Happy Monday everyone! We've got 5 great tips to help you improve your website this week across areas including page speeds, SEO, security and more. Here we go…

This article is part of our “Power Up” series to help you learn new skills and take your website to the next level.

1. Audit your plugins

If you run a WordPress website with a lot of different plugins, it’s possible that some of them are negatively impacting upon your site’s performance. Certain plugins can have this effect either because of bad coding, calls to external servers, persistent calls and more. This is why it’s a good idea to go through your plugins, ask yourself if they are all necessary and remove any that aren’t.

2. Set up Google Alerts

Setting up Google Alerts allows you to receive email updates related to current Google results based on your queries. You can use this to find out what people are saying about you online, keep up to date with trends in your industry and monitor developing news stories. Once you’re set up all you have to do is enter the search queries you’re interested in monitoring and you’ll start receiving updates.

3. Secure your folder and file permissions

To strengthen your website’s security and make it more difficult for your site to become compromised, perform a quick check to make sure that your folder and file permissions aren’t set to 777. It’s recommended that you switch your folder permissions to 755 and your file permissions to 644 to stay secure.  

To alter file permissions for your hosting in your eXtend Control Panel, simply carry out the following steps:

• Login to eXtend
• Click 'File Manager' under the 'Files' tab
• Select the file or folder that you want to change the permissions of
• Click the 'Chmod' icon on the taskbar
• Enter your desired mode number into the mode number field
• Click 'Save' and you're done

Click here for a full list of the different file permissions you can use.

4. Add a robots.txt file

Robots.txt files tell search engine spiders which folders you do and don’t want to be indexed so you can keep search engines from publicly displaying your documents, images and other sensitive files.

5. Conduct UX Testing

Conducting UX testing is a fantastic exercise for discovering how your visitors are using your website and can unearth highly effective opportunities to make the site more efficient and enjoyable to use. If you'd like to save time by having tests created for you, try using tools like Google Analytics, Qualaroo or Five Second Test.

Image credit: Johan Larsson