What is WordPress Maintenance?
To keep your wordpress website working healthy and to keep it secure, it is must to perform certain tasks on the website. These tasks are considered as WordPress Maintenance tasks. Also, these site maintenance tasks we should do frequently. For better, use a calendar to remind yourself to do maintenance job on your wordpress site on a regular basis.
Most Importantly If your wordpress website have a lot of traffic then you should do these tasks on your website once in a 3 months and if your website is a new one or have a small traffic then you need to do these tasks once in every 6 months.
Essential WordPress Maintenance Tasks List
1. Create a Complete Backup Of Your Website
Updraftplus or BackupBuddy are the best WordPress Backup plugins. Manually run your backup plugin. And last don’t forget to check your backup files that is it stored properly or not at your remote locations.
2. Change All Your WordPress Passwords
This step is basically most imporatnt because it defends your website against unauthorized access to your website. It is very important to use a strong unique passwords for your WordPress Website, FTP accounts and Database.
3. Keep Your Site Up-To-Date
To maintain your website, you should update your core WordPress to its latest version on a frequent basis. Every time wordpress updates comes with more advanced features and security fixes.
4. Update WordPress themes, and plugins
It is important to update regularly your themes and plugins of your wordpress website. Ideally, we should update these as soon as it released. Basically the updated version comes with often fixed any vulnerabilities discovered by releasing patches through last updates.
Also if you have any unused plugins on your website, then delete it because it could effect the performance as well as the security of a website.
5. Identify and Delete Spam Comments
You need to take a quick look at the spam comments in your wordpress wesbsite’s dashboard to ensure that there are no spam comments present and no real comments incorrectly marked as spam.
6. Find and Fix Broken Links
Broken Links are very bad as SEO point of view. It means no matter how much time you’re spending on SEO, your wordpress website won’t rank on search engines, if your website have broken links.
So first you need to check all that broken links across your website. You can use this tool site audit tool, It will give you a list of broken links, which you can then update in your website.
7. Optimize Your Database
Database includes your blog posts, pages, images, videos, setting and much more. So once your site growing content, your database begins to get slow down which is actually it results in turn slow down the speed of your website.
To improve the performance of your wordpress website, you must need to optimize your database. You can optimize your database by this plugin WP-Optimize. It will optimize your database and clears records and cache which are now not required.
8. Prioritize your Website’s Security
It is one of the crucial and important factor that need to be considered. You must have to protect your site from hackers and other security threats. For this you could use a relaible security plugin. Also, some of the steps are already mentioned above like changing passwords, and creating manual backups are helpful for security precautions.
You can go with SUCURI . It is a famous website security company that offers a website firewall to protect your website against common threats.
9. Optimize Images on Your Site
We all know images take longer time to load as compare to texts. Which results in decrease your page load speed. To overome from this You would first discover all those large images by performance checkup, that can be reduced in size without loosing any UI/UX structure of your website. Then further reduce the sizes of those images.
10. Analyze Content and SEO Audit
Add this important task in your regular maintenance tasks. You can get your detailed website’s SEO ranking data and traffic information from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
And for the Content, you can try adding new information, adding images, inbound and outbound links to it from other pages on your website.