Daily ArchivesSeptember 8, 2021

I think you’ll agree with me when I say: WordPress maintenance can be a pain. Almost all WordPress users have heard stories about plugin updates or theme updates breaking sites, or worse, websites getting hacked.

This WordPress maintenance checklist will take away the pain from keeping your website running stable and secure. It’ll give you a framework to structure maintenance into simple recurring tasks which you can partially automate. You can literally save days throughout the new year by using this checklist.

I’ve broken down this checklist into multiple areas to account for maintenance tasks you should perform on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. You’ll find that most of the daily tasks can be automated with ease. The weekly and monthly tasks can sometimes be automated as well, but there are some things you will want to do manually.

All tasks from this checklist come from my team’s experience of managing 100+ WordPress websites on behalf of our clients. I’m not saying this to sell you on my service but to demonstrate the practicability of this WordPress checklist.

This is no fluffy checklist written for the purpose of creating a checklist. It’s a tool you’ll want to have in your belt.

You don’t need to be a WordPress developer to follow along with this checklist.

In fact, you won’t have to write a single line of code or touch any server setting. This checklist provides you with instructions for maintenance tasks on a high level – so you know that your site is set up properly.

If your site breaks (e.g. because of a faulty plugin update that causes an error in combination with your theme) you might still need a developer at hand. But you’ll also be in the position to simply bring back a backup of your website to get it back up and running in no time.

While this WordPress maintenance checklist gives you a glimpse into all of the areas that go into keeping a WordPress site running smoothly, it cannot hide the fact that WordPress maintenance is tricky. However, it will act as a beacon guiding you in the right direction. And if you’re on Hostdedi’ Managed WordPress Hosting plan, you’ll find maintaining your site even easier.

Daily WordPress Maintenance Tasks

I’m fully aware that daily WordPress maintenance might not fit into your schedule. It certainly does not in mine. I’m a WordPress developer running my own business for maintenance services and loading speed optimization, a writer for Hostdedi (I love their approach to support the WP community), a full-time lead developer for a German agency, and a husband and friend.

Surely you’ll agree that the daily WordPress care program should take as little time as possible. But no matter whether your business depends on your WordPress site (think of lead generation, e-commerce, etc) or whether your site is for your hobby, daily maintenance is important.

Hence, I’ll give you three tasks you should perform on a daily basis. All of those can and should be automated because you want those maintenance tasks to be executed no matter what life throws at you. Software can do these things a lot better than humans.

1. Back Up Your Website Daily

Having a backup of your website is mandatory. You never know when things could go south because your website can break for so many different reasons. It doesn’t even need to be a problem with WordPress itself, but could also be related to your hosting company’s servers or their infrastructure.

The great news is that some professional WordPress developers have thought about this problem and created rock-solid solutions for us. While reliable hosting companies like Hostdedi do include backups in their Managed WordPress hosting plans, I like the security of having a second backup of my website somewhere in the cloud.

As a free plugin, I rely on UpdraftPlus most of the time, including my own website WP Mastery. I’m happy to start my WordPress maintenance checklist with this particular plugin because it served me and my clients well for years.

You can simply install it from your WP dashboard and then configure automated daily backups that get stored to whatever cloud service you prefer (I have my backups in Dropbox).

If you’d like a paid alternative with a support team you can reach out to 24/7, I highly recommend you check out blogvault.net. Their founder Akshat Choudhary gave an interview for Hostdedi recently, outlining how he runs his two businesses and what he thinks about WordPress security.

2. Get Notified About Downtime

Every second in which your website isn’t accessible matters. You’re losing visitors and, more importantly, damaging your brand’s reputation. Just think about how people go crazy when Facebook isn’t online. Those incidents even make it to media outlets like USA TODAY.

While your brand likely isn’t as big as Facebook, you still want to know when your website goes down so that you can bring it back online fast.

Here are a few services that help monitor your site for uptime.

