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Have You Checked Your Website’s Oil Lately?

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>Oil changes. Tune-ups. Tire rotations. New wiper blades.

Maintaining your car can be inconvenient, but you do it anyway, right? And the reason is simple: even though it’s a pain in the a$$, you know that regular maintenance keeps your car performing reliably and efficiently.

Your website is a lot like your car.

When it comes to maintenance, anyway! To perform at its peak, periodic tune-ups are a must for your website. Here’s why:

  • They keep you from being stranded on the side of the road during rush hour. When it comes to maintaining a website, an ounce of prevention is worth pounds of cure. Scheduling a service interruption when it least affects everyone is much better than having an emergency that needs to be fixed at the worst possible moment (If you’ve ever had your website go down at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning, you know what I’m talking about).
  • Sometimes, you can even drive your car while someone is working on it (honest, it’s not dangerous!). Scheduled maintenance doesn’t always mean your site has to be taken down. Often, it is just a time frame during which your users may experience short periods of slowness or service interruption.
  • It extends the life of your vehicle. Without regular maintenance, your site would eventually break, be hacked or run so slowly it might as well not be running at all.

Time to pop the hood?

Scheduled website maintenance obviously makes good sense. If yours is due for a tune-up, here is a quick overview of the things I recommend to maximize up-time and keep your site performing at its peak:

Hardware

Hardware maintenance includes replacing, swapping or changing out physical components that run your website, to make them perform faster or prevent imminent failure. Check:

  • Servers
  • Attached storage
  • Network cables
  • Switches

Software

Software maintenance involves updating the code that runs your website – usually to protect against intrusion attempts, add new features or just make things faster (who doesn’t love a turbo engine?). Make sure these elements are up to date:

  • Server operating system
  • Core web server applications (Apache, PHP, MYSQL, WordPress)
  • Website code (HTML,CSS, javascript)

Data

Sometimes the data underneath your website needs some cleaning up. Over time, both the database and filesystem can get bloated with old and unused information. Periodically check for and eliminate:

  • Old files: unused images, uploaded documents that are obsolete
  • Temporary data: bits of information stored in the database that is needed for only a short time, but hangs around unless it is removed

Website running slow?

Might be time for a tune-up – or even a trade in. Just get in touch with our support team, and we’ll pop the hood.

Cheers!

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