Having your own website can be very exciting. With it, you have an opportunity to present either yourself or your ideas, products, and messages to the world.
However, no matter how exciting it is, having and, more importantly, maintaining a website can be very demanding. It could require a lot of technical knowledge, patience, and money. Or it could require a good toolbox.
Today we will be taking a look at this toolbox and what tools lie inside.
Many tools are very specialized and focused on aiding you in improving specific parts of your site. Usually, people will use tools that automate boring processes and improve the looks of their website.
But, we mustn’t forget security and recovery tools, which are even more important. What good is a pretty website that has security issues and can be brought down by a simple error?
Emergency Recovery Script
Picture this situation. You have just updated one of the many plugins on your site. Everything was working perfectly before this update. However, after the update, your site has errors, or even worse, you encounter the white screen of death. Under normal circumstances, you would be slightly panicking, but there is a solution to this and many other problems – the Emergency Recovery Script.
Let’s check out some of the tools that ERS offers:
- Core Files – You have core files missing or even some malicious core files on your site? This plugin will give you the ability to reconfigure things. You can use the convenient “Reinstall All Core Files” button to restore all of the missing ones and also delete all of the bad ones.
- Administrator Account – Somehow, all of your user tables, including the admin one, got deleted. No worries, ERS will allow you to create a new admin account which you can use to restore your website.
- WordPress and Server Information – As their names suggest, these 2 tools will provide you with all of the needed info for fixing your website.
- Reset WordPress – a powerful tool with which you need to be careful; this will completely reset your WP site without deleting files, such as themes, plugins, and uploads.
- Plugins and Themes – These 2 tools make it very easy to disable bad plugins and themes. Easy, simple, and intuitive.
- User Roles & Privileges – Unlike the admin account problem, in this situation, you can log in to the website, but instead of being the admin, you show up as a guest. This tool will restore default privileges and roles while matching them to the ones you had before as best as possible.
- Many more tools and options.
This all sounds amazing, which means that the tool is very expensive and bulky, right? No! The ERS is completely free! It is also very lightweight, being a single-file PHP script. Besides being lightweight and free, this awesome tool is also very secure, requiring a very long and unique URL and an individually created password to be used on a site. Furthermore, the tool is very intuitive to use and doesn’t require advanced technical knowledge.
One last mention, if you want this tool to perform even better and want your site to be even more error-resistant, we recommend that you get WP Reset as well; these 2 tools work best when combined with each other and give additional functionalities for resetting and recovering sites.
Redirect plugin – WP 301 Redirects
You want to keep your visitors, all of them, no matter how big or small of a site you are running, especially when your site is new and fresh. So what can you do if your visitors encounter 404 errors or broken hyperlinks?
You can use WP 301 Redirects, which is one of the best tools in fixing those issues. The plugin allows you to smartly redirect your potential visitors from 404 error pages towards their desired destination, your site.
Best of all, the visitors won’t even be bothered. They won’t know they are being redirected from a broken link. The tool can monitor all of the URLs on your site and scan them for changes, automatically creating redirect rules if something does change.
These redirects can be a vital part of maintaining and improving your SEO. If your website has bad links, it will lead traffic away from your site, making you rank lower in Google searches.
Backup Solution – UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus, with more than 2 million users, is one of the most popular backup plugins on the market at the moment.
As a backup solution, UpdraftPlus allows you to create complete backups of your WP site and store them either on the cloud or offline on your computer.
Besides being used as a backup tool, UpdraftPlus can also be used for cloning or migrating websites.
With UpdraftPlus, you won’t need to manually create backups every time; you can choose to use the scheduled backup option.
Password manager – LastPass
Why should you use a password manager? Let’s be honest, a lot of us use simple, easy to remember, and easy to crack passwords.
Every security advisor will recommend that we use unique, long, and strong passwords. But those are hard to remember, and you don’t want to write them down on a piece of paper that could be easily found.
LastPass is the most popular password manager out there. It is available on all of the major platforms, PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
Like all good security solutions, LastPass offers multi-factor authentication and adds an additional layer of security.
Conclusion
As we can see, these tools are very useful to anyone who values their website. With their help, solving any errors or mistakes that happen should be a piece of cake. And if the problem is such that it can’t be fixed, you can always restore your site from a backup.
Entrusting your passwords to a manager will save you time and prevent nervous moments of “Where did I write that password down?”. And finally, you will now be able to take care of broken links and redirects, improve your SEO and keep all of your traffic where it belongs, on your site.