How to maintain your WordPress business site in optimal condition?

You invest time and money in developing the perfect WordPress website – but unfortunately, that’s where it ends. Most website owners do not give a second thought to what comes after – and that’s maintenance. Maintaining your WordPress site is important to tackle a variety of issues that arise during operation, eliminate potential security threats, boost performance and rank better in search engines.

Here are five tips that can help you maintain your website to ensure optimum performance at all times:

#1: Boost speed 

With time, users go increasingly impatient and demand faster load times. Anything that takes more than a few seconds to load is bound to turn your customers away. Make sure you optimize existing images and any new images you upload. A CDN plugin can also enhance performance significantly.

#2: Security matters

If you leave your site vulnerable, it will eventually get hacked. You need to take proactive steps to maintain security. Choose a secure admin password, install security plugins such as Better WP Security and always backup your site regularly to restore normalcy in case of an attack.

Wordpress Website development

#3: Focus on SEO

Let’s face it; the more you slacken off on your SEO strategy, the more you slip behind on SERPs. Ongoing SEO is essential to maintain a good ranking and also to improve consistently. Release fresh content, use keywords wisely and ensure appropriate ‘Alt’ tags are inserted for new images.

#4: Keep the dashboard neat

Make sure your dashboard is kept as clean and organized as possible. Get rid of old themes, publish/delete your trackbacks, and make sure you update any plugins/themes as and when available. These simple measures will make sure your dashboard is less cluttered.

#5: Optimize content

The key to maintaining optimum performance is to get a good stream of content flowing on your website. Content creation is not a one-time task. Publishing new content is the best way to notify users that you’re actively involved and is an excellent means of building your customer base. Also, ensure you’re adding social buttons to hook in an audience from such channels.
 
With these tips, your website will gain momentum and retain it in order to keep traffic coming in consistently. If you lack the expertise to develop or maintain your website, you can always reach out to expert WordPress developers in Malaysia for assistance.

5 Obvious Reasons Why Joomla and WordPress are the Best CMSs for Startups

By building an official website with a content management system (CMS), not only will you be able to create a professional-looking site with advanced features, but you will also be able to save a lot of money on maintenance and upkeep. Joomla and WordPress are two of the most popular CMSs in the market at the moment. Startups with limited budgets that want to grow their business can build excellent websites on these at affordable rates.

Here are some reasons why both are perfect choices for startups and how they can empower your nascent business:

Reasonable and easy installation
 
Being open source CMSs, setting up and using Joomla and WordPress both is free – all you have to do is pay for hosting (which is very cheap). Both systems are very newbie-friendly and don’t require much technical knowledge for setup.

Robust functionality
 
Thanks to the ready availability of premade plugins – thousands of them – you can create advanced websites by just installing the necessary features. For example, you can turn an original into an online store, gather user data, and improve customer service with live Chatbots.

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Lightning-quick loading on both PCs and mobiles
 
Website visitors don’t have the patience to wait for more than 2-3 seconds for a webpage to load. Joomla and WordPress CMS, if well optimised, can load in just a couple of seconds – or even less – on both desktop computers and mobile phones. 

SEO-ready design
 
If a website is search engine optimised (SEO), you can expect it to generate a lot of traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Both CMSs are SEO-ready out-of-the-box – your web pages will be visible on search engine ranking pages (SERPs) with just a little tinkering and optimisation. 

Localization support
 
We’re in the era of globalisation, and it’s normal for local businesses to have international clients. Both WordPress and Joomla offer localisation support – that means your web pages can be translated into a large number of popular foreign languages effortlessly, like English; Japanese; Chinese; French; and much more. 

Openwave’s experienced web development team specialises in building powerful business websites on Joomla and WordPress at very reasonable rates. If you don’t have much technical knowledge, you can get an excellent customized website from us.

5 Things Every WordPress Developer Should Know

WordPress is currently powering over 26% of the World Wide Web. It is the platform of choice for individual bloggers, startups, and even big businesses (like Sony and the New York Times). A website built with it is easy to setup and affordable to maintain. However, it takes a great deal of technical knowledge and experience to setup an advanced website that is capable of providing a high user experience (UX). 

Here are five things every WordPress developer should account for if they want to build quality websites:

Don’t make changes to core
 
Some developers have the habit of inserting small bits of code for added functionality or altering the code to customise a website. When the site gets updated, though, these changes are wiped away. That's why you shouldn't modify the core. If you find bugs, report them to the developer of the plugin. If you need to make changes, document extensively.  

Remember to turn on db_debug
 
A large number of developers never turn on the WP_debug parameter to true (found in the wp-config.php file). If you don’t turn it on, WordPress will rectify errors in the background. That results in incorrect code which can be a big headache later. By turning on debug, you can catch all mistakes before publishing.   

Wordpress website development

Optimise the database  
 
Databases can get bulky and slow with time. By streamlining a database, you can reduce their size and speed up your page and website loading times. You can do it both manually as well as automatically with the help of plugins. 

Queue scripts and styles
 
Queueing scripts and styles is important. It amounts to giving precise instructions to WordPress. By queuing scripts and styles correctly, WordPress will allocate assets at the right time and in the correct order. It will load scripts in the proper order, without faulty overrides. 

Find quality resources
 
Finally, WordPress is supported by an extensive development community that often doesn’t get the attention it deserves. By searching for quality resources (use search engines or forums), you could end up building a better quality project than you thought possible. 

If you’re not tech-savvy and need a WordPress-based website, you can hire a WordPress development team in Malaysia to build you one.

Why is Optimising Images on your WordPress Website Essential?

Humans are visual creatures. Our brains process information that comes to us from visual mediums -like pictures, GIFs, and videos- much faster than they do from words or even sounds. You could create reams of excellent content for your website, but it will never generate as much interest as lower quality content with a picture attached to it. 

That’s the reason why your WordPress website should feature as many pictures as possible to improve user experience (UX) and make it easier for you to engage with incoming visitors.

Why is optimising images on your WordPress site crucial?
 
Images, especially HD ones, are big and require a lot of storage space and bandwidth to download. Some images are worth pages of text. If you don’t optimise a picture, it sometimes takes several seconds more for a web page to load. Statistics tell us that most website visitors don't have the patience to wait for more than 4-5 seconds for a webpage to load.

 If it doesn't load that quickly, they will abandon the website and go to another. By optimising images, you can compress them and get the web page to load fast. Compressing them also doesn't spoil the picture quality – you can display gorgeous photos to visitors to catch their attention. 

Wordpress website

Optimising images helps with SEO

On-page optimising techniques are good for SEO. When you optimise an image, you are asked to place an ‘ALT’ text on it. ‘ALT’ is the alternate text that explains what the image is about and is displayed when the image doesn’t load. Search engines like Google use the ‘ALT’ text for indexing. If you have optimised a lot of pictures, your site is likely to gain many rankings. Also, you are more liable to generate incoming traffic from image searches.  

On most websites, images occupy over 63% of a site's size. The more you can compress the images, the less space they will fill and the faster the site will load. You can use tools like Photoshop to compress them. Alternatively, if you want your site to have good SEO, you can hire dedicated developers to do it for you.