Creating customer confidence with your WordPress website.

Customers have some funny ways don’t they? Some look for reasons to deal with you, and others look for reasons not to. A website is often one of the first things that potential customers look for when making decisions whether or not to use your service or buy your products. It will either confirm how they feel about your business or create nagging doubts. This article gives some tips as to how you can maximise the potential of getting that sale by making sure you don’t make some common mistakes.

We have all done it. Rushed out a blog post, or finished a piece of copy close to deadline and not fully checked it before publishing. These mistakes are easily made but have a disproportionate effect on how people view your work. Thankfully, modern tools can make this easy to correct. I use Zoho Writer and it not only spots spelling and grammar errors but also has AI tools that scan for readability, sentence structure and phraseology. 

Before making any changes or updates to your website, it is often a good idea to test to make your edits will not cause problems or conflicts which may take your website down. A staging site is a carbon copy of your website that runs on a different url where you can implement your changes to see the effect. Once you are happy you can push the changes seamlessly out to your live site.

WordPress and plugin developers regularly release security updates and feature improvements. It is important to keep these updated regularly to ensure there are no vulnerabilities. Using a staging site to test these out before pushing to a live site is recommended best practice.

Accidents do happen so the ability to roll back to a previously working version of your website is essential. Regularly backup of your site will minimise any potential data loss and this can be achieved by either an automated process run by your website host or by use of a WordPress plugin.

Malware & antivirus scans will periodically check your hosting files for known virus or malware. You will receive regular reports providing you with the all clear or identifying problems for resolution. 

Preventing unauthorised access to your website by enforcing strong password policies can significantly reduce the chances of accounts being hacked. Strong passwords consist of a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special symbols, such as punctuation. They should be at least 12 characters long using this format would take a conventional computer 34,000 years to crack this password by brute force.

A CDN offers three main benefits, increased performance, increased reliability, and resilience against cyber attacks. A CDN is designed to manage large amounts of web traffic and so is able to manage the load by redistributing or filtering traffic to ensure your origin server is unaffected. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks attempt to overload a web server with traffic and this can result in your website being inaccessible.