UptimeRobot is a free service you can use to automatically test your website every five minutes. If a test fails, you’ll get a notification from their platform so you can reach out to your hosting company or website team to fix the issue.

If you’re looking for a more complex and powerful website monitoring, have a look at Pingdom. That service isn’t free but gives you plenty of automated checks to ensure that your site is performing at its peak capacity at all times.

3. Protect Your Site Against Hackers

With WordPress powering a third of the Internet, hackers love it as a target. Imagine how many websites they can attack that all use the same platform. Since most attacks are automated nowadays, you shouldn’t believe that your website will not be attacked just because it’s small.

That’s why Hostdedi thinks security is important and why you should add your own measures as well. You can install tools like WordFence to have your website files monitored for unwanted changes (e.g. caused by malware).

Weekly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

4. Install Pending Updates

Installing updates isn’t a task you should take lightly. Always ensure you have a backup in place. Next, install the updates on a staging website first. Read this article on creating a staging site on Hostdedi or talk to your hosting support team if you’re not with Hostdedi.

If you cannot test updates on a staging copy of your website first and still want to follow this WordPress maintenance checklist, install the pending updates one by one.

Install your updates in this order:

1. WordPress core updates
2. Theme updates
3. Plugin updates

5. Monitor Your Traffic And Rankings

Do you currently know if your traffic went up or down over the past few weeks? Chances are that you don’t. However, knowing how your traffic and rankings develop can be a game changer to your business. You can base decisions on that data:

• How your content marketing campaigns are performing
• How your visitors respond to your content (time on page, bounce rate, etc)
• How your SEO strategy is working
• Whether your site got blacklisted (organic traffic dropped)
• Whether one of your content pieces got more attention than usual.

Leverage Google Analytics to report last week’s data via email every Monday. You only need to include the most relevant numbers in that report so you can skim through it within a minute and only dive deeper if a number stands out from the rest.

6. Run Malware Scans

As I already mentioned in the checklist (see #3), protecting your website against hackers is crucially important. The plugin WordFence which I mentioned earlier can run automated malware scans, but there are more tools you might want to leverage.

Sucuri’s Sitecheck platform is one of my favorite malware scanners. It’s a free tool that analyzes your website for known WordPress malware and provides other helpful information as well.

7. Moderate Comments

Depending on whether you have comments activated on your blog, you’ll want to moderate them on a weekly basis (or more often if necessary). Delete spam comments to free up space in your database and reply to relevant comments. This is not just a great way to declutter your WordPress site, it also helps you keep an active relationship with your readers.

8. Go Through Your Site Visually

Perform a visual check of your website at least weekly. You’ll want to be sure that your site looks the way you want it to! Don’t just perform this check in your favorite browser you use all the time, but also test your site in other widely used browsers. At least include Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer / Microsoft Edge, an Android phone and an iOS phone.

If this checklist item sounds too labor intensive, move it to the monthly section of my WordPress maintenance checklist. Just ensure you do it regularly!

Monthly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

9. Clean Up Your Database From Junk Data

Having a clean WordPress database helps with making your site load faster. Junk data can be spam comments, settings from plugins that were uninstalled but not deleted, post revisions, and other data that is a bit more technical to explain.

My go-to plugin for optimizing WordPress databases is Swift Performance Pro but since that is paid, you can use WP Sweep as a free alternative. Just be sure that your database is backed up before you start the cleaning process!

10. Remove Unnecessary Users

Having outdated or unnecessary users active on your website is a serious security risk. Those users could be co-workers that switched divisions or had to be let go, logins for plugin or theme support, authors that aren’t active anymore, and so on.

You never know whether their passwords are secure, whether they share their passwords with others or whether hackers know their email addresses and can thus launch targeted attacks against your site.

Hence, I recommend you go through your list of users once per month and delete all users that aren’t absolutely needed. Especially have a look at the users with administrative capabilities and double-check if those users need to be admins.

