Expert WordPress Solutions

Solution – Website Optimization

We do a deep dive into discovering what is causing a website to load slowly. We examine the number of plugins installed (some plugins are known performance hogs), which temes is activated (we typically use an optimized Divi them but there are others that are fast loading), any custom coding (not all custom code is written with perforamce in mind, web hosting (most shared web hosting packages are not optimized for WordPress – looking at you GoDaddy).

Once we finish our discovery process, we implement an optimization plan to improve the page loading speed of your website. A fast website helps improve the visitor experience.

Figure 2 – Performance report after website optimization.

Solution – Website Hardening

The first step is gain access to the backend (we have different ways of getting into a WordPress website through FTP, cPanel, File Manager, etc). Next, we take a copy of the website and download it to our isolated local web server. Then we dig into what the hack actually is, most times it is just malware installed in a WordPress directory or actual code changes to WordPress files. We remove the hacked content, fix how the hacker gained access in the first place, then we harden the website with Wordfence (the world’s best security platform). We regularily monitor the website looking for further hacking attempts and locking out potential hackers.

Solution – Planned Regular Update Program

We use a multi step process to update our client’s WordPress websites. The process starts with making a full backup of the website (sometimes we break websites when updating so we always make a backup). For websites that have not been updated in a while, we will install a copy of the website on our local testing server. We then run the update process following a set routing (plugins, themes, WordPress core). We look for plugins that have been abandoned and find suitable replacements. Finally, we do several tests on different PHP versions to see if we can gain a performance improvement from a newer version of PHP.

When we have the local version of the website fully updated and tested, we run the updates on the live website (most often the updates are run after hours to limit the amount of downtime experienced while updating). We recommend setting up a regular schedule for updating WordPress.

Solution – Regular Backup Schedule

This solution is fairly simple, make regular backups and store the backup on a third-party location like Dropbox of Amazon Web Services file system. We set up a regular backup schedule (based on how often the website changes – static websites can be monthly while e-commerce websites can be full weekly backups with hourly database backups). Our backups are then encrypted and safely stored offline.

Once we have a successful backup system started, we will regularly do a test recovery on our local testing server. Not being able to recover a website from a backup is almost as bad as having no backup at all. We will test backup recovery as part of our regular website backup service.