WordPress (WP) is one of the most popular and most powerful Content Management Systems (CMS) in the world. Moreover, it’s one of the best website hosting platforms as well. That said, 38.3% of all websites in the world are hosted by WP, which gives WP an amazing 63.6% of market share.

Now, everyone knows that once you create a WP website, it’s fairly easy to use and maintain. However, once your site starts to grow and gain more organic traffic on a daily basis, you might end up in a situation where you have too much on your plate to handle.

This is due to the nature of WP. In fact, it’s open-source software that allows people to use, change, study and distribute this software. In other words, there are a lot of third-party add-ons, plug-ins and updates that can bloat your WP website, if you’re not careful.

As you can imagine, maintaining a large site can be too much for one person alone. Fortunately, WP and DevOps can work perfectly together to overcome such obstacles. With that in mind, here are a few ways how DevOps and WP relate.

What exactly is DevOps?

DevOps stands for a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to ensure continuous delivery and improvement. As far as WP DevOps go, it’s about maintaining and updating the site to ensure a seamless experience with no downtime.

Moreover, it’s about ensuring that your WP site is well-optimized to handle the traffic, content and various features you have running. The larger the website becomes, the more planning is required to maintain it well. Therefore, sooner or later, hiring a DevOps team to help you handle everything the right way becomes a must.

When do you need a DevOps team?

So, when is the best time to hire a good DevOps team? Simply put, it depends on your needs. As mentioned before, if you’re just starting out with your WP website, you can do most of the work yourself. However, as soon as your website starts to develop further and grow, you might need some help. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you have to maintain three WP sites. One is your business homepage, the second is an e-commerce platform, and the third one is a blog. The key factor here is that you’re earning revenue from these sites, especially the e-commerce one. Therefore, it would be wise to consider opting for reliable DevOps services at this point.

The main reason is that you want to ensure exceptional customer service and support, as well as ensure that your e-commerce site doesn’t experience significant downtime. Although these three websites may seem like separate entities in this example, they are, indeed, connected and should be well-maintained equally so that everything can run smoothly.

What can a DevOps team do?

This is where WP and DevOps really relate well. As mentioned before, it may not seem like it but maintaining a WP website, especially a large one, requires a lot of attention if you want things to go as smoothly as possible. Your DevOps team is responsible for various things. Here are a few things the DevOps team will efficiently handle:

• Updating your WP site
• Adding custom code and removing unnecessary third-party code
• Approving third-party code
• Testing and approving third-party add-ons and plug-ins
• Creating, testing and deploying new features
• Site maintenance
• Risk management
• Testing new updates
• Backup and disaster recovery
• Gain oversight over multiple projects

As you can see, the DevOps team handles a lot of workload so that you don’t have to. WP has over 40,000 features in its plug-in depository alone, not to mention the mandatory quarterly core updates. Aside from that, your business will have to evolve and change over time, which requires further tweaks.

Therefore, there’s a lot of stuff to check, test, approve, remove, and so on. A good example is Etsy, a website where people buy and sell arts and crafts. Etsy makes around 50 changes to their website per day, and they manage this effectively because of DevOps. Now imagine having to do all the work all by yourself?

How to measure the outcome?

If you’re curious to know how a DevOps team and WP relate and how they can make your site more functional, faster, more reliable and efficient, you just have to monitor the progress. Of course, changes don’t happen overnight, but in time you’ll see that your WP site is vastly improving thanks to your DevOps. Here are a few of the metrics you can track to measure the outcome:

• WP site downtime – The best you can hope for is 99.99% uptime for your site. Short downtimes are sometimes necessary to install updates.
• WP site speed – Page loading speed is a vital factor. By monitoring this metric, you can see how fast your pages are and if they’re loading faster or slower over time.
• Customer satisfaction rate – Happy customers are the best sign that everything works exceptionally well. If something doesn’t work well, customers soon become quite vocal about it.
• WP updates – You can monitor this metric to determine if your site is up to date at all times. It’s a good way to see if your DevOps are doing what they’re supposed to do.

WordPress is a beneficial platform, but it still requires modifications. This is where DevOps can be of great help to you and your WP site. The only thing left to do is to determine the needs and the right moment to bring in a DevOps team.