11. Delete Unused Themes And Plugins

Similar to the unnecessary users, there’s also no reason to keep unused themes and plugins in your WordPress site. Delete those plugins and themes you don’t need any more to remove those files from your server and the settings from the database.

Remember to clean your WordPress cache after this step, so that your site loads with only those plugins necessary.

12. Check The Loading Time Of Your Website

Besides security, this WordPress maintenance checklist also focuses on making websites faster. Make sure you check your site’s loading time regularly.

I run my site through GTmetrix weekly to ensure that my changes to not negatively impact my loading time. By doing this every week, it becomes easier to identify bottlenecks that limit the performance of your website.

13. Search For Broken Links In Your Content

Broken links are links that go nowhere and result in error messages. You don’t want those to be in your content, because it makes your content look like it’s researched badly. There is a very popular plugin called Broken Link Checker, which I do NOT recommend at all. Even though it reliably points out all broken links on your site, it’s known to slow down loading times – which is a no-go in my eyes.

Instead, you can use deadlinkchecker.com to find links on your site that are broken. If you insist on using Broken Link Checker, be sure to measure your site’s loading time carefully.

14. Check The Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is a free tool that provides you with an abundance of information on how Google thinks your site is performing. It’s a good habit to look into your console once per month to check if there are any errors creeping up, such as content that can’t be found on your site, indexing errors, or other problems.

Yearly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

15. Review Your WordPress Setup

Once per year, set aside 2-3 hours to review your entire setup. You might need more time than that depending on your experience with WordPress, but you should take the time to:

With these review items, you can be sure that your site is ready for another year of high-performing online marketing instead of letting components of your site get older and older without even noticing.

16. Review Your Content Strategy

Similarly to reviewing the technical components of your website, you also should take time to review how your content strategy is performing. While your content strategy heavily depends on your marketing goals, budget, team capacity, and other factors, there are a few metrics that are worth including in almost any content strategy review:

• Use Google Analytics to get an idea of which posts and pages get the most visits.
• Check which traffic sources have the highest time on page and conversion rate and the lowest bounce rate.
• Find out which geographical areas seem to value your content most (this might be a potential for targeted ads).
• Review the performance of your opt-in forms and calls to action.
• Ensure that event tracking (e.g. clicks on important buttons) is set up and running.
• Check which content gets the most shares and comments to double down on those topics.

This WordPress maintenance checklist gives you a more than a solid overview of key factors that can turn your WordPress site into a valuable asset. At the very least, it’ll help you save time in your regular maintenance tasks and will ensure you don’t miss important steps.

Managed WordPress Can Help

Hostdedi can take care of many of these things for you automatically with Managed WordPress Hosting. From daily backups to automatic core WordPress and plugin updates, they can streamline your process.

Autoblogging was once a popular way to use WordPress. Autoblogging plugins could pull in content from other websites and republish it, creating a low-cost and low-effort site that attracted search traffic and generated advertising revenue. Read More »

Whether you’re a travel blogger, food blogger or fashion blogger showing off vacation spots, delicious meals, and outfit choices, or you’re a photographer, destination, or retail shop highlighting your brand experience, at some point you’re going need to add a gallery of photos or several photo galleries to your WordPress website.

And, because you know website performance and page load speed affects search engine rankings and how long a visitor stays on your site, you need a robust photo gallery solution that keeps your site running fast.

We put together the five best WordPress plugins for photos and videos.

The Five Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins

Here are the five best WordPress gallery plugins you should consider (in no particular order):

1. Modula Gallery

Modula Gallery is a new freemium gallery plugin that makes it easy to build stunning lightbox galleries, masonry grids, custom grids and more in no more than a few clicks right from the WordPress dashboard. It’s perfect for WordPress site owners who want to create beautiful galleries without a lot of work or technical requirements.

