This past Saturday I was chatting with a friend of mine and she could’t figure out how she got these random pictures on her website.  Not only that, but she couldn’t figure out how to get it off as well.  A few months back she converted from the free wordpress site (wordpress.org) over to the self hosted wordpress. Now she had total control over her site’s look and feel and she also didn’t have to fear her site being shutdown because of any activities that didn’t line up with wordpress.org (Note: If you are using wordpress.org to run your business be very careful.  They can shut you down without warning). Now that she had her site up and running she was free to run it as she pleased.

Well I decided to log into her site to see what was going on and also seek help from her web hosting company.  What we found out was a bit shocking to me.  Her site was not hacked (thank goodness). But she was running on an old version of wordpress and probably had about 14 items that needed to be updated (where is the love). As a fellow virtual service provider I know first hand how something like this could have happened.  We work so hard on our clients work that we forget to implement the basics for our own site.  We forget to give the time, love and attention to our own business that we freely (well there is a fee) give to our clients.  I could only suspect that this had happened here and that’s why she wasn’t in her site to notice that she needed to update her site.  So we took the time to go ahead and update her site.

Update your site regularly

Updated your site is actually quite simple.  Because of our lacking of knowledge, understanding, or web fear we stay away from terminology like that. However, if you want to keep your site up to date and prevent hackers you MUST update your site on a regular basis, and wordpress makes it really easy for you to do so.  They send out a notifciation (through your worpdress dashboard) letting you know when something needs to be updated.  You’ll see this notification at the very top of your dashboard (once logged in) in yellow. Or you’ll see a number next to the word update in your dashboard menu.  Either way, you don’t have to be on the look out for updates, you re actually notified as soon as they are available.

WordPress Update Guide:

1. Back up your wordpress database and files
2. Log into your wordpress dashboard
3. Look for update notification in the dashboard menu
4. Click updates
5. Check the updates that you want to update (note: update wordpress first if needed, then plugins, then themes)
6. You are all done.

Save yourself some headaches and backup your site.

Have you ever had an incident where you simply just lost everything you were working on.  I”m not necessarily talking about your WordPress site, but this could be a document (10 page paper) you are working on, or anything.  Instead of hitting save every few minutes you just kept in the flow of working and then the power went out, or you kid tripped over the cord and bam everything you have been working on is gone.  Well the same can happen for your site, and that’s why it is very important to regular back-up your site.  To do this you can install a plugin called WordPress Database Backup. It will back up your site on a regular basis and send you an email of your database.

You also need to backup your wordpress files.  To do so you can copy all the files from your ftp manager (filezilla is a free ftp manager) or there are plugins to help you with this.  Unfortunately I cannot give you a recommendation on which plugin to use because I haven’t used a plugin for this.  I simply do it manually.  But I will definitely add this to my list of plugins to test because backing up your site is very very important.

Please comment below!

Felicia Pratt is an author, WordPress Enthusiast and a Social Media Fanatic that supports women entrepreneurs who run their business online. She helps them streamline, automate, and build their online presence so they can increase their visibility and provide consistency in their branding and marketing efforts. Through various entrepreneurial endeavors including Real Estate, and the travel industry, Felicia has finally found her niche empowering women by helping them manage their time effectively and creating a work-life balance that works for them.