Keeping your WordPress site up to date is more than just adding new content and changing out photos. Doing some regular maintenance on your website helps keep it safe, quick, and working perfectly for visitors; no matter what type of WordPress website you manage (a blog, eCommerce site or business), you will need to continually update and optimize to ensure everything works properly. Many site owners hire professional services such as Wp-1click to help them complete their site maintenance, but being educated on the basics of WordPress maintenance is just as important! This complete guide will give you an easy-to-follow list of things to remember when maintaining a WordPress site so you can ensure your website runs well all year long.
Why WordPress Maintenance Is Important
One of the most widely used ways to manage your site's content is with WordPress, which has become one of the most commonly hacked options in recent memory and, as such, can result in performance issues if not maintained adequately. The goal of regular maintenance is to keep the website secure from hacking attempts and keep all web pages functioning properly and loading relatively quickly. Additionally, regular maintenance allows you to ensure that your website's plugins, themes, and core files work together properly.
By neglecting your site maintenance, you place your entire site at risk for: downtime, security exploitation, poor customer experience, and decreased visibility in searches performed on the internet. Search engines prefer to deliver results for websites that load quickly and have been secured with appropriate methods. As a result, your site's maintenance is as much an SEO undertaking as it is a technical one.
Daily WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Regular daily monitoring can allow you to identify issues before they become bigger problems. Having daily access to your web page allows you to verify that all elements of its operation are functioning as anticipated. You should access both your home page and all important pages to make sure each of them loads properly. Some updates may unintentionally disrupt the layout/appearance of a webpage just as if you were to have a hosting issue.
In addition to monitoring website availability, it is critical that you monitor the amount of time that your website is unavailable to users. If your site is often down, it will negatively affect your visitors and decrease your search engine rank. An uptime notification system can help you monitor your website if it goes down or has other technical problems. Checking for spam comments on your website and/or any unauthorized login attempts is also a good way to maintain a level of security and trustworthiness from your customers/clients.
If you own an active website or expect to have frequent content uploads (i.e., blogs, on-line stores), you should consider performing daily backups of your website. Using an automated backup system will allow you to create these backups easier and more securely.
Weekly WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Weekly tasks for your website are focused primarily on keeping it up to date and optimized. WordPress continuously provides updates for the core software. These updates help resolve issues in the code, enhance overall performance, and fix known security vulnerabilities. Check and install any available updates carefully to avoid any potential problems due to lack of compatibility.
In addition, plugins are also updated regularly. One of the biggest causes of site security breaches can result from using an outdated version of a plugin. Creating a backup prior to performing any updates is always a good practice, and be sure to test your site after the update is complete to ensure proper operation.
Another weekly task that is very important in terms of maintaining your website’s database is optimizing the database. Over time, a database collects a lot of unnecessary data including post revisions, spam comments, and trash items. Cleaning out your database can improve your website’s performance as well as speed up load times on your pages.
Reviewing your site’s analytics on a weekly basis can also provide valuable insight into how effective your website is. You can track traffic patterns, bounce rates, and user behavior to determine what is and isn’t working effectively on your website.
Monthly WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Tasks for the monthly maintenance of websites are generally much more detailed and involve a further in-depth review of website performance and structure than just doing basic maintenance tasks. One example of this would be testing every single form on your website including contact forms, registration forms, and checkout pages as all forms must be working properly otherwise you could lose potential leads or sales from one tiny error.
You should perform security scans on a monthly basis and check your website for malware, malicious or suspicious files as well as any vulnerabilities. Installing a trustworthy security plug-in can help automate this process. Regular security checks are especially important when your website processes sensitive customer data and/or payment information.
Additionally, you should review the user accounts that are logged into your site by checking for any inactive users and making sure that each active user has the adequate level of permission on the website. Allowing too many users to have administrative access to your website creates a security risk for your site because it increases the number of locations from which an attacker can potentially gain access.
Another important monthly maintenance task is to remove any unused themes and plugins from the website. Keeping inactive themes will allow for vulnerabilities on the site and can slow down your overall site performance. A WordPress Plugin Cleaning Up Old Themes will make this process easier and will ensure that all outdated files are properly removed without interfering with your active website design.
Quarterly WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Conducting a website audit every 3 months is very important. Your audit should start with an assessment of the content you have available. Outdated articles need to be updated, broken links fixed, and old information refreshed. Updating your website content will not only increase the visibility of your website in the search engines but will also provide more value to your visitors.
Website speed testing should be an important part of your audit as well. When a website loads slow, it frustrates users and diminishes the chances of a conversion (making a sale, etc.). Use a speed test tool to assess how fast your website loads and make any recommendations such as compressing images, using caches, or optimizing your code.
It is also important to assess your hosting provider, and to consider upgrading if your site is receiving much higher volume than it previously was.
All website owners should make it a point to review their SEO settings on at least a quarterly basis so they remain visible in search engines. Ensure that you have optimized your meta titles, descriptions, and keywords properly. Additionally, look for an updated sitemap and make sure it has been submitted to the appropriate search engines.
Annual WordPress Maintenance Tasks
You should do an annual evaluation of your site by looking at the entire strategy being used. Check your design as well as how users experience using your site. Trends will change and so should your site, it should have a contemporary look plus be user friendly for those who visit; they must like what they see and have found the information they want very easily.
If your current design appears out of date or does not meet the criteria for mobile-optimized web design, think about rebuilding your website. An increasing percentage (more than 50%) of all internet users are on mobile devices when accessing the internet. Therefore, it is imperative that you ensure your site’s design is mobile-friendly.
Make sure you renew your domain and hosting accounts on time to avoid downtime on your website. Make certain to check all premium plugins and themes are up to date through their licensing renewals.
Perform a complete security audit and perform backup verification of all backups completed. Verify that all backup files can be properly restored by actually restoring them in a staging environment.
Common WordPress Maintenance Mistakes
Website owners often overlook the importance of having a backup until it's too late, at which point they may suffer permanent data loss if they do not have a current backup. Another frequent error is failing to test compatibility before updating plugins, resulting in potentially broken site layouts or disabled critical feature (s).
Also, some people tend to overuse plugins, which, while providing additional functionality to websites, can cause sites to load slowly and increase the potential for security vulnerabilities. It's best to use only essential, properly maintained plugins.
Not addressing small issues (including minor design flaws and slow page load times) as they arise will result in larger issues developing later on. Regular maintenance will enable you to identify and address problems as they occur.
Benefits of Regular WordPress Maintenance
Maintaining your website consistently will produce better overall performance, a more secure site, and enhanced search engine ranking results. If a visitor comes to your site and it loads quickly and is functioning properly, they are much more likely to trust and return to your website.
Keeping your site up to date will protect you from hackers as they search for vulnerabilities in outdated systems/ software. When you maintain your website on a regular basis, it greatly reduces the likelihood of your site experiencing downtime or other technical issues.
Furthermore, performing regular preventative maintenance will save you money in the long run. An example of this is the high costs associated with fixing a hacked website versus the low cost associated with performing regular preventative maintenance.
Final Thoughts
WordPress website care is not something that happens once, it's an ongoing process to keep your site safe, quick, and dependable. This essential checklist will help make sure that your site runs as effectively as possible all year long. From daily backups and updates to quarterly audits and annual reviews, each task plays an important part in maintaining the value of your website.
By making sure to take care of your WordPress site, it will continue to be a competitive, usable site and able to expand into the online marketplace.