This plugin gives you the power to choose everything from the height and width of your responsive image gallery down to the resizing of individual images within the container. It also includes twelve cross-browser compatible hover effects that work perfectly on mobile devices along with six easy-to-use lightbox styles that seamlessly integrate with your galleries

The Modula Pro premium version adds more features, including:

• Increased number of images per gallery
• Add videos to your galleries with the premium Modula Video Extension
• Let visitors sort through your gallery by applying filters
• Additional lightbox styles and effects
• Image loading animations
• Custom CSS options

PRICE: Module Lite is free. Module Pro starts at $25 for a single site, $55 for two sites, $85 for three sites and $115 for unlimited sites.

2. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is one of the oldest image gallery plugins in the WordPress plugin repository and one of the most downloaded. This freemium plugin is harder to use than some of the other WordPress photo gallery options listed, the user interface isn’t as seamless and intuitive, and there is a learning curve, but the free version is robust and includes features only available in the premium version of other plugins.

The free version of NextGEN provides two main gallery styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.

The NextGen Gallery Extensions add more features, including:

• Additional gallery styles
• Social sharing
• Image comments
• Deep linking for lightbox galleries
• eCommerce integration for selling photos
• Image protection like preventing image downloads and adding watermarks

PRICE: NextGen Gallery is free. The premium extensions range in price from $79 to $139 based on the features you need.

3. Foo Gallery

Foo Gallery is another freemium WordPress plugin that lets you easily add responsive photo galleries to your website using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The Foo Gallery custom widget that can display galleries in any widget-ready area of your website. Additionally, the new Gutenberg block includes live previews of your galleries, while the plugin has built-in support for higher quality thumbnails on retina-enabled displays. It also includes the lazy loading of images, several different gallery templates, custom CSS options, and more.

The Foo Gallery Pro premium version adds more features, including:

• 11 Hover effect presets
• Media categories and tags and gallery filtering
• Additional gallery templates and pagination options
• Infinite scroll
• The ability to create video galleries
• Bulk copy gallery settings

PRICE: Foo Gallery is free. The premium version, Foo Gallery Pro starts at $49 for a single site.

4. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a freemium WordPress gallery plugin that makes adding a photo gallery to your site fast even if you’re a beginner. The free Lite version gives you control over the number of columns in your gallery, the lightbox, and lazy loading of images and even has some basic social sharing options. The easy to use drag-and-drop gallery builder is responsive so your grid or masonry galleries will look good on devices of all sizes.

The Envira Gallery premium versions add more features including:

• Additional gallery templates and display options
• Image protection like preventing image downloads, adding watermarks, and adding passwords to galleries.
• WooCommerce integration for selling photos
• Social media integration and the ability to import images from Instagram
• The ability to create video galleries
• Deep linking and pagination for large galleries
• Lightroom integration to sync photo galleries with Adobe Lightroom collections

PRICE: Envira Gallery Lite is free. The premium version starts at $29 for those who are just getting started, but if you want all of the gallery features, the Pro package is $99.

5. Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery is a freemium gallery plugin for WordPress that allows you to create simple photo galleries, photo albums, and galleries from embedded videos. It also includes support for videos hosted on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Instagram and widgets to display your albums. This plugin is excessive for a site owner who just wants to create beautiful photo galleries. Also, the best gallery layouts, like masonry and mosaic, are only available in the premium version.

The Photo Gallery premium version adds more features, including:

• Additional gallery styles
• eCommerce integration with Paypal and Stripe
• 15 slideshow effects
• Social sharing and Instagram integration
• Image commenting
• Mix-and-match galleries with both images and videos
• Facebook integration to display Facebook photos and videos

PRICE: Photo Gallery is free. The premium versions range from $30 for the Basic option to $100 for the Plugins Bundle.

BONUS: Jetpack

Jetpack is a free, multi-purpose WordPress plugin from Automattic that adds WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress sites.

