How to Perform Maintenance for Your WordPress Site?

If you are having a WordPress website or looking to create a new one, you have to take care of its maintenance to keep the things smooth and run the site in a good condition.

Despite your purpose of using it, WordPress makes it easier to get things online without any knowledge of coding. While your main focus is on creating the content, design, and promotion activities, you also need to keep in focus the maintenance as well.

If you don’t pay heed to WordPress maintenance, it can negatively impact your site, such as slow loading of site and pages, poor security, poor user experience, decline in search engine rankings, etc.

Hence, the maintenance of your WordPress site is essential. In this article, we have mentioned how you can perform the maintenance and run your site smoother always.

1.    Use the latest version of WordPress, ALWAYS

You should keep your WordPress website always up to date. This is because of several reasons and benefits. The latest version provides you access to all the new features and functionalities in WordPress, as well as bug fixes and other patches that can impact your website security. Not having the latest version can make your site vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Whenever a new version of WordPress becomes available, you get a notification in the header, from where you can take further steps and install it.

2.    Keep the plugins and themes updated

When it comes to keeping things updated on WordPress site, the things mentioned in above point are also applicable to the plugins and themes you are using on your site.

Use of outdated themes and plugins works as a primary gateway for attackers to hack your site and use it for malicious purposes. In order to fix the vulnerabilities and bugs in the plugins and themes, the creators of those plugins keep on releasing regular updates. These updates should be taken seriously for stronger security and maintenance of your site.

Also, you should take care that you use plugins and themes from reliable and trustworthy sources and authors. Since there are thousands of such assets available in the WordPress repository, it doesn’t mean all of them are safe and secure to use.

3.    Check comments and reply them

Blog posts on your site bring you a lot of traffic and genuine readers who might have queries or want to appreciate your work. For that, they comment on your blog posts. You should keep a track on all the comments on a regular basis to know if users are having any questions. Answer their queries in a polite manner and interact with them. If they have appreciated your work, thank and recognize them. This helps in driving engagement on your site and gaining more users.

It is highly recommended that you check the new comments every day so that users don’t have to wait for your reply for so long. When you reply them on time, they feel that you are taking things seriously. You can set a time for checking emails, social media interactions, along with comments on site to make processes smoother.

4.    Regular backups

For any website or blog setup, you need to have the backups of your database on a regular basis. This is one of the most important and crucial part of WordPress maintenance because if your site faces any cyberattack, gets hacked, or anything goes wrong accidently, everything will be lost.

If you have backed up everything, you don’t have to worry about anything. Even if someone hacks your site and deletes everything on it, you can restore the site and roll out the backup in no time.

One thing you should always look for in your web hosting provider is whether they are providing you backup service or not. It would be really great if your hosting provider is taking care of your backups. If you are not getting backup service from them, then do it on your own. What you can do is turn on automatic backups of your site and then store the backed-up data to cloud or any other remote locations. You can also choose WordPress backup plugins like UpDraftPlus, VaultPress, BackupBuddy, Duplicator, etc.

5.    Keep a track on Google Analytics

It is crucial to study and analyze your website through Google Analytics for better results. Google Analytics helps you understand what is working for you, which blog post or webpage is performing well, what is driving engagement, navigation, and more. Using these stats and data, you can modify your strategy, content, and other efforts to drive more traffic, and see more success.

Another positive side of Google Analytics for WordPress site maintenance is that it notifies you about the health of your website, errors on webpages, and other such things that negatively impact your site in the long run, as Google can penalize your site and affect SEO. That’s why you should check Google Analytics and analyze your site at least once a week.

6.    Scan website for cyberthreats

You should scan your entire website weekly or monthly to detect malware or any other cyberthreats. Despite the implementation of best practices, no website is 100% secure. Thus, performing a scan can help you find threats, fix things, and avoid hacking attempts.

You can use security plugins like Sucuri, WordFence, Quttera for stronger security.

7.    Fix broken links

If there are links on your site whose destination no longer exists because of removal of any post, images, webpages, or change in URL, then you have to fix this. Users visiting the broken links will see a 404 error, impacting user experience and SEO. You should check for broken links once a month to fix such errors.

Wrapping up:

Using the tips and methods mentioned above, you can maintain your WordPress site on your own. If you want to ensure improved user experience without hurting the SEO, and run the site smoothly, these methods are to be implemented on priority.

About The Author:

Mark Coleman is working as an Editor at MarkupTrend. He is a passionate writer and loves to share his knowledge with marketing community.