Although creating a stunning and highly functional WordPress site may seem like a task completed, it is only the start. By doing routine WordPress maintenance tasks, you can keep your website up and running, safe, and serving your visitors.
Every website owner has to become adept at this continual process, which rewards your efforts with dependability and stability.
You have the option of doing this yourself or using a WordPress maintenance service. Even better, anyone, regardless of their degree of WordPress knowledge, can efficiently maintain a website!
Everything you want to learn about WordPress maintenance tasks is covered on this article. Hope it’s helpful!
The Benefits of WordPress Maintenance
Regular maintenance is an excellent habit. This is especially relevant in the world of WordPress, which consists of several components that must all function flawlessly together.
The WordPress core is open source, thus upgrades and advancements happen rather often.
If you skip a few updates, your website may become vulnerable to theme and plugin incompatibilities as well as vulnerability in terms of security.
WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist
Let’s examine the crucial WordPress maintenance activities you must carry out and how to perform them.
Backup Your Files
The most basic piece of maintenance is making a backup of your WordPress files. Whatever happens, having current backups ensures that your website can always be restored with a few mouse clicks.
There are several excellent WordPress backup plugins available, including UpdraftPlus. You may use them to fully automate the WordPress backup procedure.
However, occasionally your backup solution could cease functioning without your knowledge. You should periodically manually run your backup plugin in order to make an complete backup of your website. Check that your backup files are correctly stored to the remote location of your choosing, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
Review Security Logs
You should routinely generate and review your WordPress activity/security log in addition to occasionally updating your passwords and backing up your website.
The typical WordPress user might lack the technical know-how to instantly detect an invasion on their website. The good news is that regular inspection of your WordPress activity and security logs will enable you to swiftly identify any unwanted or suspicious actions.
This is crucial because, once hackers have access to your website, additional security measures like password changes or frequent website backups may be ineffective.
A security audit plugin is a smart addition to your website.
Update WordPress Core, Plugins and Themes
Updates to the WordPress core, themes, and plugins may address different problems, including security vulnerabilities. As soon as updates are available, it’s a good practice to regularly update all WordPress files.
The WordPress core, plugins, and theme updates are handled through a built-in system. Always update WordPress to the most recent version, and update all of your plugins and themes as well.
Having said that, there are several circumstances in which you could miss an update. For instance, a paid plugin or theme may stop checking for updates after the license expires.
To manually check for updates, visit the WordPress Updates page. Check that all of your installed plugins and themes are using the most recent version.
Optimize Your WordPress Database
Your WordPress database will function at its best with regular database maintenance. The majority of WordPress’s data is kept in your WordPress database. All of your articles, comments, users, and preferences are included there.
Your database could accumulate a ton of pointless data over time. This increases the size of your WordPress backup, which might have an impact on backup uploading, downloading, and restoration.
You may clear out junk, defragment tables, and boost database speed by optimizing your WordPress database.
Find and Fix 404 Errors
WordPress will display a 404 error page to visitors who request a page that doesn’t exist on your website.
It’s common and not a reason for concern when a user types an address incorrectly and receives a 404 error. However, people find 404 errors unpleasant and have a negative user experience when they happen because a page is no longer accessible.
Find and Fix Broken Links
You’ll discover as your website expands that certain external websites you had in your earlier articles that you had links to no longer exist. Some could have relocated, while others might have just vanished.
Broken links are a problem that extends beyond external links. You might accidentally include broken links, links that aren’t properly structured, or links that are misspelled. Visitors to your site may find this annoying, which lowers user engagement.
As part of your WordPress maintenance schedule, you should examine your website for broken links.
Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site
Text loads faster than images. Thus, they slow down the speed at which your page loads. The performance evaluation of your site will reveal some excessively large graphics.
In your less popular pieces, though, you could miss them. If you manage a WordPress site with several authors, some of them might not be as conscientious about image sizes as you are.
You can keep track of the situation by reviewing your image and media library. By running this check, you can identify and resize any excessively big images.
Run Performance Tests
When they first launch their website, many users improve WordPress speed but then neglect to maintain it.
You add fresh articles over time, added new plugins, and you could even switch the theme. The performance of a WordPress site may be impacted by any of these factors.
Faster websites are not simply beneficial for user experience, but they also boost your SEO rankings. This is why you need to routinely execute a comprehensive performance evaluation of your website.
Don’t only focus on enhancing your homepage while evaluating the effectiveness of your website. Also, check your most popular posts and all your essential pages.
WordPress Maintenance and Support Services
You could choose to use a WordPress maintenance service if you don’t know WordPress well or don’t have a lot of spare time. Not to mention that if doing maintenance yourself you would need to invest in premium plugins such as backup, security, image optimization, and performance plugins. On top of getting the premium plugins, you’d need to optimize them. So using a maintenance service isn’t really that bad idea. All the back-end work will be handled by a maintenance provider, freeing you up to focus on running your business.
