10 Essential WordPress Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Site Updated

Yes, Regular WordPress Maintenance is Essential!

Here at PixoLabo, we specialize in building top-rated WordPress websites for businesses, product brands, and organizations of all kinds. And it always amazes us that many business owners honestly believe their responsibilities end when they launch their business website. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case. Any website is vulnerable if it is left unattended. And CMS sites like WordPress are especially vulnerable. These WordPress maintenance tips will help you keep your site all that it can be.

WordPress powers about 25% of all the world’s websites. WordPress hacks are also the most common. BigDropInk

Website maintenance is something most business owners don’t focus on; they have lots of other things to do as well! It is only when their site starts acting up that they begin to notice. Unfortunately, at that time, it may be too late to help your site. These WordPress maintenance tips will help you prevent that. All you have to do is implement them!

What Happens If You Neglect WordPress Maintenance?

WordPress out of the box is excellent. Properly optimized and maintained, it can load a webpage in less than half a second! However, if you neglect WordPress maintenance, your website can become slow and cause random errors. Your site may be exploited by hackers looking to take advantage of your audience and resources. Like running a business, WordPress websites need maintenance and support over time. And WordPress maintenance can be easy once you learn the basics. Our WordPress maintenance tips will show you what to do.

I suggest that you get into a regular habit of maintaining your WordPress website, say on a Wednesday afternoon. Of course, you can choose any day or time that is a bit slower for you. Use these WordPress maintenance tips to schedule tasks you need to perform. As you will notice, you can automatically schedule some tasks, so you don’t have to deal with them. Others you will need to perform manually.

10 Essential WordPress Maintenance Tips

Backups

One of the most important steps you can take when looking to maintain a WordPress website is to set up regular backups to the cloud. However, bear in mind that if your site were to be compromised, a backup could also be compromised. Still, you’ll have something you can work from, and you won’t have to start from scratch after losing your website’s data.

WordPress Updates

Most WordPress websites that are slow and buggy have issues because they use bloated themes and have too many plugins. Any good theme or plugin will release updates to improve their code, which will enhance your website’s performance. Such updates can cause issues due to incompatibility, so it’s up to you to test and roll them out as required.

Outdated Themes and Plugins

If a plugin is no longer updated, maybe it is no longer supported by its developers. So it’s worth checking the last updated time in the view details section. If it has been a year or more since the previous update, you may want to consider removing or replacing such plugins with another.

Security Scanning

A critical aspect of regular WordPress maintenance is keeping your WordPress site secure. Performing a daily security scan is a must; you can use the WordFence plugin for this. If you notice something odd with your site, it may not be a technical issue. Perhaps hackers are using your resources to run their scripts, which can affect your website’s performance.

About 30,000 websites are infected with some type of malware daily. BigDropInk

Database Optimization

WordPress revisions are helpful as they store versions of your content, which allow you to revert your changes should your content go wrong. However, these revisions and other data such as spam comments use up space in your database. They are loaded each time someone visits your site. Cleaning out such useless data can go a long way to improving the performance of your website.

Broken Links

Broken links can annoy visitors who are trying to find the information they require. Find these links before your users and the search engines, take action by fixing them, or if the pages linked to no longer exist, redirect them to an alternative page. Regularly removing or updating broken links will not only make your website more user-friendly. It will also improve your search engine optimization.

Comment Moderation

If you have comments enabled on your website, then you need to moderate them. By going in and approving, responding, and marking spam, you’ll keep your visitors engaged and the conversation flowing.

Traffic Analytics

Checking in on your analytics will enable you to see trends and check if you are meeting your goals. By identifying where your website needs improvement, you can make tweaks to test and improve gradually and then replicate the successes to different areas of your website.

Testing

It’s essential to check the functionality of your website to ensure that everything is working as expected. A usability audit should include checking your site on different devices and browsers for bugs and testing your forms to ensure deliverability. You should also test your navigation to ensure that each link goes to it’s intended destination.

On-Page SEO

When it comes to on-page SEO, every page, post, and category should have a meta description. On-page SEO is easy to overlook. An SEO audit will ensure that search engines understand your content so they can best find it and show it to people searching for your content.

There is a range of things you can do to maintain your on-page SEO. Start by optimizing your images and including alt text, and adding links to your content. Include references to show that you have done your research, and ensuring that your keyword for a particular page or post appears in the first 100 words.

Doing Your Own WordPress Website Maintenance

Performing regular maintenance and updates on your WordPress site is much more time and cost-effective than a complete rebuild after your website crashes or gets hacked. Getting in the habit of regular WordPress maintenance is not difficult. If you do this weekly, it will only take you a few minutes. We recommend that you set aside a half-hour a week to perform updates and maintenance on your site. Most likely, it will take you less than that!

It only takes about 10 minutes to crack a lowercase password that is six characters long. BigDropInk

If you are unable to follow these WordPress maintenance tips, you should check to see if your web designer or host offers a website maintenance plan. And sign up for it! If your current service provider does not provide this service, find one who does. To have a worry-free online presence, you must follow our WordPress maintenance tips regularly.

The Average Website Hack Costs a Small Business Over $2500 To Repair. Heartland Computer

Additional WordPress Maintenance Tips and Tricks

For additional WordPress tips and tricks, check out these posts from our blog:

• 45 Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Be Using
• 20 Easy-to-Use WordPress SEO Tips, Tricks, and Resources
• Essential WordPress Security Tips Any Business Owner Can Implement
• Restoring Your WordPress Website After It Got Hacked
• Page Speed Optimization – Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website
• 21 Essential WordPress SEO Tips for Small Business Websites

Do You Need Help With WordPress Website Maintenance?

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of mobile-first business website maintenance and support services, including mobile-first web design and development, e-commerce solutions, search engine optimization, brand strategy, and design, and business website hosting and maintenance.

Feel free to reach out to us and learn more about our business website design and redesign services. Our team will listen to your concerns, evaluate your needs, and develop a regular WordPress maintenance schedule for you.

Are You Performing Regular WordPress Maintenance?

Are you maintaining and updating your WordPress site regularly? If so, has it improved your overall website performance and functionality? If not, what prevents you from performing WordPress maintenance? Do you have anything to add to our essential WordPress maintenance tips? Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit as well, and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And help your audience with their WordPress website by sharing these tips with them!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Schmidt
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorinsendai