A skilled web developer plays a vital role in maintaining and cleaning a website, ensuring it is protected, up to date, and performing at its best. With the increasing rate of security threats to WordPress websites, it’s not an option to hire a web developer to clean & secure your WordPress website. This investment is really worth it.
If this is the first time that you are hiring a developer to clean your website, here are some of the activities that you must know and expect your developer to do:
#1 Regular maintenance
When you hire a web developer, they follow a maintenance schedule to keep WordPress, plugins, themes, PHP versions, and server configurations up to date, ensuring your site remains secure and error-free. To keep your website clean and safe, it’s crucial to hire a web developer to maintain it regularly.
- Keeping plugins, the theme, WordPress core, and the PHP version on your site up to date ensures your website is clean and safe to use.
- Website maintenance also includes minifying, combining, and cleaning CSS/JS, which reduces load times and improves your site’s overall speed and responsiveness.
- Some of the code or architecture of your website may become deprecated, causing it to crash or go down. Regular maintenance ensures that all functions comply with the latest WordPress standards, preventing errors and plugin conflicts.
#2 Malware detection & cleanup
Malicious files or code can spread quickly when a website becomes infected. In other words, if this malware is not removed immediately, it can further damage your website. Here comes the role of a website security specialist. A web developer can scan the site, identify harmful scripts, and safely remove the malware from the files without breaking its functionality.
How do web developers remove malware from a WordPress website?
- Identify: The first step every WordPress security specialist takes is to scan the website for malware.
- Malware Removal: Once the malware is identified, the next step is to remove it from the affected files. If the malware is spread across the WordPress core files, your developer may reinstall a fresh WordPress setup.
- Clean: After the malware removal process is complete, the next step is to clean the code and ensure there is no redundant code or deprecated scripts. This is to protect your website from future attacks.
- Update: Once the malware is removed and the code is cleaned, your developer will update the required plugins, theme, and related components to ensure that they all run on their updated versions.
#3 Hardening the website
Just removing the viruses from the website is not sufficient to keep it clean. Another critical step is to harden the security of a WordPress site. Below are some of the steps a website professional takes to ensure a website’s security.
- Resetting the passwords for FTP, the database, the admin panel, and the web hosting server.
- Changing or renaming the default WordPress admin URL.
- Restricting permissions on crucial site files.
- Installation of a security WordPress plugin such as All in One WP Security or Wordfence.
#4 Code optimization
Another way a website expert can keep a WordPress website clean is to regularly optimize the code. When you hire a developer for your website maintenance, they will scan and optimize your site’s code for optimal performance. Why is it so crucial to optimize and clean the code of a website?
- Clean, optimized code for a website reduces unnecessary scripts, removes bloat, and improves loading speed.
- Clean websites are also likely to rank higher on Google because search engines prefer fast, clean, and well-structured sites.
- Cluttered code increases the likelihood of plugin or theme conflicts, which may cause errors and warnings for users.
- A clean coding structure helps new developers understand the code more easily and make changes more quickly.