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WordPress Maintenance Tasks – Starting a Blog seems like an easy thing. But maintaining the site properly is something that site owners often seem to forget about.
Just like you need to maintain your car, your refrigerator or your air conditioner for its smooth service, your site needs proper maintenance too, for it to remain fast, secure and bug-free.
There are hundreds and thousands of websites on the internet, that are selling or writing about the same things that you are talking about. That leaves no reason for people to visit your site if it’s is not properly functioning.
Landing on to a slow site with too many errors and broken links can be the most annoying thing for a visitor.
It is therefore essential that you take care of your site properly and ensure that it is performing its best. In today’s post, I will tell you about 7 most Crucial Maintenance tasks For Your WP Sites that you should perform regularly.
Ideally, these tasks should be performed once in every 6 months with sites with low traffic. For advanced sites with a higher traffic, performing them once in every 3 months is essential.
So let’s check them out.
Crucial Maintenance Tasks For Your WP Sites
1. Backup Your Site
Filling up your site with amazing content needs time. And as it gets filled, your site stats slowly starts growing and you start getting backlinks and social shares for the content that you have created with so much care.
It feels great when your views increase and your subscriber’s list swells.
But what if one day all your content is randomly gone. Your site is all empty and you have nothing left.
That’s where your backup files come to your rescue. The WordPress market is flooded with tons of backup plugins. These plugins can help you automate the backup process for you.
This will securely backup all your files and you can easily access them in times of emergency.
However, back solutions sometimes do not work like we want them to. Therefore the best option to keep your data safe is by manually running your backup plugin so that a complete backup of the entire site is done.
Do not forget to cross-check if your files are safe on the location (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) you want it to be. You can use plugins like Backup Buddy for the purpose.
2. Update Your Files
Keep an eye on your WordPress core. Your site may have various plugins installed on your site. Make sure you keep your plugins and themes updated. Using outdated products on your site can make it vulnerable to attacks from different sources.
Your WordPress version should always be the latest one and the plugins and themes that you use on your site should be regularly updated.
Although WordPress notifies site admins about an update you might miss a notification on several occasions. It is, therefore, better to manually check for updates. Also, make sure you delete all inactive plugins from your site.
3. Fix Broken Links
Another major turn off for visitors can be to visit websites with too many broken links. Sometimes the external websites that your old posts were linked to, may not exist anymore.
Broken links may also result from your mistakes in typing the words in your links or formatting the links poorly.
Identify all such links and fix them for your visitors, because you don’t want to create a bad user experience.
There are several plugins that help you identify broken links on your site. Plugins like Broken Link Checker can help you solve your problem quickly.
4. Update Your Password
Most of us ignore this step. But updating our password is one thing you regularly need to do. Use a strong password with a combination of upper case, lower case characters, and numbers.
Update it regularly to protect your site from malicious attacks. This should be done for your admin area, FTP or SSH accounts, and your WordPress database. This will keep your site secure and prevent hackers from attacking it.
5. Optimize Your Speed by Optimizing Your Database
Your site might have an amazing speed when you just start your blog. But as it gradually starts growing, your site starts filling up with content, plugins, users, etc. You may also want to experiment with different themes for your appearance.
All of these might cut down your loading speed to a great extent. And this might adversely affect your site’s image when your visitors land on your site.
Try running a performance test and make sure you boost your site’s Speed & Performance.
A fast loading site not only has an amazing user experience but it also performs well with search engines. So keep an eye on your site’s speed from time to time. The faster your site is the better.
Another reason why your site may slow down is a cluttered database. As your site grows, it also gets loaded with unnecessary comments, lots of content, subscription and so on.
By optimizing your database you can get your database cleaned up to improve its performance.
You can use plugins like WP-Optimize to clean and speed up your database.
6. Fix 404 Errors
404 Errors come up when you remove a page but do not change the URL in posts in which you mention it. So when your users click on the existing link, they tend to land on to a page that displays the 404 error.
I personally hate this error and I am sure you are not fond of it either.
If you want to save your site’s reputation go fix all the 404 errors on your site now. The WordPress market is no short of plugins for technical fixes. You can do everything with these plugins even if you are a newbie in the field.
All 404 Redirect to Homepage can help you redirect your errors to the homepage by using the SEO 301 error redirection. This will help you have an upper hand when Google evaluates your overall site.
7. Create a Frequent SEO Audit
Sometimes you may notice that in spite of creating high-quality content, your site is unable to get the expected traffic from search engines. One reason for this might be a bad on-page SEO. Try conducting an SEO audit for your site and see if you can fix the problem.
There are several plugins to help you boost your on-page SEO. I personally use the Yoast SEO plugin and I have been using it for the past one and a half years. I have seen many of my clients using this amazing plugin on their site.
Learning the basics of SEO is one thing that you should invest your time on. This might help you get better rankings and also save money by not hiring an expert.
Conclusion
These are a few steps that WordPress experts do to keep their sites to keep them running smoothly. You should regularly perform these steps on your sites too if you to want your site to work properly.
I have tried covering the most Crucial Maintenance Tasks For Your WP Sites for effective business. If you know about another step that you think cannot be skipped, do let us know through your comments below. I would love to hear from you.
