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WordPress (WP) is one of the world’s most popular and powerful Content Management Systems (CMS) and one of the best website hosting platforms. That said, 38.3% of all websites worldwide are hosted by WP, which gives WP an impressive 63.6% of the market share.
Everyone knows that once you create a WP website, it’s pretty easy to use and maintain. However, once your site starts to grow and gain more organic traffic daily, you might have too much to handle.
This is due to the nature of WP. It’s open-source software that allows people to use, change, study, and distribute it. In other words, if you’re not careful, many third-party add-ons, plug-ins, and updates can bloat your WP website.
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 DevOps and WP relate.
What exactly is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to ensure continuous delivery and improvement. WP DevOps is about maintaining and updating the site to ensure a seamless experience with no downtime.
Moreover, it’s about ensuring 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 starting with your WP website, you can do most of the work yourself. However, as soon as your website develops and grows, you might need help. Here’s an example.
You must maintain three WP sites: your business homepage, an e-commerce platform, and a blog. The critical factor is that you’re earning revenue from these sites, especially e-commerce. Therefore, it would be wise to consider opting for reliable DevOps services.
The main reason is that you want to ensure exceptional customer service and support and that your e-commerce site doesn’t experience significant downtime. Although these three websites may seem like separate entities in this example, they are connected and should be well-maintained equally so everything can run smoothly.
What can a DevOps team do?
This is where WP and DevOps relate well. As mentioned before, it may not seem like it, but maintaining a WP website, especially a large one, requires much 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 large workload, so 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 much 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 its website daily, managing this effectively because of DevOps. Now imagine having to do all the work all by yourself.
How do we measure the outcome?
You must monitor the progress if you’re curious to know how a DevOps team and WP relate and how they can make your site more functional, faster, reliable, and efficient. Of course, changes don’t happen overnight, but you’ll see your WP site vastly improving in time 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. 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 pretty vocal about it.
- WP updates—You can monitor this metric to ensure that your site is always up to date. It’s an excellent 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 is to determine the needs and the right moment to bring in a DevOps team.