If you are thinking about blogging, or perhaps you already own a blog, then you are going to need to learn about how to maintain it. Maintaining a blog can be quite time consuming, but overall it is necessary if you are going to have a successful site.

Just to preface this post – we are going to be discussing mainly WordPress sites. If you are using WIX or Squarespace or if you built your own website, then some of these tips might not help you. The general idea is the same though.

In this post we are going to go over some of the general questions you might have about maintaining a blog like:

  • What happens if you do not maintain it
  • How to maintain a blog
  • What is Site Health
  • Common Problems
  • Backups and Updates

Lets dive right into what happens if you do not maintain your blog.

What if you do not maintain your blog

What if you ignore your blog? Well lets look at it like this:

If you have a car, and you do not change the oil what happens? Well, the car definitely will not go zoom for very long.

Likewise, if you do not maintain your blog, it will eventually stop running. It will sort of happen like this:

  • Your site health will flag something wrong with your blog or something not updated
  • It will start experiencing problems or not allowing you to do certain things
  • The blog will slow down and start to crash unexpectedly
  • Eventually, there will be a technical error and it could even get taken down

Now, all of these things can be fixed and easily avoided with some general rules. First, do not ignore things that are wrong with your website. These things can quickly stack up and cost you resulting in a:

  • Drop in traffic
  • Drop in Ad revenue
  • blog posts being unavailable
  • Plugins becoming corrupted

If any of the above happens, it can be very annoying to deal with and ultimately these things will effect the growth of your site. High website growth and ranking is the hardest thing to achieve and needs to be done consistently over time, so do not let these things happen to your site!

Maintain a Blog

So then, how do you maintain a blog?

It is actually quite simple. First you will need to become familiar with the backend of your site, but that should not take long. If you are using WordPress, like I mentioned above, the backend will alert you if things are going wrong with your site.

This is useful because it saves you the trouble of digging for problems. Most specifically, the backend of WordPress will give you a “site health” stat that you can use to gauge if you need to fix things or not.

Maintaining Site Health

Maintaining site health is vitally important. You can access the site health of your page simply by clicking onto Tools -> site health in your WordPress backend dashboard. Once you arrive on the page and it loads, there should be a list with everything currently wrong on your website.

If there are critical issues, then they need to be addressed immediately. These issues could be preventing your page from being live, keeping you from updating posts, or simply just be cosmetic errors. Most of the time the issue is that a plugin or theme needs to be updated.

Plugins get updated by their creators all the time to fix bugs, add on new features, or simply to fine tune the code. It is important that your site always has the most update-to-date versions to not conflict with anything on your site.

Most of the other issues that your site health stat points out will usually be non-vital but should still be addressed. Some of the time the issues can be more suggestive in nature and those can be ignored. At the end of the day, you need to always check this metric, fix these issues to the best of your ability, and make sure your site is in top shape.

Backups

Another feature of maintaining a website is to constantly back up your site.

In this post here, I describe why this is SO important. Believe me, you never want to wake up and see your site down without a backup. Most hosting providers will automatically create backups, but it is vital that you do some on your own as well.

Believe me when I say that this experience is frustrating and a huge headache. Save yourself the trouble and back up your website monthly if you can.

Maintaining a Website

Besides site health and backups, you will need to make sure a of a few more small things:

  • Make sure the hosting is paid for and on renewal
  • Confirm that your domain is on renewal and will never be sold
  • Constantly look for bad links on your site and delete them
  • Make sure questionable sites are not backlinking to your site – Google can penalize this
  • Keep posts relevant and updated to keep them ranking

There is so much to do for a website, not including adding more content, building an email listing, building out social channels, and the general tasks. I suggest you work on your site daily if you want it to be successful. If not, then you probably will not see the return you are looking for.

Maintaining a Blog

Thanks for reading our post on how to maintain a blog. I hope these tips helped you in a small way. There is so much to do for a website, but if you take care of it and give it what it needs to grow you will not be disappointed.

How To Recover A Website

The worst thing for a blogger or website owner is waking up, clicking on your website and seeing that it is down.

What a headache.

There are so many things that could be wrong. But it always seems to happen at the worst times when you really do not want to deal with it. On top of that, nine out of ten times it is something within the code, files, or Cpanel that needs to be changed which requires some external help for most people.

Unfortunately, sometimes things get a little too corrupted. This could because you changed hosting providers, messed with some settings, or maybe there was an update that did not sit right with your setup. Regardless, sometimes blogs and websites can get “reset” or completely lose files.

