Going live with a WordPress site feels like the finish line, but it is really the starting point. Everything is new, real visitors are about to arrive, and a single overlooked setting can leave you with broken SSL, unreliable scheduled tasks, or no clean backup when something goes wrong. Here are five things worth doing before you direct serious traffic at your new site.
1. Force HTTPS and Clear Mixed Content
TekLan shared hosting can issue a Let's Encrypt certificate for your site, but a certificate alone does not always force visitors from HTTP to HTTPS. Without the redirect, some users may land on the insecure version of your site, and search engines may see both versions as separate URLs.
Enable the redirect in Enhance: navigate to your website, open the Security tab, and toggle Force HTTPS on. That handles the server-side redirect.
The follow-up step most people miss is mixed content. If your database still contains http:// references in image URLs, internal links, or theme settings, browsers may block those resources even on an HTTPS page and show a warning. Install the Better Search Replace plugin and run a search-and-replace across all tables, swapping http://yourdomain.co.uk for https://yourdomain.co.uk. Run it in dry-run mode first, then for real.
2. Replace WP-Cron With Real Server Cron
WordPress's built-in task scheduler, WP-Cron, doesn't run on a schedule. It runs when someone visits your site, triggering any overdue tasks at that point. On a low-traffic site, this means scheduled posts might not publish on time, emails may be delayed, and cleanup tasks quietly pile up.
The proper fix is a real server-side cron job. First, disable WP-Cron by adding this line to wp-config.php:
define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );Then in Enhance, go to Advanced → Developer tools → Cron jobs and create a new job with a five-minute interval. Use your real domain in the command:
wget -q -O - https://yourdomain.co.uk/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1You can also use WP-CLI if it is available for the site. Once a real cron is in place, WordPress tasks are no longer dependent on visitor traffic.
3. Take a Baseline Backup Before Anything Else
A clean backup taken immediately after launch is worth more than any backup taken later, because it captures a known-good state: freshly configured, no conflicting plugins, no corrupted uploads. If anything goes wrong in the first weeks of operation, you want the option to roll back to a verified baseline.
In Enhance, go to your website and open the Backups tab. Click Create backup. It typically completes in under a minute. Make this a habit; take a backup before every significant change: a plugin update, a theme customisation, a database migration.
4. Manage Automatic Updates Deliberately
WordPress updates core minor releases automatically by default, which is generally sensible; these are usually security patches. But automatic major version updates and plugin updates are a different matter. Either can break your site without warning, and they'll do it at whatever time WordPress decides, not when you're watching.
Take control of what updates automatically. In the WordPress admin, go to Plugins and disable auto-updates for plugins where you want to review changes manually. For finer control, use a maintenance plugin or manage update policy in code through a small custom plugin.
Then set a regular maintenance window where you take a backup and apply pending updates manually. That way you stay current on security while still being present when things change.
If you prefer a UI, Easy Updates Manager gives you fine-grained control over exactly what auto-updates and what doesn't.
5. Set Your Permalink Structure Now
WordPress's default URL format is /?p=123, a query string with no descriptive information. It's bad for readability, bad for SEO, and if you change it after publishing content, every existing URL breaks and any external links pointing to your site become dead ends.
Change it before you publish anything that matters. Go to Settings → Permalinks in the WordPress admin and select Post name. This gives you clean URLs like /your-post-title/, readable by humans and search engines alike. Save the settings and WordPress will regenerate your .htaccess rewrite rules automatically.
None of this should take long on a straightforward site, but skipping these checks can cost you much more time later. If you hit any issues along the way, open a support ticket; we're happy to walk through it with you.
