Transcription
When we talk about website maintenance, we often find law firms refer to this as content updates. While keeping content updated and producing fresh articles is important, what is equally as important is to regularly maintain your website internally.
Not enough attention is given to regular internal maintenance for law firm websites, the parts that might not be immediately obvious. This maintenance is often more technical and just as important as making the website look good as it can impact your reputation, and your website search engine results, which in turn impacts your website traffic and leads.
In addition, you are at risk of a cyber-security attack which is not ideal for you or your clients when they are searching for you online.
Following are some common website maintenance tasks for WordPress websites, the most popular platform for law firm websites.
1. Update WordPress Software
Updating to the latest version of WordPress avoids the vulnerabilities presented in previous versions. This includes performance issues, finding and fixing bugs, adding any new advanced features and providing improved security.
As soon as you become aware of a stable software update, try to update this as quickly as possible.
2. Update Plugins and Themes
Updating plugins and themes can present benefits such as increased security and rectifying bugs, personalising the design and improving your speed. However, caution should be taken in adding unnecessary plugins, which can result in clutter or cause your site to conflict with your core website functionality and security.
As part of regularly maintaining your website, it is important to review all plugins and themes to see if they are necessary or are harming your website performance. Outdated plugins also offer a window of opportunity for hackers to access your website.
3. Optimise Performance
The performance of your website delivers many benefits including high return visitors, low bounce rates for new visitors, higher conversions and better engagement. Load speed is a major player in optimising your website performance.
Did you know that a 1 second delay means page views decrease by 11%? That means over 1/10 visitors will just turn away for every second your site is still loading! One way to enhance the speed of your law firm website is to optimise your database – the place where all your content, images, videos and audios are stored.
An easy way to optimise your database is to ensure irrelevant code, records and spam comments are removed on a regular basis, images are compressed and trash folders are emptied.
4. Regular Backups
Regularly backing up your website offers you peace of mind knowing that your site can be fully restored after any problems or cyber-attacks. You can backup your site through your hosting provider, plugins or download a local copy of your website via FTP.
Summary
Regular maintenance on your website could be performed by someone in your law firm, however, sometimes you might need to engage experts, as ensuring the tasks are completed properly plays an important role in the uptime of your website.
Closing
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