Crucial WordPress Maintenance Tasks to Perform Regularly
Have you ever wondered which important maintenance tasks you should perform regularly on your WordPress site?
Why and When to Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Your WordPress website is a powerful system made of several parts.
These include your WordPress hosting, the WordPress software itself, and your plugins and themes.
On top of that, you add your content with text and images.
After starting a blog or website, many website owners do not perform maintenance checks unless something breaks.
If you want optimal performance, then you will need to perform simple site maintenance tasks regularly.
These tasks ensure that your website is always in the best shape.
How often should you perform WordPress maintenance tasks?
You should go through this WordPress maintenance checklist every 3-6 months.
Essential WordPress maintenance tasks you need to perform
1. Change All Your WordPress Passwords
Change all your passwords regularly.
Passwords are your first defense against hackers trying to gain unauthorized access to your website.
You should always use strong, unique passwords for all your online accounts.
However, even if you are using strong passwords, they could be compromised without you knowing.
That’s why WordPress security experts recommend changing your WordPress passwords regularly.
This includes passwords for your WordPress admin area, FTP or SSH accounts, and your WordPress database password.
2. Create a Complete Backup of Your Website
A backup plugin is one of the most important WordPress plugins in your arsenal.
There are plenty of great WordPress backup plugins like Duplicator, UpdraftPlus, or BlogVault.
These tools can help you completely automate the WordPress backup process.
Once in a while, you need to manually run your backup plugin to create a complete backup of your website.
3. Check and Update All WordPress Files
WordPress comes with a built-in system to manage updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes.
You should always update WordPress to use the latest version, as well as keep all your plugins and themes updated.
You can go to the WordPress Updates page to manually check for updates.
Review all your installed plugins and themes to make sure that they are running the latest version.
If they are not, then make sure to document a reason why you are choosing not to update.
4. Check and Delete Spam Comments
Many website owners use Akismet to combat comment spam in WordPress.
It automatically keeps spam away from your comment moderation queue.
Once in a while, you need to take a quick look at the spam comments to ensure that there are no real comments incorrectly marked as spam.
Once you are done, you can safely delete all spam comments from your website.
5. Test All Your WordPress Forms
However, due to misconfiguration on your WordPress hosting server or your email service provider, sometimes these forms may suddenly stop sending emails.
You need to check all forms on your website to make sure that they are working properly.
6. Optimize Your WordPress Database
WordPress stores most of its data in your WordPress database. It contains all your content, comments, users, and settings.
Over time, your database may gather a lot of unnecessary data.
This increases your WordPress backup sizes which may affect uploading, downloading, and restoring backups.
Optimizing your WordPress database allows you to clean up clutter, defragment tables, and improve database performance.
7. Run Performance Tests
As time goes by, you add new content, install new plugins, and may even change the theme.
All of these items can affect the performance of your WordPress site.
Faster websites are not just good for user experience, but they also improve your SEO rankings.
For best results, follow our step-by-step guide to boost WordPress speed and performance.
8. Find and Fix 404 Errors
When a user requests a page that doesn’t exist on your website, then WordPress will show them a 404 error page.
404 errors that occur because a user mistyped an address are normal and nothing to be worried about.
404 errors that occur because a page is no longer available are frustrating for users and create a bad user experience.
9. Find and Fix Broken Links
As your website grows, you will realize that some external websites that you linked to in your older articles do not exist anymore.
Some may have moved to new locations, while others may just disappear.
The broken links issue is not just limited to external links.
You might accidentally add broken images, poorly formatted links, or misspell your links.
This can be frustrating for your visitors and harms your site’s user engagement.
You need to check your website for broken links as part of your WordPress maintenance routine.
10. Perform a Thorough Content and SEO Audit
The next thing you need to include in your regular maintenance tasks is a thorough in-depth review of your content.
This is where the data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics shows you where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website.
This data allows you to discover content on your website where you have lots of traffic but your conversion rate is low.
Google Search Console’s Performance page can help you find search keywords where your site appears in the results.
If you are using All in One SEO, then you can set a particular keyword as your focus keyphrase.
All-in-One SEO will give you a True SEO Score plus specific optimization tips.
Even with an excellent SEO score, you can still further improve your content.
Try adding new information, adding images, and linking to it from other pages on your website.
11. Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site
Images take longer to load than text. This means they increase your page load time.
You will discover some overly large images during the performance checkup of your site.
Reviewing your images and media library allows you to stay on top of the issue.
You can perform this check to find images that are too large and reduce their size.
12. Review WordPress Security Logs
Some WordPress users don’t realize that their site is under attack until it slows down or their search rankings drop.
You also need to review your site’s access and error logs to see if there is any unusual activity on your site.
Another good option is to add a security audit plugin to your site.
Use Sucuri or MalCare.
Both are reliable website security companies that offer a website firewall to protect your website against common threats.
13. Troubleshoot Maintenance Tasks
Most WordPress website maintenance tasks are quite harmless and will not affect your website’s normal functioning.
Some may slow down your site, like checking for broken links or running an image optimizer plugin.
One way to deal with this is by putting your WordPress site in maintenance mode.
Alternatively, you can perform these tasks during your low-traffic hours.
