. It comes at a fee of $150 per month, but it comes with a malware removal feature.

The basic plan is known as Maintain, and it provides website backups that are saved in Cloud. It also offers site restoration services. It also provides plugin and theme updates each week.

Site monitoring is done all around the clock with this plan. It comes at $50 per month.

The other plan is known as Perform, and it is offered at $100 per month. It has an iThemes Security Pro integration that offers 24/7 security monitoring. It also provides speed optimisations on a weekly basis.

You can also contact their support team through the phone, email, or live chat.

• GoWP

This is yet another WordPress maintenance service that serves both agencies and small businesses, although both of them get charged the same costs. It advances four distinctive plans.

The initial two plans serve different wants, and you join these services by purchasing their third plan. Let’s go into details.

The initial plan is known as Maintenance, and it comes at the cost of $29 per month. It provides backups that are saved offline on a daily basis, and they can be utilised to reinstate your website when requested.

GoWP also provides WordPress plugin and theme updates. It also has a security monitoring feature and website cleanups whenever there are issues.

The second plan is known as Support, and it comes at a $59 fee each month. This plan only offers limitless 30-minute support errands. If you buy their third plan known as Complete to receive all the services given by both Support and Maintenance plans, it is charged a fee of $79 per month.

The fourth plan is known as Manual, and it provides all the services offered by the Complete plan plus a manual plugin testing and update service at the cost of $129 each month.

With this service, you can also purchase WordPress Fixing services for only one time at a price of $49 per individual task, although the cost changes.

• WP Maintainer

This company provides website maintenance services to various types of businesses using a single plan. The basis for this pricing approach is that every person gets their best services.

There are no elaborate plans and packages as they offer their services at the same cheap price.

They initiate their services by providing you site backups offline or by sending them to you through the email.

They also update the plugins, themes, and interior of your website, ensuring that they get fresh backups before initiating the update process.

They also offer site cleanup and security monitoring services which get powered by Sucuri. It also provides ticket and email help, but special requests can lead to extra charges.

The single WP Maintainer’s plan comes at a fee of $99 per month.

• Maintainn

Maintain is a WordPress maintenance company that provides various plans. Some of them offer customised development options. Most bloggers should get interested in their Premium Support plan.

It includes daily offsite website backups and weekly site updates to ensure that your website is secure. They also offer security monitoring services all around the clock as well as site cleanups and fixes if your site gets hacked.

They also give you the maintenance reports for every month.

For support services, you can either surrender a ticket via the support gizmo available on the dashboard of your WordPress site or send an email to their support team.

This plan comes at the cost of $499 per year or $49 per month.

• WP Site Care

WP Site Care is a maintenance service company that offers various features for all types and sizes of businesses.

The enjoyed by more prominent agencies include custom setups on a monthly basis, a manager for your account, and many more. The service that suits small business owners and bloggers best is their Core plan.

The plan comes with daily website backups that are safely saved in a cloud database offered by Amazon Web Services. The next service they provide is ensuring that the interior, themes, and plugins of your website are up to date.

You will also enjoy a 24/7 security tracking and site cleanups through a union with Sucuri, a famous site security solution.

They also provide support via your WordPress dashboard. The cost of this plan is $948 per annum or $99 per month. They also offer a money back guarantee for 30 days.

• WP Team Support

WP Team Support  is yet another WordPress maintenance agency that offers services to various businesses in Singapore. The services it provides to bigger businesses include custom development, optimisation of performance, and search engine optimisation. For small businesses and bloggers, their Startup plan is the best.

If you are new to this service, you can schedule periodic website backups that will get stored in Cloud. This company also offers regulated WordPress updates.

They provide 24/7 security tracking and cleanups in case your site gets attacked by hackers or when a malicious file gets into your storage system.

The other services offered by this agency include monthly reports, spam cleanups and uptime tracking.24/7 support is available through live chat for urgent issues, and a ticket system for matters that are less urgent.

The Wp Team Support plan comes at the cost of $49 each month and has a 30-day money-back assurance.

Other Similar Services That Are Worth Mentioning

Before concluding this article, let’s highlight two extra WordPress maintenance service providers that were not mentioned in the list above namely WP Curve and WP Butler.

WP Curve is a maintenance service e company that provides services using a specific approach.

Their services are given in a catalogue where they are called tasks.

Some of these tasks include custom development, Website development as well as maintenance of themes. Every plan you buy from this company offers you a specific amount of credits.

You can utilise each of these credits to purchase a task. Each plan contains credits for various tasks.

There are two plans: the Starter plan which comes at the cost of $49.99 per month and the Basic plan which comes at a price of $79.99 per month.

Wp Butler is the other WordPress maintenance agency that is worth to mention. You can purchase each of their services individually rather than buying the complete solution.

For instance, if you require updates on a weekly basis, you will be required to pay a fee of $16 each month.

When you need full website backups on a weekly basis and database backups on a daily basis, you will pay only $15 per month.

For both services, you will pay a $31 fee.

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One of the most crucial first steps to starting your own website is deciding on the Content Management System to run the site on.

You’ve got options aplenty, but there’s a reason WordPress is widely recommended by web developers, designers and owners alike.

One is it’s the easiest framework to use, and flexible enough to build anything – from a simple minimalistic blog to a thriving, feature-rich eCommerce site.

