Tips for maintaining your Umbraco website
It is important for all website administrators to keep their websites up to date and functioning properly. This also applies to Umbraco websites. Failure to provide regular maintenance can quickly lead to security vulnerabilities, slow performance, and unexpected downtime.
Without maintenance on your website, a simple error can quickly develop into a bigger problem that affects both user experience and SEO. On the other hand, a well-functioning maintenance routine can not only make your website safer and more stable, but also faster, which ultimately results in better search engine results.
Why is it important to maintain Umbraco?
The short answer is to ensure high security and performance as well as a good user experience.
As with all other open source CMSs, new updates are released on an ongoing basis. These can be both minor patches and major upgrades. These updates can have several different purposes, such as optimizing security, implementing new technologies, improving performance, and the like.
Updates help ensure that your Umbraco website is always up and running with the latest technologies. They also ensure that potential security vulnerabilities are closed before they become a real risk.
How do you maintain your Umbraco website?
When maintaining your Umbraco website, it is first and foremost about keeping the system, themes and plugins up to date. This means that you should regularly check for new versions of both the Umbraco CMS, the themes used and all plugins. By ensuring that you are always running the latest updates, you will have access to the latest features as well as the important security patches that protect your website from potential threats.
At the same time, you must ensure that you take regular backups of both your files and database, and that you continuously test that the recovery procedures work, so that you can quickly get the website back up and running if something goes wrong.
It might be a good idea to create a maintenance plan for your Umbraco website. That is, how often updates should be performed, how often (and how) backups should be taken, how you monitor the website so that you can quickly identify and respond to any abnormal activities. By creating a maintenance plan, you can ensure that the tasks are carried out on an ongoing basis.
Safely test updates in a staging environment
Before you make any major changes or roll out a new update to your live website, it’s a good idea to test everything in a staging environment first. A staging environment acts as an exact copy of your real website, but without affecting your users. This allows you to safely test new versions and configurations to make sure everything is working as it should. This approach can save you both time and unnecessary downtime if an update turns out to cause compatibility issues or other unexpected errors.
Tips for maintaining your Umbraco website
Here you will find a quick overview that will help you keep track of the essential tasks so that your website is always up to date and secure:
- Updates: Check for new versions of Umbraco CMS, themes and plugins at least once a month – and preferably more often.
- Backups: Take daily backups of both files and database. It may also be a good idea to test the backup recovery regularly.
- Monitoring: Check server performance and logs daily for abnormal events, and set up automatic alerts.
- Security: Regularly review firewall settings and change passwords regularly. It's also a good idea to implement 2FA.
- Staging testing: Test all major updates in a staging environment before rolling them out live.
Do you need help?
We understand if the technical maintenance of your Umbraco website is not your main focus. Especially if you can't see the direct results of the updates. But the fact is that the updates are important – and they greatly benefit your website and your data security.
At itpilot, we have extensive experience updating websites in various CMS – including Umbraco. That's why we also offer a security and update subscription, where you let us take care of the ongoing maintenance of your website, including regular updates, automated backups and ongoing monitoring, so you can focus on running your business.
If you want to hear more about how we can help you keep your Umbraco solution in top shape, contact us – we are ready to have a non-binding chat about your options. Call us on +45 87 25 07 87 or fill out the contact form to hear more.
