Perplexing and Bursting Article on Testing a WordPress Site Before Going Live

Are you one of the millions of people using WordPress, the popular content management system (CMS)? If so, then good for you! It’s easy to use, and a popular choice for individuals and businesses looking to build a website. But before going live, have you thought about thoroughly testing your site? It’s vital to ensure that everything works as expected, so let’s dive into the details.

1. Checking Website Performance

Before going live with your WordPress site, you need to ensure its performance. Running a website speed test is crucial to identify slow areas. There are free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix that you can use to check your site’s speed.

Additionally, you should test your site’s responsiveness. This means ensuring your site looks and performs well on different devices like smartphones and tablets. Tools like Responsinator can come in handy to help you achieve this task.

2. Checking Website Security

Website security is a significant point to consider when testing your WordPress site before going live. Your site should be secure and protected from hackers and other online threats. Luckily, WordPress has several security plugins like Wordfence and Sucuri to achieve this.

You can also check your site for vulnerabilities using free online vulnerability scanners like the Nmap Security Scanner.

3. Checking Website Functionality

Before going live, you should ensure that all functionality works as expected. This means making sure that all links, forms, and pages load correctly, and everything is error-free. You can check this manually, or use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your site and identify any issues automatically.

4. Checking Website Compatibility

Compatibility is another crucial factor to consider when testing your WordPress site before going live. You must check if your site works well on various devices and web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. You can test manually or use automation tools like BrowserStack to achieve this goal.

5. Checking Website Backup and Restore Process

Finally, always check that you have a robust backup and restore process in place before going live with your WordPress site. This means having a regular backup schedule and a system in place to restore your site if anything goes wrong.

WordPress has backup and restore plugins like UpdraftPlus and BackupBuddy to help with this. Regularly testing this process ensures that everything is working as expected.

Conclusion

Testing your WordPress site before going live is essential to ensure that it functions correctly and secures users’ data. Follow these five steps on performance, security, functionality, compatibility, and backup and restore processes, and your site will be ready to launch!