WordPress website maintenance
Is your website slow or not working like it was when you first launched it?
If yes, answer the next question. Is WordPress site maintenance on your priority to-do list?
If your answer is no, the reason behind your website’s poor performance is no mystery. Most website owners don’t realize the importance of website maintenance. For WordPress to consistently perform well, it needs to be well maintained.
Not sure how to do it correctly? No problem.
Keep reading to find out details about WordPress maintenance checklists and tips.
Why is WordPress website maintenance so important?
WordPress is the most popular content management system, accounting for nearly 42% of all websites online.
WordPress makes web development easy for users, but you have to remember that a lot goes into building these user-friendly systems.
Running a WordPress site is like running a business, and as a business, you need to maintain a WordPress site regularly.
- Better website security: Having your website hacked is probably the worst thing that can happen. However, you can ensure your website’s security by avoiding hackers.
- Improved Conversion Rate: Poorly maintained websites load slowly and nobody has time to waste on a slow-loading website. So if your website conversion rate is low then maintenance can largely fix it.
- Search Engine Optimization: If you want your website to rank on search engine results pages, then you must maintain your website. Search engines do not rank poorly maintained outdated sites.
- Grow Your Business: An online business with a website is not a one-time thing, but a long-term commitment. Not maintaining your website can hurt your business. So, if you want your business to keep growing, website maintenance is a must.
- Measure website performance: With regular website maintenance, you can get an idea of how your website is performing. That way, you can make plans to improve your site’s performance.
Now you know how website maintenance is an integral part of your online business journey. Let’s move on to the things you need to do to maintain your WordPress site.
WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist: 13 Points You Must Follow
1. Regularly back up your website
Regular backup is one of the top tasks on your website maintenance checklist. With WordPress backups, you are prepared to deal with any bad incidents like hackers. If you have backups, you can restore the previous version at any time to get a smooth working website.
You need to back up your complete site, which includes the core files and the database. You can make daily or weekly backups. But check now and then whether the backup system is working properly or not.
2. Update Software
It’s always good to use the most up-to-date features of your theme and plugin. Usually, WordPress themes and plugins update themselves with better security systems. So, updating your software will also ensure that your website has better security.
3. Test all your WordPress forms
Website forms are how your customers communicate with you and submit inquiries related to your service/product. Having a non-working form will cause you to lose customers as they are unable to contact you due to a non-working form.
Check every form on your website to make sure they are working properly every week. Sometimes there can be an issue with your WordPress hosting or email provider that can cause the form to stop working. So also check your hosting and email provider settings if any form is not working.
4. Optimize the WordPress Database
WordPress databases over time can end up storing a fair amount of redundant data. This unnecessary data will increase the size of your site and may slow it down. Optimizing your database will improve your website’s performance. Remember to remove all media files, theme files, and plugins that you don’t use.
5. Run performance tests
You should run performance tests regularly. Most people make the mistake of running a performance test only at the beginning and never again. Over time, you add new content to your website, update the software, and all these actions affect the performance of your website. So make sure you run a performance test on your WordPress site every month. The performance test results will give you the right direction you should go to improve your website performance.
Note: Be sure to use Google’s speed test tool to find out how long your site is loading on all devices.
6. Change all passwords
I know, changing passwords sounds silly. But a weak password is one of the most common reasons for getting hacked. Therefore, to protect your site from phishing and brute force attacks, WordPress experts recommend changing passwords regularly.
Passwords are your first layer of protection against unauthorized access, so create strong passwords. Not just WordPress admin password, you should regularly change FTP or SSH accounts and WordPress database passwords as well. Always create long and random passwords.
7. Find and fix 404 errors
Error 404 is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) status code that indicates that someone tried to access the page on your website, but the server was unable to find it. While this error can arise when someone mistypes the location of your website, sometimes important pages can also become unavailable due to technical issues.
To find out if your website currently has any 404 errors and redirect it to the right place. This step is important because 404 errors can result in a poor user experience.
8. Find and fix broken links
Adding external links to your blog content is great for SEO. But you need to check whether these external links are working or not. Sometimes it may be found that some of the external links no longer exist.
Not just broken external links. Sometimes your internal links may also stop working due to accidental URL misspellings or URL changes. So remember to check your site for broken links, both external and internal, and fix them.
9. SEO Audit
SEO audit is one of the most crucial points of website maintenance. You should always check your website’s SEO campaign performance. Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can check your website’s performance against browser usage, demographics, load times, bounce rate, most viewed pages, unique views, average time spent on each page, etc.
All this valuable information will give you a better view of how your website is performing. As a result, you can decide on future content updates based on reliable data.
10. Image Optimization
Image, if not optimized, can cause your pages to load very slowly. You should never skip the step of optimizing your images. If you have multiple authors on your site, sometimes some images may load without being optimized. So make sure you check all your uploaded images and compress any images that are not optimized.
11. Review WordPress security logs
Reviewing WordPress security logs is another way to ensure that your site is running smoothly. Especially if you run a site with multiple authors. If something goes wrong, you can check the WordPress activity log to find out what recent actions caused the problem. Once you know the cause of the problem, you can easily fix it.
Not necessarily you should only check the revision logs after something has gone wrong. You should do a security check to find any unusual activity that could degrade your site’s performance and fix it.
12. Troubleshoot maintenance tasks
While website maintenance tasks are done to improve the performance of your website, some tasks like optimizing images using any WordPress plugin can temporarily slow down your website. The best practice is to perform these types of tasks on a staging site.
If you can’t afford a test site, you can put your site in maintenance mode while you perform troubleshooting maintenance tasks to avoid slow speed. Even if you usually do your tasks in WordPress maintenance mode, be sure to choose a period when your site has historically seen fewer visitors.
13. Check if your WordPress hosting needs updating
Over time and activity, such as regular blog updates and video uploads, your site grows in size. Not just space, the speed of your website also depends on your WordPress hosting.
So once a year you should check if you need to upgrade your hosting plan or change your hosting provider. If upgrading your hosting plan increases your website speed, do that or just change your hosting company.
Read PHP Version in WordPress: How to Check and Update
WordPress Website Maintenance Tips: Bonus
So far I’ve talked about all the technical points you need to follow to maintain your website. But there are a few more tasks you can add to your regular WordPress site maintenance to-do list.
Check comments daily and reply
You should check your blog’s comment section daily and respond. Getting comments on your blog is a good sign that readers found your blog attractive. And Google sees this as a quality that can help you rank better on the SERP page (search engine results page). Always provide relevant responses to comments.
Delete spam comments
While positive comments are good for SEO, spam comments do the opposite. Having bad comments on your blogs hurts your site’s credibility. Also, bad links and comments can make customers lose trust in your site. Therefore, never approve spam comments and delete them regularly.
Should you delete spam comments?
Yes. Spam comments are not only bad for SEO, but they can also damage your site’s credibility. So always delete spam comments. You can also block spammers.
How to tell if your blog comments are spam
Some of the common signs of blog spam comments include:
- You will find the commenter’s name is weird or fake
- In most cases, the email does not look legitimate or professional.
- Comment contains profanity or strange link
- The website URL looks weird or bad
- Very generic comments can be posted on any blog, not just yours
Conclusion
Hope you found this content useful. Remember compromising on your website maintenance can directly hurt your website performance.
You can either hire a professional WordPress maintenance service or do it yourself. But always make sure that WordPress site maintenance is always on your priority list.
