What are the most important maintenance tasks you should perform on your WordPress site regularly?
It takes very little time to carry out routine WordPress maintenance tasks, and they ensure that your site is secure, safe, and performing at its best.
This article will show you how to perform the most important WordPress maintenance tasks regularly.
Why and When to Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Plugins and themes are parts of your WordPress website. They include your WordPress hosting, the WordPress software, and your WordPress plugins.
You also add your own text and image content to make your own website. Together, all of these elements create a website that your visitors and customers love.
It is common for website owners to ignore maintenance checks for their blogs and websites until something goes wrong.
The best way to keep your website in top shape is to perform simple WordPress maintenance tasks regularly.
How often should you perform WordPress maintenance tasks?
The WordPress maintenance tasks checklist should be run every three months for busy websites with a lot of traffic, and every six months for smaller websites with less traffic and content.
The following are the essential WordPress maintenance tasks that you need to perform and how to perform them.
– Table of Contents
The first line of defense against unauthorized access to your website is a strong, unique password.
You might not even know that your passwords have been compromised if you use strong passwords.
Changing your WordPress password on a regular basis, including the passwords for your WordPress admin area, FTP, or SSH accounts, and WordPress database password, is highly recommended by WordPress security experts.
Check out our beginner’s guide to changing your WordPress password for more information.
In order to store and fill passwords securely without typing them, we recommend password managers apps like LastPass, which allow you to create strong passwords without remembering them.
See our WordPress password management guide for details.
Making a full backup of your WordPress site is the most important WordPress maintenance task.
You should use a WordPress plugin that automates backups.
The WordPress backup process can be completely automated with plugins like UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy.
You may not even realize that your backup solution has stopped working sometimes.
You need to run your backup plugin manually every now and then to ensure your website is properly backed up.
After running your backup, make sure your backup files are properly stored at the remote location of your choice, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
As soon as you update WordPress, all your plugins and themes will also be updated. WordPress comes with a system to manage updates for the core as well as plugins and themes.
There are times when you may miss an update; for instance, when a premium plugin’s license expires, it may not check for updates.
If your plugins and themes aren’t running the latest version, then make sure to document the reason why you’re not updating them.
Visit the WordPress Updates page to manually check for updates.
To prevent comment spam in WordPress, many website owners use Akismet. It keeps spam away from your queue for moderation.
The spam comments may sometimes be marked as spam by Akismet, so it is a good idea to check them carefully from time to time to ensure they aren’t real comments.
When you’re done, you can safely delete all spam comments.
If you have thousands of spam comments, you should batch delete all spam comments in WordPress.
The only benefit you will gain is that you will not miss any genuine comments if you do so.
You can create beautiful forms on your website using WordPress form builder plugins such as WPForms.
The forms may suddenly stop sending emails due to misconfigurations on your WordPress hosting server or your email provider.
Make sure all forms on your website are functioning properly.
If you are experiencing problems sending emails from WordPress, see our guide on fixing the WordPress not sending email problem.
The WP Mail SMTP plugin is a good choice as it has email logging as well as email failure alerts.
You can access all of your content, comments, settings, and users through the WordPress database.
WordPress backup sizes may increase as your database accumulates unnecessary data. This may affect uploading, downloading, and restoring backups.
It is possible to clean up clutter in your WordPress database, defragment tables, and improve database performance by optimizing it.
We have a guide that explains step-by-step how to optimize your WordPress database.
WordPress users often optimize their website’s performance at the beginning, but then neglect to do so later.
It is quite possible to affect the performance of your WordPress site as time goes by by adding new content, installing new plugins, and even changing the theme.
Regularly reviewing your website’s performance will improve your SEO rankings as well as the user experience.
Test your most popular content, as well as all your important pages, when reviewing your site’s performance.
To boost WordPress speed and performance, follow our step-by-step guide.
Users will see a 404 error page when they request a page on your website that does not exist.
The 404 error that occurs because a user mistyped an address is normal and should not be a cause for concern.
However, 404 errors that occur because a website is no longer available are frustrating and create a bad user experience.
You can easily track 404 error pages in WordPress and redirect them if you are not already tracking them.
Your website will grow over time, and you will find that some websites you linked to in your older articles no longer exist. Some may have moved to a different location and some may simply no longer exist.
Your site’s user engagement may suffer if you add broken images, poorly formatted links, or misspell your own links. Broken links are not just limited to external links.
Check your WordPress website for broken links as part of your regular WordPress maintenance tasks routine. See our guide on how to find and fix broken links in WordPress for instructions.
Using the information from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can also thoroughly review your content as part of your regular WordPress maintenance tasks.
You can use Google Analytics to discover the content on your website that has lots of traffic, but low conversion rates. It shows you how your site is performing and where your visitors are coming from.
It is possible to sort the Search Performance page in Google Search Console to see keywords where your site ranks higher if you update the articles related to those keywords.
The performance checkup of your site will show you some large images that take longer to load than text. This decreases your page load speed.
It is possible, though, that you may not catch them in less popular posts or articles.
If you run a WordPress multi-author site, then some of your authors might not be as attentive to image size as you are.
You can use this check to find images that are too large and reduce their size by reviewing your images and media library.
See our guide on saving web-optimized images for more information.
When a WordPress site slows down or search rankings decline, some users are unaware they have been attacked.
It is also a good idea to review the access and error logs on your website to see if they contain any unusual activity.
We have already discussed some security precautions like changing passwords and creating manual backups.
If you want your site to be secure, you can add a security audit plugin.
A website firewall that prevents common threats is also available from Sucuri. It is a website security company that can protect your website from common threats, such as those on the Internet.
Use our step-by-step guide to complete a complete security audit of your WordPress site.
The majority of WordPress maintenance tasks are harmless and won’t affect your site’s normal performance. However, some may slow it down, such as checking for broken links or running an image optimizer plugin.
You can perform maintenance tasks on your staging site and then push them live if you have a staging site.
If you don’t run a staging site, you might experience a temporary slowdown and unexpected errors.
Your WordPress site can be put in maintenance mode or you can perform these tasks during low traffic times.
Check out our guide to fixing common WordPress errors.
If the error you encounter is not listed there, then follow the steps in our WordPress troubleshooting guide to find the solution.
The purpose of this article was to teach you how to perform important WordPress maintenance tasks regularly.
To create custom design layouts without coding, check out our tips for increasing traffic to your blog and our comparison of WordPress page builders.
Note: If you want to take any service related to
WordPress maintenance tasks, our company can provide you with these services. We have Expert Designer & Developer in Web Development. Contact us to get the service.