Jetpack’s Tiled Galleries module allows you to display images in a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, and a circular grid within the native WordPress media library. It’s a great option if you don’t need the robust features of the more robust gallery options listed above or you’re already using Jetpack on your site. Also, if you use a lot of images on your website and don’t have a CDN, Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly Photon) helps pages load faster by leveraging the WordPress.com CDN.

Try Managed WordPress

Managed WordPress Hosting comes standard with Stencils for easy multi-site staging, nightly backups, and automatic updates for core WordPress and plugins.

For more than 15 years WordPress has been in existence, powering blogs, websites, and even eCommerce stores. One could argue that WordPress is a big deal in the web development space. Of all sites with a known content management system, WordPress accounts for 50-60% share of the global CMS market and powers 35% of the internet. Before we take a look at WordPress history, from whence it came to where they are today, I’d like to give a brief overview for the uninitiated.

What is WordPress?

So just what is WordPress? It is a free and open-source Content Management System or CMS. The main features are the template system and plugin architecture. Templates allow developers to build on a predefined structure as opposed to building out a site from scratch. Plugins allow for additional functionality to extend the tools that come “out of the box.”

The founders of WordPress operated on the philosophy that great software should work with minimal setup. They aimed to make the tools easy to use and intuitive so that developers and designers spend their time creating. No matter what tools you use to build sites, there are many reasons why so many web agencies use WordPress.

WordPress History: Origins

WordPress began as a fork of b2/cafelog in 2003 by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg. They were looking to create an elegant and well-architected personal publishing system. B2/cafelog was developed in early 2001 by a French programmer named Michel Valdrighi. It was a unique concept that brought about a new way of creating web pages. This new concept, which gave birth to WordPress, was the idea of creating pages dynamically from MySQL database contents. By doing this, they were able to expand the power of the blog.

Even before this, the main reason for the beginnings of WordPress was the fact that developer support for b2/cafelog became non-existent in December of 2002. While Michel Valdrighi worked throughout 2002 on the project, it was abandoned leaving users with concern over the future of the project. One of those concerned users was Matt Mullenweg.

Fast forward to January 2003 where Mullenweg uses the source code of b2/cafelog to create a new platform based on the things that he thought was cool but with added features. He wanted it to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger.

FOSS WordPress

The year 2004 saw tremendous strides for the platform and was arguably the turning point for WordPress moving from another blogging platform to the CMS we know today. The first thing they accomplished was obtaining the GNU GPL. What that means is that WordPress is now free and open source. The contributions of developers around the globe help open source projects thrive.

Plugin System

Around the same time, Ryan Boren created the plugin system. This key feature revolutionized WordPress’ capabilities. It allowed them to offer functionality outside of the core elements of WordPress, maintaining the core while users explore other things that work for them. Version 1.2, the first major update to WordPress, included support for plugins.

Branding

In 2005, we saw the branding of WordPress with the creation of their logo. Through private email communications, six developers and designers close to the project began the early workings of what would become the “W” we know now. After a process that lasted several months, May 15th was the day they finalized the logo.

Theme Directory

By 2008 WordPress launched their Theme Directory. Having a directory for themes allowed users to develop and upload themes for the public to use. Today, there are over 2,500 free themes that are available.

The Foundation

The creation of the WordPress Foundation completed in 2010. Automattic, the company that held WordPress’ trademarks, formed the foundation following the intentions of some of the founding contributors. The idea was to keep them separate from the company, and to prevent abuse and dilution should acquisition of the trademark guardian take place.

REST API Infrastructure

WordPress made considerable strides in 2015. This year saw the merger of the REST API infrastructure into the WordPress core. The integration of REST allowed for less complicated creation of custom API’s.

REST, also known as RESTful API or RESTful web service, is based on REpresentational State Transfer technology. It is an architectural style and approach to communications often used in web services development which uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data.

