Of course not everyone has the skills or experience for website maintenance.  But WordPress makes it easy, with essential plug ins that do most of the work for you.  As soon as you’ve downloaded your free website builder program, install these 6 essential maintenance plug ins from our resources page.  They are completely free to download and give you peace of mind that your blog is running smoothly and your visitors can easily enjoy your great content:

1. Redirection: this plug in deals easily and effectively with broken links, which are really annoying for your visitors and lead them to blank pages or a 404 error message.  Broken links can be created for many reasons, the most common is when you change a webpage file name, perhaps to improve search engine optimization.  This changes the URL address, which means that any search engine with the old URL address will direct visitors to the broken link.  This might annoy your visitors but also affects your search engine ranking.  The Redirection plug in is so easy to use and redirects visitors who click on broken links to a different page on your site.  For more information on how to use this plug in and repairing broken links, this article about fixing broken links is packed with information.
2. Maintenance Mode: from time to time you may need to do some front end maintenance that means shutting down your website for a short period.  This plug in creates a splash page that informs your visitors that the site is under maintenance and for how long, which will encourage them to come back later rather than simply going away for good.  While you’re working on maintenance, as blog owner and administrator you can see the site and check how your updates look.  
3. WP-DB Manager:  this is a really useful plug in that helps you to protect your valuable customer information.  It allows you to back up, optimize and manage your database with a simple tab in the admin panel.
4. Akismet: one of the most annoying things for visitors and bloggers is spam.  No one wants to read a comments page full of it and it’s a real pain to remove and check your site regularly.  That’s why WordPress is such a great free website builder program, giving you plenty of plug ins and tools to deal with spam.  Akismet is a favorite of bloggers worldwide, taking the hassle out of spam prevention and keeping unwanted code at bay.
5. Antivirus:  another really useful plug in for security and maintenance.  It checks your blog daily for malicious code that could inject spam or even worse a virus.  Security is a huge issue you need to be aware of and if you don’t protect your site you could end up losing hours of work.  As soon as you’ve downloaded your free website builder, install a plug in such as Antivirus to protect your site.  This plug in gives you an alert message if code is inserted and tells if you a virus is suspected.
6. Theme Tester:  part of maintaining your blog is ensuring you keep the content fresh, up to date and with an impressive visual impact that grabs your visitors quickly.  There are hundreds of themes released every month and you don’t want to change your theme too often.  However every once in a while you may want to give your website a fresh look.  This plug in is a perfect addition to your free website builder program.  It allows you to test a theme without changing it permanently on your site, giving you time to decide whether you like it before you install it. 

As a website builder, I know for a fact that one of the most common headaches that a lot of website builders have to deal with are broken links.  Broken links are not necessarily out of carelessness as most of the time, they are a result of editing your site’s page file names which in turn changes that file name’s URL. If the previous URL has already been indexed by search engines, it may show up in search results and clicking it will lead to a blank page or 404 (page cannot be found) errors.

A common example is when you change a page URL for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Once you change a page URL, the old URL will now lead to a blank page. If taken to a certain degree, these mishaps could even get your site blacklisted in the minds of your followers, leading to the demise of your site’s reason for existence. Search Engines do not like broken links too, and this could hurt your rankings.

Fixing Broken Links The Painful Way

If you built your site the conventional way, ie with an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, the usual approach to fixing broken links is editing the .htaccess file. If you’re not a web developer, I can totally forgive you for not knowing what that is. As a matter of fact, not all website builders even know what that is! And even if you can locate the .htaccess file, the text in there would look so gibberish you wouldn’t understand what’s going on in there and even if you manage to know how to edit it, manually editing each and every broken link is not a pleasant experience.

A WordPress Plugin To Save The Day: The Redirection Plugin

The major advantage of using the free website builder WordPress to create a website is that it allows us to install plugins. These plugins can be used to increase the functionality of WordPress, making it a more effective, reliable and easy to use website builder.

The Redirection plugin comes in handy when it comes to transferring pages from an old site, editing page names and URLs, or deleting pages as all these can lead to broken links. It’s so easy to use and you don’t have to deal with incomprehensible codes. It also allows you to effectively manage their permanent redirections, follow their 404 errors (“File not found” page), and tie up loose ends in general. This plugin can also provide logs of all redirected URLs, enable you to choose redirection methods such as redirect based upon login status, redirect to some random pages in your site, or redirect based on the referrer! Another feature I like a lot about it is it allows you to remove or add www to all your WordPress pages. In my case, I like to remove it.

If you would like to get the redirection plugin, you can download it from our plugin resource page. Once installed and set-up, you can sit back and relax. Your broken links will be taken care of.