Have you ever wondered what maintenance tasks you should regularly perform on your WordPress site?
A WordPress maintenance routine requires very little time, but it ensures your site runs smoothly, remains secure, and operates at peak performance.
In this article, we’ll share the most important WordPress maintenance tasks to perform regularly and how to carry out each one.
Why and When to Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Your WordPress site is a powerful system composed of many parts. This includes your WordPress hosting, the WordPress software itself, plugins, and themes.
Additionally, you add your own content with text and images. Together, all these elements make your website a pleasant and welcoming place for your visitors and customers.
After starting a blog or website, many site owners don’t perform maintenance checks until a problem arises.
However, if you want optimal performance, then you need to perform some simple maintenance tasks regularly. These maintenance tasks ensure your website is always in the best shape.
How Often Should You Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks?
If you run a high-traffic website, you should go through this maintenance checklist every three months. For smaller websites with lower content and traffic, you should perform these maintenance tasks every six months.
Let’s take a look at the essential WordPress maintenance tasks you need to perform and how to do them:
- Change All Your WordPress Passwords
- Create a Complete Backup of Your Website
- Check and Update All WordPress Files
- Check and Delete Spam Comments
- Test All Your WordPress Forms
- Optimize Your WordPress Database
- Run Performance Tests
- Find and Fix 404 Errors
- Find and Fix Broken Links
- Perform a Thorough Content and SEO Audit
- Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site
- Control Access to Your Website
- Detect and Fix Technical Issues from Maintenance Activities
1. Change All Your WordPress Passwords
Passwords are your first line of defense against unauthorized access to your site. You should always use unique, strong passwords for all your online accounts. This includes your WordPress site, of course, as well as the database.
However, even if you use strong passwords, they could be compromised without your knowledge. This is why WordPress security experts recommend regularly changing your WordPress passwords. This includes the password for your WordPress admin area and the database.
The problem with strong passwords is that they are harder to remember. This is why we recommend using password manager applications to securely store and autofill passwords without needing to type them.
2. Create a Complete Backup of Your Website
Backups are one of the most important WordPress plugins in your arsenal. There are many great WordPress backup plugins that can help you automate the backup process completely. However, sometimes the backup solution can stop working suddenly without you noticing. From time to time, you need to run the backup plugin manually to create a complete backup of your website. After running the backup, check the files to see if they are safe and stored correctly in your chosen location.
3. Check and Update All WordPress Files
WordPress comes with a built-in system for managing updates for plugins and themes. You should always update WordPress to use the latest version, as well as keep all your plugins and themes up to date. That being said, there are some situations where you might miss an update. For example, when a premium plugin or theme license expires, the update check might fail. Go to the “Updates” page in WordPress to check manually. Review all installed plugins and themes to ensure they are running the latest version.
4. Check and Delete Spam Comments
From time to time, it’s good to take a quick look at spam comments to ensure that there are no real comments incorrectly marked as spam. Once you’re done, you can safely delete all spam comments from your site. If you have thousands of spam comments, you should delete them all from WordPress. This won’t necessarily improve performance, but it will ensure you’re not missing important comments.
5. Test All Your WordPress Forms
WordPress form plugins make it easy to create beautiful forms on your website. However, due to misconfiguration on your WordPress hosting server or your email service provider, sometimes these forms can stop sending emails suddenly. You need to check all the forms on your website to ensure they are working correctly. As a best practice, we recommend using the WP Mail SMTP plugin, as it provides email logging and will alert you when an email fails to send.
6. Optimize Your WordPress Database
WordPress stores most of the data in the WordPress database. This includes all your content, comments, users, and settings. Over time, the database can collect a lot of unnecessary data. This increases the size of WordPress backups, which can affect their loading, downloading, and restoration. Optimizing your WordPress database allows you to clean up the clutter and improve database performance.
7. Run Performance Tests
Many users optimize WordPress performance when they start their website but then forget about it. Over time, you add new content, install new plugins, or even change themes. All these elements can affect your website’s performance. Faster websites are not only appreciated by users but also help with search engine optimization. This is why you need to regularly run a thorough performance analysis of your website. When testing, don’t just focus on the homepage; try the most popular content pages and other important pages as well.
8. Find and Fix 404 Errors
When a user requests a page that doesn’t exist on your website, WordPress will show them a 404 error page. These errors are normal and nothing to worry about. However, 404 errors are frustrating and create a poor user experience. Track these pages and try to redirect them.
9. Find and Fix Broken Links
As your website grows, you’ll find that some external sites you linked to in older articles no longer exist. Some might have moved to different links, while others might disappear altogether. The problem with broken links is not limited to external ones. You might also accidentally add images that no longer exist or even write incorrect internal links. This is frustrating for your users and can affect their experience on your website. You need to add broken link checks to your WordPress maintenance routine.
10. Perform a Thorough Content and SEO Audit
The next thing to include in your maintenance tasks is a thorough content review. This involves data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, you can see where your visitors are coming from and what they do on your site. This data allows you to discover your site’s high-traffic content.
Google Search Console can help you find keywords that people search for when they find your site. You can sort the keywords by appearance in top results and then update your articles accordingly.
Even with excellent SEO scores, you can still improve your content. Try adding new information, images, and internal links to other pages on your website.
11. Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site
Loading images takes longer than loading text. This means page load speed can decrease. You might find some large images during your performance check. However, you might not notice those in your less popular articles. If you run a multi-author WordPress site, one of them might not be as careful as you with image sizes. Reviewing images and media files allows you to stay on top of this issue. You can check for images that can be reduced in size or are too large.
12. Control Access to Your Website
Some WordPress users don’t realize their site is under attack until it slows down or their rankings drop. We’ve already mentioned some precautions like changing passwords and manually creating backups. You also need to review site logins and access errors to see if there’s any unusual activity. Another good option is to add a security audit plugin to your site.
13. Detect and Fix Technical Issues from Maintenance Activities
Most WordPress site maintenance tasks are harmless and won’t affect your site’s normal operation. However, some tasks can slow down the site, such as running an image optimization plugin. If you run a staging site, you can perform maintenance tasks there and then push changes to the live site. Most WordPress users don’t run a staging site, though. In this case, you’ll need to expect a temporary slow site and some unexpected errors. One way to handle this is to put the site in maintenance mode. Alternatively, you can perform tasks during low-traffic hours.
We hope this article helped you learn the essential WordPress maintenance tasks to perform regularly on your site. If you liked this article, be sure to leave a comment and check out other articles on our site! For any questions, the Xplication team is at your disposal.
