What is WordPress Website Maintenance?
In short, WordPress maintenance refers to a variety of tasks used to continually monitor and improve the performance, security, and quality of your WordPress site.
Your website requires ongoing attention. These tasks may come up monthly, weekly, or even daily. Maintenance includes:
- Backing up your site: This involves saving several copies of your website in various locations so that you can restore it in the event of a security breach or a mistake that deletes your files.
- Updating WordPress core: WordPress is constantly being updated to fix bugs such as security vulnerabilities. You should stay updated with the latest version to ensure that your site is as safe as possible.
- Keeping themes and plugins up to date: Themes and plugins are regularly updated. This includes security updates, bug fixes, and updates to stay compatible with the latest version of WordPress. It’s important to keep up with the latest versions of your themes and plugins to benefit from these upgrades.
- Clearing your cache: For websites, caches are saved files that can help your site to load faster. Over time, cached files can start to build up and cause site bloat. You may need to clear the cache periodically to reset things.
- Optimizing your database: Your WordPress database is a set of structured data at the core of your site. It contains user roles, post information, and other site data. As time passes, the database can collect unnecessary information, such as trashed posts. Optimizing your database clears this excess data. This can help your site load faster and keep your site’s size down.
There are many other small and less frequently needed tasks that also require attention, such as clearing out your Media Library, deleting spam comments, and fixing broken links. These examples just scratch the surface – the list goes on!
Why WordPress Maintenance Is Critical to Your Site’s Success
As we just discussed, WordPress maintenance tasks are important to keeping your site running smoothly. The benefits of performing regular maintenance include added security and increases in site speed.
Regular maintenance can even boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since search engines favor sites that load fast and are easy to use. A site that loads slowly and contains errors such as broken links appears less trustworthy. These things can cause users to abandon your site.
Additionally, internet users have short attention spans. If they can’t quickly find what they are looking for, users are more likely to bounce. They would prefer to leave your site to easily accomplish their goals elsewhere rather than poke around on your site for long periods of time without success.
To that end, maintenance can even impact your conversion rate. By keeping your site professional and usable, you maximize your chances of engaging visitors so that they’re more likely to become returning users.
However, maintaining a WordPress website on your own is an arduous task. It requires frequent–and sometimes daily–monitoring. Running a business is challenging enough without having to deal with your website every day.
Fortunately, there are WordPress maintenance services designed to take on the grunt work so that you don’t have to. In the next section, we’ll review eight platforms that you can use to help maintain your WordPress site.
WordPress Quarterly/Half-Yearly Maintenance Checklist
- Change passwords. Change your password, and have other users change theirs too. Don’t make it easy for hackers—use a strong password.
- Minimize admin users. Delete or downgrade unnecessary admin users (and delete the default admin username). Hacked admin accounts can do the most damage to your site, so minimize the number.
- Delete unused plugins and themes. Deactivate and delete all unnecessary plugins and themes, though never remove the latest default WordPress theme. Unnecessary plugins increase your website’s overhead and the risk of vulnerabilities.
- Delete unnecessary files Website clutter can hide vulnerabilities. Check for unnecessary files in your wp-content folder and browse through your Media Library to remove any images, videos and audio files you no longer require. You can use a plugin like Delete Not Used Image or Media Cleaner to automatically remove unreferenced images. Perform a backup before deleting anything!
- Fix dead links. You don’t want your visitors receiving a “Page Not Found” error when clicking on a link. Find any dead links by using a link checking tool like Broken Link Checker or Link Checker.
- Veryify your contact form. Send yourself a message using your website’s contact form, and make sure you get it.
- Optmimize your database. Delete any draft posts you’ll never finish, and empty your comment spam. Then optimize your database by running a plugin like WP-Optimize, Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions or WP-DBManager.
- Speed audit. Use Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your site loads. If it takes more than five seconds, consider implementing caching and other measures to speed up your site. Slow sites lose visitors and search rankings.