WordPress Today

Today, WordPress powers more than 20% of all self-hosted websites. Its architecture is mostly similar to that starting b2/cafelog foundation: PHP, a server-side scripting language for Web development, and MySQL (pronounced My-sequel or MY S-Q-L) which is an open source relational database management system. It is highly flexible and customizable. Matt Mullenweg was indeed successful in creating the very platform he talked about in his original 2003 blog post.

Other technologies used for WordPress web server environments are Apache with the mod_rewrite module, Nginx, and Varnish cache. These tools are used to help your website run lightning fast.

A recent major addition to the WordPress platform was the introduction of the Gutenberg editor, helping beginners and developers alike to easily create beautiful websites at any scale using the new Gutenberg Block. Gutenberg, coupled with a Managed WordPress host, could help streamline processes for digital agencies, developers, and freelancer with multiple clients and websites.

What Kinds of Sites Can WordPress Host?

1. WordPress for Personal: With all of the tools available through WordPress, the types of sites you can create are almost endless. Do you have a personal website used for informational purposes? There are plenty of tools WordPress offers to help enhance your site. You can even use it for an electronic resume or portfolio sites.
2. WordPress for Blogs: Whether it is a public or private blog, there are plenty of themes and plugins to make your blog site pop. WordPress centers around bloggers as a platform for them to create and deliver their content. Blogs are one of the areas that it shines but not the only one.
3. WordPress for eCommerce: eCommerce is another area that runs on WordPress. No matter the store plugin of choice, WordPress has many options for online stores to set up stunning websites. WooCommerce and WP eCommerce are among the popular platforms with tools developers need to transform a standard site into a fully functional store. We’re proud to say that our Managed WooCommerce Hosting platform has WordPress as its backbone.
4. WordPress for Business: WordPress is not just for eCommerce businesses, by the way. Companies such as the New York Post, TED, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, and TechCrunch all use WordPress for their CMS. It is easy to quickly build and launch your site and grow as your business expands.
5. WordPress for Non-Profits: Some businesses, such as non-profit organizations and religious groups, don’t exist in a profit-seeking capacity. Having access to free services wherever possible is of critical value to these groups. WordPress has many free and open source solutions that still allow businesses that don’t derive income from profit margins to create professional websites.
6. WordPress for Directories: Job boards, business directories, and forums can all be created using WordPress. Building community is everything in today’s online climate and having the right online presence can prove valuable to your project. There are several plugins devoted to this task, like the bbPress forum.
7. WordPress for Many Cultures: You can install WordPress in many languages. Multi-lingual support is a massive factor for developers that may not speak the same language as their clients or the intended site audience. Not only can your administrators have this feature, but you can also create sites in other languages as well.

An Overview of WordPress Basics

WordPress Themes

A WordPress theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website. Changes to your design will alter how your site looks and what visitors see on the front-end. There are thousands of free WordPress themes available in the WordPress.org Theme Directory and many developers sell premium WordPress themes with additional functionality and support. Many WordPress sites also use custom themes for their website designs.

Themes are what allow you to store your content in WordPress and then take the content and data and display it in the web browser. They let you decide the look of your site and how visitors interact with it. Even within the themes are customizable ways to display your content. Choose from static or responsive layouts and use columns where necessary.

Beyond these basic forms, you can also choose where you want content to be displayed. Use tools to specify how your site looks on different devices or what actions make your content visible. Images and videos are additional elements that can be included anywhere in your theme.

WordPress themes are amazingly efficient. There is more to them than meets the eye than color and layout. Having the right themes enhance engagement with your website’s content.

Out of the box, WordPress comes with a pair of default themes. If they are not up to your standards or do not fit the direction of your site, you can use the theme directory to create an elegant website. You can choose from single page layouts to multiple pages with menus.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of WordPress theming is the freedom to code or not to code. Change the typography and design elements by dragging and dropping or by entering your CSS code. What happens when all of these options still don’t meet your needs? You can create your custom theme, of course. With the click of a button, you can upload your custom coded, entirely original website theme.

