Is owning a website seem a big responsibility to you?
When it is about maintaining a website, you may face several challenges that need to be handled promptly and with the appropriate action.
For instance, you may receive code injection emails from a host’s account, which can introduce and execute malicious code into your website. Also, there could be other cyber attacks such as phishing, malware, denial-of-service, DNS Tunneling, etc. that can cause severe damage to your website and thereby business. Moreover, a plugin with security vulnerabilities can invite several cyber threats to your site. Continuous spam mails sent through contact form may also disturb your website security. To prevent such security threats, you need to carry out periodic scans and keep monitoring your site regularly.
Your website loading speed may slow down due to several reasons such as excessive use of images, plugins and other large files, website updates, and so on. And a slow speed can greatly affect the search engine ranking, SEO, bonus rate and customer retention on your website. To increase and maintain your website speed, you need to perform several page speed optimization techniques.
Search Engine Optimization is of utmost importance for your website to get the highest ranking and strengthen its visibility. Several issues may affect your website SEO such as having pages with duplicate titles, duplicate content, missing image alt tags, broken internal links, etc. You should be able to detect and overcome such issues to improve your site’s SEO and performance.
Other challenges with managing a website can be related to the improper website backup that can lose some of the vital website data. Also, website updates if not installed properly, can cause changes to your website functionality.
With such an abundance of challenges and duties to handle, anyone will get terrified with the thought of owning a website. However, you need not worry if your site is built with WordPress. As WordPress doesn’t let you do all the tasks on your own.
Having a WordPress website serves you the most significant advantage, i.e. automating most of your routine tasks related to the site. With WordPress automation, you can breathe a sigh of relief and concentrate on your core business functions. Your routine, essential tasks will be performed automatically without having you to monitor them continuously.
But, how exactly automation is done in WordPress?
There are several tactics you can perform to leverage WordPress automation to the fullest.
In this blog, we have pitched several proven ways to automate WordPress tasks that can ease your life to a great extent. Before that, let us help you get more clarity about what is automation in WordPress.
Automation in context with WordPress simply means having features, plugins, software or tools to perform the regular tasks automatically without your continuous attention or assistance. Most of the crucial tasks of your WordPress site are handled automatically, e.g. update, backups, etc. The time and effort you save on these aspects can be utilized to improve other business operations. There is a plethora of WordPress automation plugins, themes and tools that help you autopilot things and run your website smoothly. However, you must know how to use these constituents to take full advantage of automation for your WordPress site.
Security is a major area of concern, as any security breach can cause serious damage to the website. For instance, a backdoor can give a high level of access to unauthorised users by which they can steal financial and personal data, install malware or completely hack your website. Thus, it is indispensable to keep monitoring your site for hackers, malware, cyber-thieves and other security risks 24/7. Though it is not possible manually, you can take help of automation to ensure robust and perpetual security of your WordPress website.
Several WordPress security plugins and software can take responsibility for the different security aspects of your website:
WP Check is an excellent tool you can use for automating security tasks for your website. The plugin can perform an automatic scan and sweep your site for any harmful files or malware.
Shield Security is one of the top-rated WordPress security plugins that can perform all heavy lifting for you to keep your site secure. The plugin automatically detects security risks and takes necessary action, without disturbing you with continuous notifications. You will be notified only in extreme conditions or when a severe action needs to be taken. From limiting login attempts, blocking Brute-Force Bots, scanning to two-factor authentication, Shield Security comes with all necessary features for automating WordPress security.
Defender is another option you can consider for WordPress security plugins. It can seamlessly monitor your website and automatically carry out several security tasks. The plugin offers plenty of features including Two-factor authentication, IP blocking, firewall, Geolocation IP lockout, etc. to strengthen your website security. Also, it gets you a list of one-click hardening techniques to add layers of protection to your website instantly.
By integrating any of the best security plugins your website will be automatically monitored, and protected from cyber threats.
Search engine optimization is an incessant and important process including a lot of activities. You need to optimize the keywords, redirect old URLs to new ones, monitor your website traffic, and perform so many SEO exercises to get the highest rank for your website. Most of these activities require your close attention and manual work. However, there are certain SEO aspects that you can consider automating for your WordPress site or blog. This not only reduces a bit of your burden but also helps you achieve specific SEO goals. Following are some WordPress automation tools and plugins that help in automating and improving WordPress SEO:
Rank Math is one of the best plugins for automating SEO activities for your WordPress website. The best part is, it automatically configures itself for your website. The built-in SEO analysis feature gives you insightful recommendations to improve your SEO. Moreover, you can optimize unlimited keywords for your post.
It is a consummate plugin for improving the SEO of your WordPress site by automating several tasks. As its name suggests, the plugin performs SEO tasks smartly. It helps in different ways such as boosting page rank on Google, improving the XML sitemaps, keywords optimization, meta tags, etc. Moreover, SmartCrawl also informs Google when it’s time to recrawl your website.
Together with an SEO plugin and tools like Google Analytics, you can efficiently manage your SEO tasks. After setting your website and keywords in Google Analytics tool you can receive updates on your SEO campaigns.
A regular backup of the entire website is a must from the security and maintenance perspective. Having a complete backup saves you in catastrophic situations such as when the site gets hacked or unnecessary changes are made to unintended parts of the website. As it is a time-consuming process, automating WordPress backup can be very lucrative. You can schedule an automatic backup for your site with the help of some reliable plugins, such as:
Updraftplus is one of the most prefered WordPress automation plugins for backup. The plugin lets you schedule and have a complete backup of your website and download it to your computer or store it on the cloud. Also, it automatically uploads your backup to Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, Rackspace, and other cloud storage.
