WordPress Site Maintenance

[Duff-Man]

Hi MyBB

Okay, if theres one thing I've noticed with CMS' is that things tend to go worng quite easily, I've used Joomla before and some error would pop-up every 2 days. Currently I'm using WordPress and the number of errors has been greatly reduced, with most of the few errors being caused by jQuery problems.

However these problems still persist despite my best efforts, and there seems to be no way to "bulletproof" my site against these errors. I mean the number of large sites (i.e. site getting over 500 000 visits a month) using WordPress is astonishing, IGN was running WordPress for most of their site two years ago and getting around 10 Million hits a month.

MyBroadband, MyGaming & BusinessTech all utilise WordPress (with the forums using vBulletin) and there never seems to be any errors with their sites at all. In the last year I've been at MyBroadband, theres never been one issue (that I've seen). Given most sites have engineers constantly monitoring it, but there must be a way to reduce the number of errors on a WordPress site.


So my question is, how can you essentially prevent your WordPress site from getting errors, or reduce the number of errors on your WordPress site. I know many (including myself) use Hotfix, but besides that there seems to be nothing else.


Your feedback is greatly appreciated

Regards,
Duff-Man

 

[Pada]

You cannot prevent it from getting errors, but the best that you can do is to regularly update to the latest stable version and update it as fast as possible when security exploits has been found for it.

 

[rpm]

Hi Duff-Man

There should really not be any errors unless you start to use many plugins which are either not working well together or are not well developed. A qualified developer (and designer for that matter) also go a long way to avoid problems.

VBulletin, Wordpress and the like are fairly solid systems, and there will always be a good reason - typically easily solvable - when errors occur.

 

[naeem]

depends on the errors. Often on high traffic sites its server related. Look into that?

 

[w1z4rd]

Either your theme or bad plugins are causing the errors. Default wordpress is pretty solid. Revert back to one of the default themes to see if its the theme causing the errors or go to your plugins and disable them one at a time and see which one it is. Wordpress is pretty cool (though I do recommend Wordfence and Codegaurd for security).

 

[Duff-Man]

Hi Duff-Man

There should really not be any errors unless you start to use many plugins which are either not working well together or are not well developed. A qualified developer (and designer for that matter) also go a long way to avoid problems.

VBulletin, Wordpress and the like are fairly solid systems, and there will always be a good reason - typically easily solvable - when errors occur.

Hi rpm

I generally try to keep the amount of plugins to a minimum, currently I have around 9 installed coming from a wide variety of hosts, so that could be a problem there like you pointed out. I think my next priority would be to hire a qualified developer to help these plugins better intergrate with WordPress / each other.

 

[Duff-Man]

You cannot prevent it from getting errors, but the best that you can do is to regularly update to the latest stable version and update it as fast as possible when security exploits has been found for it.

Thanks for the advice Pada, I was going to install W3 Total Cache a bit earlier but then found out its glaring security problem that was identified around a week ago, where hackers could easily obtain passwords and info through the cached pages of your site, if I'm correct.

I've since been using CloudFlare to reduce server load and bandwith consumption

 

[Duff-Man]

depends on the errors. Often on high traffic sites its server related. Look into that?

I'm not so sure about WordPress as I haven't been using it long enough to judge, but I found that Joomla tended to cripple under load, i.e. when around 200 visitors were logged into the site (excluding normal guests), which is still a relatively small number. Problems faced included pages that wouldn't load, unresponsive components and excrutiatingly slow load times among other things.

As far as traffic WordPress seems to be handling very well under load, only one semmingly traffic related error when jQuery wouldn't load. Then again there could also be server related issues, like you pointed out, which could be causing some of those errors, I'll contact my webhost to see what's the optimum number of visitors, at any given time, my server is able to handle .