But as with any other CMS platform out there, the framework isn’t bereft of its fair share of common errors beginners are likely to encounter.

Even with WordPress developing a well-oiled machine, some errors are just inevitable. And don’t they know how to ruin a perfect day, especially when you’re completely clueless about troubleshooting and fixing them?

Perhaps most common about these problems, regardless of the degree of severity or how intimidating they appear to be, is that they all stem from really minor issues.

Nothing too complex, so long as you understand the root cause of the problem, you can troubleshoot everything on your own and even fix it without involving a third party.

To get you started, here are five common problems WordPress beginners are likely to encounter. Read on to find out how to diagnose them and get them fixed on your own.

White Screen of Death

You load your site and instead of your content loading, your site goes completely blank. Just plain white, even with several refreshing attempts you still can’t get anything to display.

What you have there is the dreaded White Screen of Death, commonly abbreviated as WSoD.

The problem is usually caused by a number of things, but at core, it’s just your site failing to load up properly.

So how do you fix it?

• Disable Your Plugins

Faulty plugins are the most common suspects of the White Screen of Death. So the first step in troubleshooting the exact problem behind the WSoD is to disable all plugins and start activating them one by one until you’re able to track down the exact plugin causing the issue.

• Disable your theme

When your theme fails to load properly what follows is the White Screen of Death. So after you’re done ruling out your plugins as the possible cause, the next most logical thing to do is to also disable your theme.

The easiest way to do this is to sign in to your Cpanel and head straight to the public HTML file, followed by WP content, and then themes. There you should be able to see your theme. Just delete and try reloading the site on a different tab. If the problem persists, head on to option 3.

• Activate Debug Mode

This can be found in your Cpanel and it’s the feature to use if you’ve ruled out plugins and themes as the possible cause of your WSoD issue. The feature will highlight some of the errors registered on-site for you to fix.

• Increase your memory limit

Your site may fail to load up simply because it has run out of memory. A simple way to fix it is to open up the php.ini file and raise your maximum memory.

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The 404 Error

This is a common error among WordPress users.

The error signifies that the server couldn’t find the page you requested. This could be due to broken links or altered URLs.

Keep in mind that the error can still occur even when the page is available.

When this occurs, then the problem is with the .htaccess file, which handles the hyperlink structure of your website.

So how do you fix it?

To fix this, try generating a new .htaccess file.

But in the off chance that this fails to work, just re-upload a new .htaccess (mind the full stop). In most cases, this should be able to get the problem ironed out, unless otherwise.

Database Connection Error

If upon opening your site you encounter an error stating “Error establishing a database connection,” then that can be interpreted to mean your site is encountering some problem connecting to your database.

So basically, the problem is with your wp-config.php file. Your database details might have been entered incorrectly, thus causing the conflict.

So how do you fix it?

Login into your Cpanel or FTP and locate the wp-config.php file. Take your time to go through the file, and correct your database name, host, username, and password.

The problem might also be caused by your web host. That happens when the host decides to limit your database, and when you’ve finally reached the set limit, you’ll automatically be slapped by the error message.

If this is the case, you might want to change your web host or contact your current host for an upgrade.

Connection Timed Out

This error occurs after you’ve tried to load your site several times. And that’s because your web server is experiencing hardship loading up, and it’s essentially giving up in the process.

The problem occurs mostly because your web servers don’t have the required amount of resources to function optimally. Very common to those using shared hosting, where several sites compete for the same limited resources. Or it could be that your site has exceeded the maximum bandwidth allowed.

On rare occasions though, the problem could occur as a result of a slow internet speed on your part.

So how do you fix it?

Simple, start by checking your internet speed. If other sites are loading properly, then the problem could with your website instead.

So yes, consider changing your web host or upgrading it for better services and server resources.

A higher-tier hosting plan should help you avoid unnecessary downtimes and slowdowns. You want your site to perform optimally and with minimal strain.

Then it behoves you to pick the server with the best resources possible, or upgrade it by moving it one level up until that option starts acting up as well.

A better approach would be to look at your web content. Do you have unnecessary plugins hogging up the bulk of your resources? Go through your list of plugins and delete any of them that are of no use to you.

Your theme is not an exception in this. Check to find out if it’s the one dragging your site down.

Lastly, you might also want to raise your PHP memory limit to something higher than what you already have.

Your Sidebar Occurring Below your Content

This is a very common problem among web owners running their sites on WordPress.

You load up your site only to find the sidebar has moved from the usual left or right hand spot to hang underneath your web content.

How to Fix It

This occurs when you’ve made changes to the HTML or CSS code of your theme.

The only way to change is to change your theme or to consider reverting some of the changes made to their original form.

If this fails to work, then consider deleting the theme and uploading it afresh or just getting a different theme unless you were using a customized one.

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Final Verdict

Maintaining your WordPress site is something that you need to take very seriously.

There is no extent of features, firewall rules, or security track that can keep away hackers if your WordPress plugins and themes are not updated correctly and on a regular basis.

WordPress maintenance allows you to focus on creating content and growing your business without having to worry about whether your website is safe and secure or not.

The alternative to these services is taking your time to learn how to back up your site, implement solutions for website security and run the updates by yourself.

The second option is using WordPress Managed Hosting.

They provide daily site backups, security solutions, cleanups for malware, and website updates — the cost of these services changes based on the one you select.