BackupBuddy is another best plugin for automatic WordPress backup. It lets you schedule backup daily, weekly, and monthly backups for your WordPress website. The plugin automatically stores the backup in cloud storage like Amazon, Dropbox, Stash, FTP, etc.
Another way you can ensure automated backup for your website is by choosing WordPress managed hosting solutions like WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, Pressidium, and so on. A managed hosting service comes with an automatic backup solution that ensures a proper backup of the entire site without losing any of your data.
Social media platforms have a crucial role in promoting any brand, improving organic traffic and getting more customers. Having proper social media management in place makes it easy to achieve your goals. WordPress automation can be an excellent solution for many of your social media management tasks. For instance, you can automatically send updates to your followers whenever you post a new blog. There are several plugins that you can automate social media sharing, such as:
Revive Old Posts is an excellent plugin for automating sharing of posts and content from WordPress website to the social media networks. If you own an eCommerce site or a large blog, then this plugin would be convenient to you.
WP Social Sharing is a simple and light-weight social media sharing plugin. It supports most of the social media platforms, including Linkedin, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on.
By installing social media plugin, you can take a break from social media while your readers or followers still receive your posts regularly.
To make strategic decisions about your website maintenance, digital marketing campaign or optimization tasks, you must analyze and collect the important, relevant data. For your WordPress website, you can automate the data collection and analysis task using Google Analytics plugins like MonsterInsights.
Google Analytics is the most popular tool letting you check the performance of your marketing campaigns, products, content, etc. MonsterInsights helps you to easily connect your WordPress website with Google Analytics, automatically track traffic on your website and thereby make data-driven decisions.
If your site comprises a plethora of images which are glossy and large-sized, then image optimization is a must strategy for you. By optimizing images and other media files, you can attain a good website speed and serve a better experience to site visitors. Manual optimization of all image files can take a lot of your time, thus automating this task would be beneficial for you. WordPress can automatically perform image optimization and thereby boost the loading speed. You can automate image optimization using any of the popular WordPress plugins such as,
EWWW Image Optimizer can help you achieve pixel-perfect optimization of images and improved page speed. The plugin incorporates plenty of amazing features like intelligent conversion options, smooth handling, free image backups, etc.
Smush is an award-winning WordPress plugin helping you to optimize images easily. It lets you asynchronously auto-smush your files for fast optimization on upload. The plugin offers several useful features like lazy load, directory smush, bulk optimization, etc.
Automating image optimization can be one of the most advantageous page speed optimization strategies for your website.
Creating and publishing engaging content is utmost to keep your site/blog fresh and grow your audience. However, due to high-traffic periods or full workload, you may not maintain this consistency in the blog posting. WordPress offers you the flexibility to schedule your blog posts and publish them automatically at regular intervals. You can automate the blog posting in WordPress in different ways, such as:
If you have bulk blog posts to post on your website monthly, then automation would be your best bet.
Invoicing and payment collection are significant business operations especially when you own an eCommerce store. Having an eCommerce website built with WordPress brings you the advantage of automatic payment collection. You can automate the payment process on your
WordPress website using a payment gateway tool. A reliable payment gateway integrated with your website can seamlessly handle the payment process PayPal Payments Pro, Stripe, Braintree, and Square are some of the top payment gateways you can choose for your WordPress eCommerce site.
As long as you have a reliable payment gateway or plugin in place, you don’t need to deal with conventional payment collection activities. You can relax while your website is collecting payments for you.
Email marketing is one of the effective strategies to get more traffic to your website and generate leads. A successful email marketing campaign needs you to consistently send deals, newsletters, alerts, reminders and other essentials stuff to each email address. Of course, doing it manually is not feasible. Automating email marketing tasks can make your life easy.
There is an abundance of plugins that can perform most of the email marketing tasks on behalf of you.
Mailster is a versatile plugin offering you plenty of useful features to automate and boost your email marketing.
SendPress Newsletters is the best email marketing plugin you can opt for. With this, you can easily schedule the sending of newsletters and track them.
An appropriate email marketing plugin will reduce some of your marketing burden by automatically sending newsletters and messages to the subscribers when any new content publishes.
A regular database clean-up and optimization is an essential part of your website maintenance. An overloaded database may slow down your website performance, while an optimized database can better respond to queries. Similar to other tasks, database clean-up can also be automated with the help of plugins like,
WP-DBManager lets you automate the optimization, backup, and repairing of website database. It is a complete plugin for effectively managing your database-related tasks, including restoring, repairing, running selected queries, and so on.
WP-Optimize is another best plugin to simplify your database management. It performs automatic weekly clean-up and optimization of unnecessary data without requiring to run manual queries.
This was all about how to automate WordPress task and reap the maximum benefits through automation. Apart from benefits, you may experience some pitfalls with automation, if not executed properly. Below tips would help you avoid some mistakes and carry out automation like a pro.
As you have noticed, automation in WordPress mainly requires the use of plugins, themes and tools. Integration of automation plugins or tools may add weight to your website, which may affect its performance. Therefore, try not overuse plugins, especially the futile ones.
Third-party plugins or tools may modify your website database and code, without your awareness. Also, flawed plugins are likely to corrupt your website or database and therefore affect your essential business functions. Thus, ensure to find appropriate, updated and reliable plugins/tools for automating your WordPress tasks, so that you can save your website from major risks and loss.
As stated before, wrong or outdated WordPress automation plugins can modify or corrupt your website. Having a backup plan in place saves you from such situations. Hence, ensure to create a complete backup of your site and store it in a secure location, before performing WordPress automation.
Today, the majority of business operations depend on a website. Automating those operations can help boost productivity and stimulate business growth. If you want to give maximum attention and time to your core business functions, then it is high time to opt for automation of your WordPress website tasks. If anything is bothering you with your decision, we are here to assist you in the right way.
Share