WordPress Plugins

As you might understand by now, WordPress is full of features for every creator and developer. Still, there can be an instance where some features you may want don’t come included. Not to worry, there’s a plugin directory as well with thousands of plugins.

Plugins are code packages used to stretch the core functionality of WordPress. They are made up of PHP code as well as images, CSS, and JavaScript. Most WordPress plugins exist as many files, but they only need one main file with a specially formatted DocBlock in the header.

As with anything else in WordPress, you can use the plugins of other developers or write your own. By making your plugin, you further extend WordPress and its limitless functionality.

Hostdedi’ Managed WordPress

With all of the tools and tricks to WordPress, there’s no wonder that many creatives and agencies look to a hosting provider to manage their environment. Hostdedi is ready and equipped with a Manage Applications team to take care of the heavy lifting.

With Managed WordPress Hosting, you can focus on your sites and content while we concentrate on the environment.

Hostdedi Managed WordPress hosting features include:

• Easy to use dashboard that focuses purely on the management of WordPress sites
• Automatic Plugin updates using our Visual comparison tool
• Ability to add additional users
• Painless, plugin-based migrations make it simple to move websites
• Create multiple website templates at once using Stencils to save time
• Automatic core updates to WordPress ensures greater security and peace of mind
• Automated backups make it simple to restore from earlier points as needed or to download a backup any time they need to
• We don’t limit the number of installed plugins, allowing for even greater flexibility
• SFTP and SSH access for simple file management
• 1-click staging provides an easy way to try new themes or plugins without any risk to a live site if something needs tweaking
• Hostdedi manages the entire WordPress optimized backend, leaving our customers free to design and develop, rather than focus on administration
• Free, automatically installed SSLs on each site
• We make getting started easy, with helpful information on common tasks available right in the dashboard
• Easy database management utilizing phpMyAdmin
• iThemes Sync Pro is a dashboard that helps those managing multiple client sites save time by providing them with the tools and resources they need. Get back to developing and building websites for clients:
  • White-labeled client reports for WordPress maintenance
  • Control over what clients see in their WordPress dashboard (wp-admin)
  • Site uptime, downtime, and performance monitoring
  • Tracking and viewing Google Analytics data
  • Mass install or update of commonly used plugins

WordPress Is Changing History

WordPress has changed much over the past 15 years. From the original self-publishing system adopted by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg from b2/cafelog in 2003, all the way to the number one Content Management System powering 14.7% of the top 100 websites in the world, WordPress continues to grow and thrive. And with the introduction of the new editor in WordPress 5.0, also known as WordPress Gutenberg, WordPress continues to evolve.

Need a WordPress Host?

Managed WordPress hosting from Hostdedi makes it easy to manage multiple customer websites. Stop worrying about plugin updates, backing up websites, or compressing images so you can focus on developing beautiful websites for your customers.

Pages and posts are what make WordPress such a versatile platform for content curation. Each offer unique advantages for both on-page and off-page elements, including design, functionality, aggregation, and SEO.

If you’re worried whether you’re using posts and pages correctly, keep reading. This article aims to look at the differences and provide a clear rationale for what content should go where.
Read More »

This article looks at Headless Drupal, providing an overview of what it is, and what some of the pros and cons are to implementing it.

Traditional Drupal website have often been monolithic. This has meant that Drupal is responsible for both content management on the back-end and content rendering on the front-end.

Headless architecture changes this by implementing a decoupled approach to site design. For many, the new approach is seen as innovative and the future of web development. For others, headless architecture brings a worrying lack of clarity to development processes and business practices.

Read More »

Slow sites crush eCommerce. Your customers will rebound quickly and forget about your lumbering load times when they flee to your competition. The same can’t be said for your site. Even if you dropped time and money on a sleek interface, marketing, and captivating copy,  even a 2-second load time will send your customers for the hills and drive down your page ranking. Read More »