How do I prevent malfunctions on my website
Your website is important, many people earn their living with it.For this reason you should always prevent as much downtime as possible.
If you have regular downtime you will eventually lose customers.Of course you always want to prevent this if possible.In this blog post we will discuss what you can do to prevent downtime as much as possible.
Always online
Many people expect that their website is always available but this is not always realistic.Reaching an uptime of 100% is not possible and annually you will always experience some downtime.
Often downtime is out of your control but in some cases it is.Think of planned maintenance, this will always happen but you need to inform your clients about this.
Besides that, you can also schedule the maintenance in such a way that people have as little inconvenience as possible.For example, you can schedule it for the evening hours.
Some people prefer not to do any maintenance on their website because they are afraid it will inconvenience people too much.However, it is important that you do, we will discuss why below.
Why maintenance is important
Maintenance of your website is important because you can prevent even more downtime in the future.Especially with a CMS like WordPress, it is very important that you maintain it properly.
You can prevent more downtime in the future.It often happens with websites that are poorly maintained that they just fall offline or that they are even abused.
You want to prevent this at all times and therefore it is important that you regularly check your website for updates.At WordPress we have special hosting packages for this called Managed WordPress hosting.
Everything in this package is updated automatically so you don't have to worry about it anymore.
Plan B
Make sure you always have a plan B ready for when things go wrong.Think about having backups of both your files and your database.
If there has been abuse or other problems that you had not anticipated it is always useful to have a backup.You can restore it at any time so that your website is available again as before.
You should not only have a backup on your hosting but also on a local computer.Besides that, a database backup is perhaps a lot more important.
Often your database contains more important data than the files themselves.This is where the customer and account data is stored, so it is important that you make a local backup about once a week.
Recognize error messages
It is also important that you recognize error messages on your website and that you know what they mean.Error messages on your website can also cause unexpected downtime.
Think for example of a 500 error, if you have this problem your website will go down completely.Fortunately you do not need to panic because it is also an error that is easy to solve.
Very often the reason for this is that you are using an outdated or unsupported PHP version.If you just updated from PHP version 5.6 to 7.0+ and you get this message then your WordPress is not up to date.
You can then further reset this to PHP 5.6 and then update everything via the admin page.You can also do this via FTP, it is then just a matter of overwriting the current WordPress installation.
Under construction pages
Even if you experience downtime it is useful to put an under construction page on your website if possible.This way your visitors will still know what is going on when your website is offline.
In WordPress this is easy to do by using a plug-in called Under Construction.With this plug-in you can easily inform customers that maintenance is currently underway on your website.
If you have any questions you can always check to see if there is a chat employee present.If no one is available you can create a ticket using our ticket system.Contact via Facebook or Twitter is also possible.
