Wow. I just watched the WordPress Disaster Week webinars—all about how to prevent website disasters—hosted by iThemes and my eyes have been opened! I learned that I’m up to snuff in preventing website disasters by encouraging my clients to frequently backup their sites—and maintain a backup somewhere other than their web server. And, clients on my website maintenance plan can be sure that WordPress, plugins and themes are up-to-date, and their websites are secure.
But here are three things I haven’t been doing and am implementing immediately (and if you’re a designer, you should too) to help prevent website disasters.
- Create a hit-by-a-bus folder. If you take a vacation, you’ll be able to plan for it. But if an unexpected disaster happens, there is no planning involved. Put all of the information your clients need into an emergency folder (so they aren’t left high and dry if something happens to you)—and give somebody access to it. I got a lot of this in place when I went on maternity leave, but I’m going to make the Google folder comprehensive and share it with a trusted developer and my husband.
- Do WordPress manuals or training videos. WordPress is pretty intuitive and I’ve always been a fan of learning-by-doing—but not everybody learns that way. So in addition to the personalized training sessions I provide via Skype or Google Hangouts, I’ll be adding a WordPress manual to help my clients prevent website disasters.
- Reinforce strong passwords. Hackers can compromise accounts by running script to guess your password. It’s called a brute force attack and we need to protect our websites. WordPress requires a strong password, but you can go beyond that with password programs like 1Password and Dashlane. They run on your computer and provide an added layer of security.
Want to see the WordPress Disaster Week webinars yourself? Free replays are available here.
