WordPress Website Maintenance - Why it is so important?

WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

If you want to create your own comprehensive WordPress Maintenance Plan, here are a few top items to add to your checklist. 

Backups

Backing up your website may feel unnecessary until you are faced with an unexpected threat or breakdown. It is recommended that you back up your website regularly and save multiple versions in different places to ensure your website's safety and avoid potential losses. Most web hosts offer automatic backups, but if hacked, alternative versions may also be corrupted, so it is best to use a backup plugin such as UpdraftPlus, BackWPup or Blogvault. Alternatively, you can back up your website manually using cPanel. 

Security Checks

Keeping your WordPress website and data safe and running daily security checks should be a top priority. Cyber attacks have become prevalent, so it is essential that you take steps to protect your site and data, including customer profiles, card details, passwords, and other sensitive information. The best way to do this is to use WordPress plugins such as MalCare, Wordfence, iThemes Security or Sucuri.

WordPress Maintenance Mode 

If your WordPress website breaks, it is a good idea to set your site to maintenance mode, so your clients and customers are served a user-friendly message while you get to work making changes and updates. Again, the best option is to use a plugin such as WP Maintenance Mode, which provides a fairly generic template to notify your website visitors. For maintenance landing pages with a little more flair, SeedProd offers over 180 professionally-designed templates and blocks. 

Clean your Database

To help reduce page loading times, improve website performance and enhance user experience, it is recommended that you clean your database regularly. To do this, use a spam plugin such as CleanTalk or Akismet to remove unnecessary spam comments, delete post revisions and set a limit to the number of revisions that can be saved, delete unused WordPress themes and plugins and remove any temporary media files using a plugin like WP Media Cleaner.

Update WordPress

With every new WordPress release comes bug fixes, feature additions and updates and performance enhancements, so staying on top of these updates should be a routine part of your WordPress maintenance plan. These updates appear on your WordPress dashboard, but if this is not something you check regularly, it is best to set up email notifications to avoid missing out on new releases. 

Update Themes and Plugins

Like WordPress core, developers often update themes and plugins, providing bug fixes, security updates and performance improvements. A quick way to update these is to enable the auto-update feature on your themes and plugins. However, this may pose a risk if there is a compatibility issue which may cause your website to crash. To avoid this, perform your updates manually by checking the updates tab in your WP Admin.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links not only lead to a poor customer experience but can also negatively impact your SEO rankings. Broken links often occur when a page is either deleted or moved to a different location which results in a 404 not found error message. To solve this issue, it is recommended that you use SEO tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs, which can help perform website audits to identify broken links and other issues.

Check WordPress User Accounts

Different user accounts offer hackers another opportunity to gain access to your WordPress website and data. To protect your site, it's important to regularly delete old and inactive user accounts and implement a strong password policy across all accounts with frequent updates.