WordPress Maintenance: 12 Important Tasks You Should Do
Have you ever wondered what to do after setting up a WordPress website? Usually, after starting a site with WordPress, users don't do periodic maintenance checks until something goes wrong! By regularly performing WordPress maintenance tasks, you can ensure that your WordPress site is performing at its best at all times. In the following, we explain the 12 essential tasks to maintain and maintain WordPress that must be done regularly and periodically.
When and why WordPress maintenance should be done
Your WordPress website is a powerful system made up of different components. These components include the hosting service of the site, the WordPress software itself, plugins, and its graphic skins.
Add to these the content you have produced, and add text and photos. The sum of these components make your website and attract the attention of your visitors and customers.
However, this system requires care and it must be ensured that it always performs optimally. For this, there are a number of WordPress maintenance tasks that are not too difficult and should be done regularly according to a schedule to ensure the optimal performance of the site.
How often should WordPress maintenance tasks be performed?
If you have a busy site with a high volume of traffic, you need to do things related to WordPress maintenance every three months. For smaller sites with less traffic and less content, this should be done every six months.
Next, we will take a look at the tasks that are necessary to maintain and maintain WordPress.
1- Changing all site passwords
A password is your first line of defense against unauthorized access to your website. You should always use strong and unique passwords for all your online accounts, such as your WordPress website, FTP accounts, and databases.
However, even if you use a strong password, it is possible for your password to be compromised or stolen; And you will never be aware of this happening.
For this reason, WordPress security experts recommend that you change all the keywords of the site and its different sections once in a while to prevent unauthorized access and possible abuse. Thus, changing the password is one of the most important things that must be done to maintain WordPress.
2- Complete backup of the site
One of the most important things to do in WordPress maintenance is backup. There are backup plugins in WordPress that allow you to backup your entire site automatically and according to a schedule.
However, your backup program may suddenly crash or malfunction for no apparent reason.
Therefore, it is better to check your backup program from time to time and backup manually if needed. Also, after the backup, make sure that the backup file is saved correctly in the desired location (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) and that there are no problems.
3- Updating all files
WordPress has a built-in system that manages updates to WordPress core, plugins, and theme. You should always use the latest version of WordPress and update all plugins and the graphic skin of your site.
But there may be situations where the update is not done automatically. For example, the subscription of a paid plugin or graphical skin may expire and cannot perform the update operation.
In such cases, go to the WordPress updates page and manually check for updates. Check all plugins and themes you have installed and make sure they are all updated.
4- Delete spam comments
If you use the systems that are in place to deal with spam comments, you shouldn't have much of a problem with spam comments. But sometimes these systems mistakenly remove correct comments from the list of comments.
So, take a look at the spammed comments from time to time to make sure that no valid and valid comments have been mistakenly spammed. After this, remove all spam comments from your website.
5- Control all WordPress forms
WordPress form builder plugins, such as WPForms, allow you to easily create beautiful forms on your WordPress website. But these forms may not work properly and send emails due to incorrect configuration of WordPress hosting or email service provider.
Therefore, it is necessary to check all the forms on your website to ensure that everything is working properly.
6- WordPress database optimization
WordPress often stores data in the WordPress database. All content, comments, users, and site settings are stored in its database. However, over time, too much unnecessary information may be stored in your database. This will increase the size of your WordPress backup and negatively affect uploading, downloading, and restoring your backup.
Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the database. This work, which is considered among the maintenance tasks of WordPress, improves the performance of the database.
7- Performance test
Many WordPress users test and optimize its performance at the very beginning when they launch their site; But later they forget to do it again.
During this time, new content and materials are added to the site, new plugins are installed, and even the graphic skin changes. All of these can affect site performance.
The high speed of the site not only has a positive effect on the user experience, but it is also effective in SEO. That's why you should check the performance of your website regularly.
When checking site performance, don't just check the home page. Also check other popular sections and important pages.
8- Fixing 404 errors
If a user tries to open a page that doesn't exist on the site, WordPress will show him a 404 error page. If the 404 error display is due to the user's mistake in typing the site address, there is no need to worry, because the error was made by the user.
But if the 404 error display is due to the absence of the desired page on the site, and for example the page has been removed from the server, it will harm the user experience.
Therefore, it is necessary to regularly find 404 errors on your site and fix them.
9- Fixing broken links
As your site gets bigger, you will notice that some of the external sites that you linked to in your older content (external links) no longer exist. Some of those sites may have moved to other locations, and others may have disappeared altogether.
The problem of broken links is not only limited to external links. This issue may also happen inside your site. It means that you may accidentally make a mistake in linking pages and photos and inadvertently create a broken link. Broken links harm the user experience and increase the bounce rate.
Be sure to check the links and fix the broken ones in the WordPress maintenance program.
10- Content control and SEO of the site
Another thing that you should do in the periodic maintenance service of WordPress is to carefully review the content of the site. For this, you must from Google Search Console And Google Analytics use.
Google Analytics tells you where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website. This information tells you where visitors came from, what content they viewed, and whether or not they converted.
The Google Search Console service also shows you search analytics. Using this service, you can find out for which keywords your site appears in Google. You can categorize these keywords to find more useful words and update their content to eventually attract more users.
11- Optimizing WordPress website photos
Photos take more time to load and therefore slow down the page speed of the site. The larger the image size, the more the page load speed decreases. When checking the performance of the site, you will notice some of these bulky photos. But you probably won't notice the photos that are on the pages and content with low viewership.
If the provision and entry of information on the site is done by several people, it is possible that all these people are not as careful as you are about the size of photos and upload large photos on the site.
Therefore, when maintaining WordPress, pay attention to the photo library and folder so as not to suffer from the problem of non-optimized photos. With this you can find photos that can be reduced in size, or photos that are too large.
12- WordPress security review
Some WordPress users don't realize their site has been hacked until their site slows down or their Google ranking drops.
We have already mentioned some precautions regarding WordPress security, such as changing your password and making a backup copy of your site. In addition to these, it is necessary to regularly check site access and error logs to ensure that nothing unusual is happening on your site.