This is horrible. Believe me because I just went through it on one of my blogs: sanfranciscotribe.com

Site Crashes

For me, it happened because I recently migrated files from one hosting provider to another, updated my Php version, and then there was a big update that was pushed out through WordPress. I do not fully understand why, but my entire blog went down for 2 months. Yikes.

This cost me most of my traffic, a bunch of backlinks, and plenty of people contacting me asking what was going on. After I had the time (aka stopped ignoring it), I realized that I had made a mistake in ignoring it. It cost me 25 posts which is a lot considering there were only 200 posts on the blog at the time.

Therefore, I want to share my experience with you and help you understand a few things. First is how to fix this. There is an easy way and a hard way:

  • The easy way – using a back up within the allotted time frame
  • The hard way – using cache versions of pages with google cache or lost webpages

Lets start with the easy way on how to recover a website!

The easy way

The easy way is to simply use a back up of your website.

Website Back Ups

These are generally made every so often by your hosting provider, but I would make sure the package you bought has this feature right now. This is extremely important for several reasons. First, because if your website does go down, you can simply pull the back up version and restore all of your files and posts!

This is the ideal way to deal with your website going down clearly. The best part is the hosting provider can usually do this for you and work with you to fix the issue that caused the problem in the first place

What is a website Backup

Well in short a website backup is just the files being saved that are in your Cpanel to another location on the hosting provider’s server. You can even create copies of your files from the Cpanel and pull them onto your local machine or your C drive to keep a back up yourself.

In addition, there are many plug-ins for wordpress that will do this for you for free!

How long do Website Backups Last

The problem is that typically a hosting provider will update your website backup every 2 to 4 weeks. Some do it monthly, or some only do it when you request it. The backup lasts as long as the files are saved on their server, but once they are updated, then you lost the previous versions forever.

This is what happened to me.

I waited a month to try and fix my site, and when they updated their backup files to my “corrupted” version of my website, my blog posts and everythimg I had done for the past few months was gone.

Therefore, timing is very important in fixing a website. You need to fix it the moment you see it is down or risk losing most of your work.

The Hard way

Now that we’ve discussed the easy way, lets look at the hard way to restore a website.

In short, the hard way is by restoring your website page by page. This might seem easy if you have a small site with only a few pages, but if you write hundreds of posts and you have tons of content on each post it could take a while.

Google Cache

Luckily, I only lost 40-50 blog posts when my site initially went down. After realizing the back up was corrupted as well, I turned to a plug in to do the next best thing. Scrap the Google Cache for my pages previous versions of themselves to get the content on each page. The process is quite simple:

  • You are going to want to download this plug in which will allow you to right click on things and pull up their Google cache
  • Once you pull up the Google cache, two things will happen. Either there will be an error page, or there will be a txt version of the page available from a month to a few months ago.
  • If you get a txt version, then you can simply highlight the content and text, and post it onto a word document. Then simply report the page later.
  • I did this for 23 pages or blog posts in my case and saved 23 posts which was about 50,000 words of content!

I know this still sounds like a lose, but from losing 40 posts to only losing 17, I was very happy. Not to mention each post takes 1-3 hours to complete, it is time well spent saving those posts.

You might be wondering though, why would Google only have Cache for certain pages on your blog and not others?

Well, the answer is those other pages did not rank well. So much so that Google basically did not have versions of them cached. That basically means, they were not ranking anyways and in losing them, my blog is not suffering at all. I ended up saving the pages that were ranking which means that my blog is still healthy and thriving once again!

Web Archive

One of the other services you can use on the web is called the Web Archive. Although, this did not work for me and it might not work for you. I think your website needs to be sufficiently popular, of a certain age, or simply added manually to the archive. Either way, it is worth a shot!

The Last Alternative

If all else fails you might want to resort to your local drive.

If you are like me, then you might occasionally save your posts on word or somewhere in text files during editing. I saved a few and this actually helped me recover a couple of them. While this is not ideal and certainly will not work for everyone, it is something to consider and look for.

Regardless, losing your webpages or blog posts is incredibly frustrating. Overall, I suggest being preventive in the first place.

Recover a Website

Thanks for reading our post on how to recover a website. I know these are not full-proof methods, but they are a start.

At the end of the day just remember that a website is nothing more than files being hosted. Make sure to protect your files, protect your investment, and protect your website! Be preventive by:

  • Make backups on your hosting provider, and locally
  • Constantly update your website and check for site health
  • Be quick when errors do pop up
  • Try not to move hosting providers or get professional help to do so
  • Use a plugin to help make back ups as well

With these tips, you should survive owning and maintaining a website!

Cheers