Step by Step Guide to Maintain Your WordPress Website
Ongoing website maintenance is essential in order to keep your WordPress website healthy and long-lasting. This will allow you to identify and correct problems in good time, and ensure your site remains operational.
Why Do You Need Website Maintenance?
There are several purposes one creates a website, and there are multiple reasons for their success.
Adequate site maintenance is often overlooked by site owners, though, this is one of the most important aspects of the success of a website.
All WordPress websites require a certain level of maintenance to ensure that they are safe and operate well. Although this sometimes requires much work on the part of the maintenance team of the web site, although, it is not a complicated process if you know exactly what, how and when to do.
Even though this might seem a daunting task, do not despair! It’s worth dividing up these tasks by the frequency they are performed. Thus, plan:
- weekly maintenance tasks,
- monthly maintenance tasks,
- then annual WordPress website maintenance tasks.
Your WordPress website is like a car. If you treat it right, it will be able to generate revenue for you in subsequent years, but if you neglect its maintenance, that may build up problems. Or if you really procrastinate things, your website can even stop.
WordPress keeps changing continuously
WordPress staff continually develop new features, correct errors, and troubleshoot security issues discovered. The same applies to all add-ons, i.e. WordPress plugins.
Your website itself is constantly changing. One day, you add new content or change the design, the other day, you try out new features on your website. Developing your website always carries the risk of something not working properly.
This is when a WordPress maintenance checklist comes handy, essential for your WordPress website to update in time, remain safe and operate smoothly.
Work through the following checklist of ours to successfully maintain your WordPress website:
Weekly WordPress maintenance tasks
- Visit your website and verify it
- Moderate the comments
- Back up your website
- Apply the updates (Core, Plugins)
- Test the key forms and services
- Check the Google Search Console settings and error messages
Monthly WordPress maintenance tasks
- Run performance tests
- Analyze your website traffic by Google Analytics
- Run a security check
- Optimize your website database
- Check for broken links or 404 errors
- Check the backups of your website
Monthly WordPress maintenance tasks
- Consider if you need extra storage space
- Change your WordPress password
- Optimize your website content as far as search optimization is concerned
- Check the plugins
Conclusion: This checklist is not carved in stone, you can change it at your own discretion. We hope our checklist will serve as a good starting point for you to draw up your WordPress maintenance plan.
