Good site maintenance is necessary for proper and long-term functioning of the site. It allows you to spot problems early, fix them and ensure that your site remains operational and useful. Follow our list of essentials below to successfully maintain your WordPress site.
There are many reasons for creating a website, and its success depends on many factors. One of the aspects that affect the success of a website is proper maintenance, which is often neglected. All WordPress sites require at least some level of maintenance to keep them secure and functioning well. And although you need to put effort into maintenance, it doesn't have to be complex and complicated if you know exactly what to do and when.
To help you in this endeavour, we've put together a list of essentials to guide you through WordPress site maintenance and help keep your site up-to-date, secure and running smoothly. Although this may seem like a difficult task, do not despair. We've broken down these tasks by how often they should be done, ranging from weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks.
Let's start with a tutorial for proper site maintenance.
Why should you maintain your WordPress site?
Your website is kind of like a car. If you treat it well, it will serve you well for many years. However, in case you give up on maintenance, problems can start to pile up and if you really put off fixing them, your site can even stop working.
Your site itself is also constantly changing. Maybe you're publishing new content, changing the design, adding new features, and more. Put all those changes together and there's a big risk that something will go wrong and your site will stop working.
This sounds a little scary, but it doesn't have to be. Most of the time, all these changes go by the wayside. However, to avoid the rare situation where something goes wrong and to keep up with trends on your site, it's important to invest some time in site maintenance.
WordPress Site Maintenance List
Weekly site maintenance tasks
1 – Visit your site
This seems simple, but just visiting the front-end of your site and clicking on a few key pages is a great way to uncover any potential issues. However, it's easy to forget about this and spend all your time on your site's dashboard instead. So once a week, just visit your site and review a few key pages to make sure everything is still working as you expect.
2 – Edit the comments
If you allow comments on your site, you'll need to spend some time editing them each week to make sure you're approving real comments and flagging/deleting spam.
To save time editing comments, you can consider using a spam protection plugin such as Akismet. That way, you only need to log in once a week to approve comments and see if Akismet accidentally marked the right comment as spam.
3 - Back up the site
Having a recent backup is essential to protecting your site data. So if your hosting provider doesn't take care of the backups for you, you have to do the backup yourself. For most sites, a weekly backup is sufficient.
If you have a static site with brochures that never change, ie. no blog articles or comments, then you can backup the site once a month. The optimal frequency of backing up your site really depends on how often you make changes and add content to your database.
4 - Update the site (WordPress, plugins, themes)
If you want to protect your site so it can continue to function normally, applying updates quickly is essential. Every week you should check for any updates to WordPress, plugins or themes.
If there is something to update, you should do so immediately. In case you are concerned about compatibility issues, you can test the changes on a staging site before applying them to your live site. Or you can put your site into maintenance mode while you apply the update.
5 – Testing key forms and options
If you have important forms or options (like the payment process) it is important to test them regularly. There's nothing worse than wondering why you haven't gotten any leads/sales in the past 10 days, only to find out it's because your form has stopped working.
On some sites, you may want to do this once a month instead of once a week. It really depends on how necessary the forms/options are for your business. Forms where you lose a client or income because of one problem, it's always good to test once a week. And for really badly needed forms/options, you might want to set up some sort of automated monitoring system. For example, Pingdom offers transaction monitoring to test key forms/options on a daily basis.
6 – Check Google Search Console
If Google encounters any issues with your site's SEO or mobile optimization, you will receive alerts in the Google Search Console. For this reason, it's important to check in frequently to see if Google has reported any issues with your site.
You can quickly see all issues by clicking on the notification bell in the upper right corner.
You can also review other reports to see changes and trends.
Monthly site maintenance tasks
7 – Run performance tests
How fast your page loads plays a key role in user experience and conversion rates, and even has a small SEO positive.
When you built your site, you probably optimized it for good performance. However, this does not automatically mean that your site will remain optimized, so it is important to still periodically evaluate site performance to catch any potential problems.
Once a month is quite enough to do optimization tests, and for some critical sites you might even need to do it once a week.
8 - Analyze the traffic on your site
To understand what is happening on your site, you should use some kind of web analytics tool like Google Analytics.
