You get an email from a reader or potential sponsor of your website –  and they attach an image showing a warning message that appeared to them while viewing your site showing links to obviously irrelevant content. When you visit your site everything appears as normal. What do you do next?

If you can’t resolve the problem quickly, it could lose you sponsorship money, turn readers away in droves or, even worse, spark rumors across social media that your site has been hacked and is spreading viruses. All these things can quickly damage your brand – maybe even irreparably. Can you afford to take that risk?

Are you old enough to remember how fast dial-up internet was? If you can’t remember but have a website that takes over 5 seconds to load, you’re starting to get the picture.

These days, the internet is all about instant access, rapid-streaming video, and questions answered with the first result in a Google search. We are in a world of extreme impatience. If your site takes longer to load than someone takes to post an update to Facebook, sent out a tweet or upload a photo to Instagram, you need to be worried. You just lost another reader to a picture of a cute puppy. Speed it up – keep your audience.

To competently managing a WordPress site, you need to know more than how to add a post or page. There’s the configuration of analytics of your site, there’s knowing how to find and install quality themes and plugins, there’s maintaining proper backups and there’s even a smattering of code editing as well. (That’s the surface scratched. There’s much more.)

Have a look at the code below. It’s applicable to the header section of your site, where you’d normally install your Google Analytics tracking code. If you put that code in the wrong spot, it can instantly stop your site from working, leaving you – and all your readers –  with nothing but a white page. Would you be able to fix it quickly so those readers can access your site again? Are you sure about that?