The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Maintenance

Maintenance of WordPress website is always treated as the most hectic task, but it is very important. The web platforms which get little care or maintenance, can functions lower than normal and develop a lot of error.

Talking about security, a poorly managed web blog can become a liability. Unnecessary files and data can decrease the speed of your site. Security errors can let the hackers to hack your site easily, and they can use the site to commit fraud.

No matter what is the situation, wordpress maintenance should be done regularly to ensure the proper functioning of your website. It takes a lot of time to program and develop the best quality website.

But if you don’t maintain it regularly, it will eventually collapse, and all your hard work and investment can go down the drain.

Why should you do monthly WordPress maintenance task?

You all know that WordPress is a dynamic and advanced platform. It consists of several parts, such as WordPress hosting, plugins, themes and more.

On the other hand, you can add your content along with images, videos, and other multimedia. All these elements lead to a quality website.

Every month users get the new update for WordPress which enhances the functionalities and security of thee websites and blogs connected with WordPress.

The new upgrade helps in:

1. Keeping the security of the website intact.
2. Using responsive designs for the website.
3. Effective SEO tracking.
4. Increasing the user’s experiences for better usage and more.

How often should you do WordPress maintenance?

If the traffic to your website is huge, then WordPress Maintenance should be carried out once every three months. If you have a smaller website and traffic rate is low, you need to perform this once every six months.

Some important WordPress maintenance tasks and how to do those task

1. Update your password regularly

Your password acts as the first defence by preventing unauthorizes access to your WordPress website.

While setting the passwords for our WordPress site, database and FTP accounts, use strong and unique passwords. But sometimes those passwords can be hacked, and you will not be able to notice this.

So, the best thing that you can do is change your WordPress passwords regularly, including the WordPress admin area, FTP or SSH accounts, and the database password.

2. Regular website backups

Backups are essential but always neglected by the users. If you feel it takes a lot of time to do a backup, you can find a lot of effective and faster WordPress backup plugins for your WordPress.

Using the plugin, you can make the backup process fully automatic. But check them regularly to make sure that they are working properly. Sometimes, the automatic backup plugins may not work properly and can stop functioning without any notice.

That’s why it is important to go for manual backup your data frequently. After doing a manual backup, make sure that you have properly stored that data on your secure remote servers.

3. Core, theme, and plugin updates

WordPress comes with a system to manage the updates for its core, plugins, and themes. To enjoy a faster and safer site, always use the latest version of WordPress themes and plugins and keep all those up-to-date.

Sometimes, you may miss an update when the auto update fails to check for the update. In such cases, you will need to go to the WordPress Updates page and check for the update manually.

4. Use different maintenance modes

While doing WordPress Maintenance, prefer to take your site offline. This is quite important while working on a live site. This will prevent the viewers to see what you are changing in your site. You can also find different maintenance mode with WordPress.

Use them to carry out the task easily. There is a lot of things that you can do with the maintenance modes. You can even customize and styled the modes.

5. Check for spam comments

Spam comments come with links which stay there for few minutes to generate sales and boost SEO. Such comments can affect your WordPress site negatively.

The best thing that you can do is use the best plugins like Akismet. This keeps spam comments away.

But sometimes it can also treat a useful comment as a spam and will block it. So, you should check your spam comments regularly to make sure that no real comments have marked as spam.

After verifying the spam comments, now you can delete all those comments from the website. If there is a lot of spam comments, you can delete the comments in batches using this.

There is an easier way to turn off comment from a particular site. For this, you can use the Disable All Comments plugin. But make sure that you don’t need the comments in the future.

6. Check the WordPress forms

Your WordPress Maintenance task must include the verification of all your WordPress forms.

There are many plugins which can develop effective and beautiful WordPress form, for example, WinForms. But WordPress hosting server confliction can affect the performance of your WordPress forms.

That’s why regularly check the forms of your website to ensure the smooth running of WordPress forms. If you found any error, fix that as soon as possible to keep the site functioning properly.

7. Optimize your wordpress database

No matter what kind of database you have, it needs proper maintenance. To offer you better functionality, WordPress stores most of the data in the database of your WordPress.

The database stores the contents, settings, user’s data and comments. With time, the database collects a lot of useless data which affect the storage facility of the WordPress and affects it download, upload, backup and restore process. The maintenance depends upon the size of the database.

With optimizing the WordPress database, you can remove the clutters, defrag the tables and can boost the performance of the database.

8. Check for 404 Errors

If a page is not there on the website and the users search for that particular page, they will get a 404-error notification. This can occur when the user mistyped an address.

This is very normal.

But such notification can lead to a bad user experience. So, find out those 404 errors pages and fix it quickly.

No one can just sit and relax forever after developing a self-hosted WordPress blog. You need to improve its plugins and themes regularly. WordPress Maintenance will not affect your website functionality.

So these are the 8 proven ways to maintain your wordpress site. Using these tips, you can easily maintain a WordPress website which will run without any issues. For the more technical part you need to hire a  WordPress developer. They know the best way to maintain your website intact.

Also for effective SEO tracking, you can take the advice of SEO specialists, they will guide you in optimising your website as well as keep your website relevant and updated.