Your entrepreneurial dream has come true! Your business is growing, and your WordPress website traffic is scaling. But this brings its own challenges — occasional website crashes during sales events and more complex operations to manage. What is a savvy businessperson to do?
The answer is to automate complex workflows wherever possible to help you better focus on strategic initiatives. Automating key WordPress processes is crucial for scalability, efficiency, and sustainable growth.
There is no getting around the fact that growing businesses inevitably develop into more complex operations to manage. With your WordPress website, this includes adopting a wider variety of plugins, implementing custom themes, and integrating a range of new features and functionalities. Automation becomes a key strategy for managing this growing complexity, in particular to assist with challenges around scalability, efficiency, and reliability.
With website scalability, automation assists with handling increased traffic and data while avoiding performance bottlenecks. It can also help you adapt to growing business needs and expanding website functionality.
When it comes to efficiency, automation can save you time and resources, reducing the effort required to manage manual tasks. It also streamlines workflows, helping make content creation, marketing efforts, and website maintenance — to name a few areas — easier to manage.
Automation also drives greater reliability for your website, minimizing errors and ensuring consistent performance where it is needed. Automating tasks will improve your website’s uptime and availability.
As you dig into all the possibilities that automation offers, you will want to focus your efforts in the following four areas.
You want your WordPress website to be able to accommodate regular traffic as well as traffic spikes. To do this, you need to work with a hosting provider that can auto-scale access to server resources and memory, either vertically (adding more resources to your dedicated server) or horizontally (providing access to more servers) as needed to handle the traffic load. Horizontal auto-scaling can also include load balancing traffic across multiple servers. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), geographically distributed networks of servers that offer improved speed and reliability of web content delivery, offer an additional route for auto-scaling to meet your WordPress website traffic needs.
Securing your WordPress website can get complicated, but it needs to be a business priority. Luckily, this is an area with a lot of automation opportunities. Backups of your website data can be automated to help speed up recovery if your website goes down. Most malware monitoring and threat detection tools are automated, automatically scanning your website to protect it from these threats. Core updates to patch vulnerabilities that come to light can be automated through the use of plugins, like Patchstack.
There are many avenues for automating performance optimizations on your website. Both browser caching, taking cached versions of your website pages that visitors browsed and storing them in local memory, and object caching, storing database query results in your server’s memory, can be automated to improve the site’s performance. WP-Fastest Cache can do both. A plugin like Smush can provide Image optimization, reducing the size of image files, and lazy loading, rendering an image only when the user scrolls over it, giving you two additional optimization automations. Your database, which gets more complicated and cluttered as your business grows, can be optimized using an automated plugin like WP-Optimize to regularly clean it up.
Two areas sometimes overlooked for optimization opportunities are marketing and content. These are essential initiatives for growing businesses that require time but can now benefit from automation. Social media scheduling and posting can be automated, as can email marketing to potential customers. WP to Buffer is a plugin that can help automate your social posting. Website content scheduling and publishing workflows offer additional automations to help your business continue growing.
Making the most of the automation opportunities available with your WordPress website will go a long way toward positioning your business for sustainable growth and scalability. Be sure to start with reliable and well-supported plugins and tools.
Pay close attention, especially to your initial configuration of the automation settings to avoid conflicts that adversely affect your website. Once your automations are set, monitor and track their performance over time. With any automation you set up, you will want to regularly review and update its underlying strategies to make sure they are consistently supporting your business’s growth and scalability.
As a growing business, your WordPress website is a key asset. Seeking out ways to automate processes will lead to greater scalability, efficiency, and sustainable growth. Focusing on automation now will help secure a bright, expansive future for your business.
If your business is looking to automate for greater scalability and growth, choosing Pressable as your hosting provider is the best place to start. Pressable helps get more done with less busywork, offering a variety of automation features including automated WordPress updates, backups, failover. We also offer auto-scaling and free CDN to meet your website’s growing traffic needs.
Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—offers experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site.
If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued growth.
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