Automate the work on your website
There are a number of almost daily tasks for a website, for example, answering and organizing the emails you receive to your own email address. Managing the messages left on your website. Updating plug-ins and installing more updates. And backing up your work. That can be a lot for people who don't look at their website every day. And in some cases, they can be easily automated. It's just important to keep your finger on the pulse when automating your work and take some precautions. In this article, let's look at how and what you can automate.
Of course, everyone would love to be done when their website is live, but that's not the case. A website, like anything else in life, requires attention and time. You can reduce that effort by automating a number of standard and recurring tasks.
Update plug-ins and updates automatically
Plug-ins and updates will always remain part of your website, whether you built the site yourself in a code language or framework, or in a content management system like WordPress. There is always a security update, or you can make a website faster by applying the latest technology. Plug-ins are easy to implement in a content management system like WordPress; in most cases, it's just a click of a button. Since some WordPress versions, you can now have automatic updates for plug-ins and themes. If you want to learn more about this, you can always read a previous blog post where we cover this topic in more detail.
With automatic updates, it's very important that you also run an automatic backup task, because if something goes wrong, you can always restore the entire backup. Or you can reset only this particular plug-in. There are several ways to do this. If you would like to see a how-to video, please send an email to helpdesk@mijnpartnergroep.nl and we will put it on the list to be created.
To update it automatically, you just need to select it in the options. You can enable this in the individual settings as shown below.
More filtering of comments and messages
Another daily task for some websites is to filter out SPAM comments and other messages that come in regularly. This is one of the main reasons why many webmasters have decided to disable comments or messages on a website altogether. It's a way to ensure that your interaction is only through platforms like social media. It may be easier to keep track of them there. Still, many webmasters leave them on because they provide interaction on your website and therefore can be considered fresh content in the eyes of search engines. If you still have messages enabled on your site, it's a good idea to filter out as much SPAM as possible. You can do this by creating a list in your CMS with an appropriate action. Or install an appropriate plug-in.
This will ensure that you can handle a large number of responses in bulk and stop being flooded with corresponding emails. Also nice for the next part in this article!
Create email filters and set up automatic replies
Email filters make your life easier, especially if you have a bare website email address, you receive a lot of SPAM and requests for guest blogs, web design help, SEO or higher rankings in Google and so on. With MijnHostingPartner.nl SPAM filters, we always try to keep track and flag and control as much as possible for you. However, this battle can never be won. So always stay on your guard against emails and make sure you have the latest email security in your DNS. Watch the video below again:
To create more filters, for example to flag website design requests, you can always do this with your local mail program like Outlook. However, you can also set this up via our webmail. You can find out more about this in our knowledge base.
Automatic replies can be turned on with an email address, for example with an info@ address it is often appropriate to send a greeting/notification about the lead time of a reply. Or for example, if you are on vacation, to notify you of this. This can save you a lot of work.
Automatically create a backup
An automatic backup is absolutely essential for running a website, as a webmaster you are responsible for it and you have to take some measures. With MijnHostingPartner.nl hosting, standard scheduled tasks can be created to automatically backup both your website files and your database. These backups are written to your own hosting space and can be downloaded to a local PC using FileZilla, for example. After that, I recommend that you also save them to a third location, for example a service like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and other alternatives. If one of these storage methods fails for some reason. You can always fall back to a backup in another location.
We hope these tips will help you automate your website. Of course, even with automation, there is still some work to be done. For example, consider Managed WordPress Hosting if you prefer to outsource the technical issues to us.
