The beauty of Wordpress is that it is self-maintained, well most of it. WordPress users running small blogs and affiliate websites just have to keep the site database optimised, install updates, and keep the site secure and backed up so that their data remains safe.

However, when it comes to high traffic websites, portals and eCommerce stores based on WordPress having thousands of pages, the story is completely different. Often maintenance charges for maintaining such types of websites can run in the thousands. So, the best way to go about it is to hire professional website maintenance experts and let them take care of the whole site maintenance.

Now, what if small business owners don’t have the budget or the resources to hire WordPress professional experts for maintaining their WordPress websites? Can they maintain their websites themselves? 

The purpose of this article is to help WordPress users reduce their website maintenance costs through various tips. Let’s discuss them in detail below.

Ways to Reduce Your WordPress Website Maintenance Cost

Here is a list of ways to maintain your premium WordPress website and eCommerce stores with minimum cost.

• Update Site On Time

Most WordPress CMS framework problems occur because the site is not updated on time. So, the first thing you can do to keep your website in the best shape is to update it on time. WordPress releases updates all year long. The core updates are released at least three to four times a year and the rest are automatic updates related to security. These are updated automatically and you just have to approve core updates.

• Test Updates on Staging

Make sure that you approve core updates by running your website on a staging area. If you are using a cloud hosting server, you can create your own staging site for testing your website after updating it. Otherwise, you can ask your website hosting team to test updates on a staging area before updating them on the main site.

• Only Update When Stable Version is Available

The best way to ensure that nothing on your website breaks when you update the site version is to wait for the stable version to update it. When WordPress releases a stable version, it will show up as a notification on your current CMS.

If it doesn’t show up, you can click the Updates button in the WordPress dashboard to check it.

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• Keep Your Site Secure

Security is the main concern for any website administrator. Although WordPress offers many security features out of the box, you still need to make it more secure with plugins. 

• Add Security Plugins that Keep Site Secure

So, make sure that you add security plugins on your websites such as Sucuri and WordFence to remove and limit malware. These plugins will also run routine scans on your website to make sure nothing intrusive enters.

• Whitelist IP Addresses

Only allow access to a limited number of IPs to the WordPress admin panel and the site’s database. You can whitelist IP addresses using SSH for this purpose.

• Create WordPress Website Security Checklist

Keep a checklist of WordPress security measures that need to be taken every time a new user role is created/ a website backup is created/ or a new plugin is added to the WordPress website. This will ensure that your website security is always ironclad.

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• Clean and Optimise Databases

The majority of WordPress websites become slow because of the clutter they get. This clutter consists of WordPress website data such as comments, old deleted posts, post revisions, pings and callbacks, old removed plugins, previous themes, and previous versions of WordPress core. They can increase unnecessary server requests and decrease site load time. 

To ensure that they don’t hinder your site performance, make sure to optimize the WordPress database.

• Clear Junk Data with a Plugin

The easiest way to clean junk data from your WordPress database is with a plugin. A few plugins that you can use to clean and optimize WordPress databases are WP-Optimize, WP DBManager, and Advanced Database Cleaner.

 All of these plugins are perfect for WordPress database optimizations. Just make sure to read their reviews and check their ratings before using them on your WordPress website. Some of these plugins may not work with your current WordPress version.

• Use Commands to Clean WordPress Database

Another way to clean and optimize WordPress databases is by running a few SQL commands. If you have access to your WordPress website, then run the following commands. 

Go to PhpMyAdmin and run the commands:

OPTIMIZE TABLE 'wp_posts'

This command automatically optimizes WordPress posts and declutters them for better performance.

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'META-KEY-NAME';

This command deletes metadata of old posts and pages on a WordPress website. Old post data can send requests to the server. They also hinder website load speed. You don’t want garbage obstructing your site performance so use the above command to optimize your WordPress database.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 2 );

Limit Post revisions of your WordPress website to ‘2’ only with the following command.

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam';

If you have too many spam comments in your spam folder, they put unnecessary storage weight on the website and take space that could have been utilized elsewhere. Use the above command to delete spam comments.

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There are many more WordPress commands that you can use to optimize site performance and reduce request load on the server. But for the purpose of maintaining your WordPress website, starting with these commands is enough. 

Bonus: Hire Professionals to Maintain Your Website

After trying all the above steps, if you are still unsure how to maintain a website yourself, or you have too much on your plate to do this work, you can hire professional services.

Professional WordPress website experts often work on a subscription model for site maintenance. This means you will be paying them monthly for their services of maintaining your site data, keeping it optimized for performance, backing up site content on a regular basis, and constantly monitoring websites for any other anomalies. 

However, on the bright side, you will have the liberty to work on a lot more revenue-generating projects when you hire professionals to look after your site maintenance. So that is the tradeoff. 

Will you be willing to make it?

Bottom-line

These are the top three ways to reduce the cost of WordPress website maintenance. 

If you are willing to hire professionals for your WordPress website maintenance, then look no further. Our website developers can easily handle the task of site maintenance for an extremely affordable cost. 

No matter how big your website/eCommerce store/web portal is, our WordPress maintenance experts can do the job with ease. 

>>> Learn how our site experts handle your WordPress maintenance. Schedule a Call Today.

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