If digital marketing is a serious part of your strategy, you probably already check your web analytics on a daily basis. Most webmasters don't need to check it often, but it's definitely useful to check in once a month to keep up with trends and what's going on.
If SEO is an important part of your strategy, you may want to set up keyword monitoring to monitor your site's Google rankings and perform monthly checks.
9 – Run a security scan
Since WordPress is quite popular, it attracts a lot of malicious viruses. To make sure your site doesn't fall victim, it's a good idea to run regular security scans to catch potential problems. Most WordPress security plugins include automatic security scanning features.
10 - Optimize your site's database
Your site's database is what stores all your content, theme settings, plugin settings, etc. It can create a lot of clutter over time through things like article revisions, temporary changes, spam comments, and the like. For this reason, it's a good idea to periodically optimize your site's database to remove all this junk.
You can do this with some performance plugins, including WP Rocket. These plugins also allow you to schedule database optimization to run automatically.
11 – Check for broken links or 404 errors
Broken links or 404 errors are terrible for the user experience on your site, as they prevent visitors from finding what they're looking for.
Although broken links and 404 errors are separate things, they go hand in hand, as a broken link usually leads directly to a 404 error. If you're not familiar with a 404 error, it's an error your site displays when a visitor opens a URL that doesn't exist.
To check your site for broken links, you can use the broken link checker plugin. To find the pages that visitors tried to access that resulted in 404 errors, you can search for something like “Not Found” in Google Analytics and then click through the list to find the specific URLs that triggered the 404 errors.
In addition to fixing 404 errors on your site, you can also create a custom 404 page, with the help of Elementor, that can help visitors find what they're looking for.
12 – Verify your site backups
A backup is only good if it works. So while you should be backing up your site once a week, it's also important to periodically check that those backups are actually working. You can do this by backing up your site to a staging site or by using a local WordPress development environment with tools like Local or DevKinsta.
Annual site maintenance tasks
13 – Consider whether you need new hosting
As your site grows, it's very possible that it will grow so much that it outgrows your current hosting. This is a good problem to have, if you can call it that, but it may be necessary to upgrade your hosting to a higher level or even switch to another, better hosting provider.
If you are already running into hosting limitations, your provider will likely contact you. But if they don't, it's still a good idea to contact them once a year or more, to check if the hosting still meets your needs in terms of performance, reliability and features.
14 – Change your WordPress password
All the WordPress security tips in the world aren't enough if a virus gets hold of your username and password. For this reason, it's a good idea to follow good password principles and change your WordPress admin password at least once a year.
This, combined with other tactics like login restrictions, should protect you from hacker attacks and other login-based threats.
Be sure to enter a strong, unique password. Password managers like LastPass or Bitwarden make it easy to securely store a unique password for each WordPress site.
15 – Revise your content
A content audit is a great way to improve SEO and user experience on your site. With it, you can double up on your site's best performing content and fix its weakest content.
Basically, your audit objectives are:
– Updating and improving top performing content to help it maintain its rankings or achieve even better search engine performance
- Removing ineffective content and merging its content into other content or redirecting to other content.
- Also, the audit will help you understand what content works best for your site, so you can focus your strategy going forward.
16 – Revise your plugins
Every plugin you add to your site presents a potential security vulnerability and potentially impairs your site's performance. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use plugins, it just means you should be careful and only use neophdone plugins.
For this reason, it's a good idea to review once a year whether your site is still benefiting from each plugin you use. If your site isn't getting as much use as you thought it would when you installed it, consider deactivating and deleting it.
Keep your site maintained and eliminate all obstacles
This list is not fixed and you may want to adjust the frequency for your site. For example, if site forms don't play a critical role in your business, you probably shouldn't be checking them once a week.
However, we've tried to find a good frequency that will be optimal for most sites, so this list is a great place to start when creating your maintenance plans.
If this maintenance seems complicated, you may want to consider managed WordPress hosting, which can do some of these tasks for you, such as handling site backups, security scans, updates, and the like. You can also consider paying for a maintenance service for your site. If you decide for such assistance, please feel free to contact us through this link.
Source: elementor
